Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2014, volume 32, pages 12 – 29

doi:10.1068/d17012

Natura Urbans, Natura Urbanata: ecological urbanism, circulation, and the immunization of nature

Ross Exo AdamsThe Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, Faculty of the Built Environment, Wates House, 22 Gordon Street, London WC1H 0QB, England; e-mail: ross.adams@ucl.ac.ukReceived 20 September 2012, in revised form 9 July 2013

Abstract. While ‘ecological urbanism’ promises the introduction of a new generation of apparatuses, exacting control ever more deeply within the social whole, the logic by which such networks of power operate has remained largely unchanged since the 19th century. This paper will demonstrate the persistence of this logic by placing ecological urbanism within a genealogy of the concept of urbanization. Looking at the work of Spanish civil engineer, Ildfonso Cerdá, I will examine his remarkably prescient theory in which he proposed to replace what he saw as the ‘anachronistic’ ciudad (city) with the ‘modern’ figure of the urbe—a generic, scaleless template of territorialization engulfed in expansive urbanización. The first part of the paper focuses on Cerdá’s concept of vialidad (roughly, ‘circulation’), which formed the basis of his theory of urbanization and provided its origin in ‘nature’ itself. Urbanization was an effort to free mankind from political domination and recover it’s ‘natural’ destiny by unifying a latent global society in a single, interconnected global urbe. However, not only did Cerdá’s theory introduce a new, far more pervasive technological relationship of power between government and population; it also set free to circulate what was previously fixed in the space and form of the city: the apparatus. In the second part of the paper I reexamine ecological urbanism with regard to the founding relationship between urbanization and nature. Now, because it is nature that has become pathological to humanity, it is nature which must be immunized. Ecological urbanism thus reinvigorates the capacity of the urban to stave off the end of the world, not only by rhetorically reaffirming the natural origins of urbanization but also by inverting this relationship: ecological urbanism proposes to reconstruct nature as urbanization.

Keywords: nature, circulation, infrastructure, urbanization, ecological urbanism, immunization, urbe, vialidad, Cerdá, apparatus, state, private property, pharmakon

In February 2011, the office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA’s) (Rem Koolhaas) research studio, AMO, along with the WWF and Ecofys, published The Energy Report (WWF et al, 2011), a comprehensive ‘roadmap’ which would see the world transition to a coordinated network of renewable energy by 2050. As a point of departure, the report makes its first claim in appropriating Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Map of 1943 to depict the Earth today. Flattened to its two-dimensional projection and oriented vertically, the Dymaxion Map provides the perfect neutrality through its technical ‘correctness’ while cleverly centering the world around perhaps the most contested political and geographical void in the world: the North Pole. Throughout the report, the Dymaxion Map serves as the template for displaying various forms of information. However, it is in the two most conclusive images of this publication where the map begins to speak beyond the gravitas of fact-deluge. The first is an attempt to reimagine statehood in terms of regional energy and resource specificity. The second proposes a new global energy grid, linking all of the world’s energy ‘region-states’ into a singular network (figure 1).

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While such imagery may appear somewhat facile in its content, it reveals far more than the simple narrative carried on its surface. In fact, it is precisely the simplicity of these images that is significant. For they mark an endpoint in a certain collective imagination where it is now possible to envision the entire globe parceled into functional, apolitical blocs joined together as a single, interconnected union of network confluence. Lines that once politically divided the world into territories will now unite it in universal circulation—the technoneutrality of urban planning made global. What is implied is twofold: on the one hand, we can now fully imagine the world reduced to a single, unified, human population—a global society, in Hannah Arendt’s (1958) terms, whose homogeneous needs are to be organized and satisfied through the administration of services. On the other hand (and because of this), we can imagine the space of the world only to be determined by patterns of movement. Today, everything that matters circulates. Circulation is the central activity through which value is made visible. It is the concrete register of progress. For this reason, infrastructure now appears as the default apparatus by which such a global society mediates its needs. It is the source of our problems as well as the diagram for their solutions. And because of this, infrastructure also defines the ultimate limit of society’s material and political imagination. Fuller’s clever interpretation of the world as a single continent has found its fulfillment in a technologically unified machina mundi.

In spite of the creative tropes of Koolhaas’s AMO, the content of this imagery noticeably lacks the usual daring bravado because it articulates sentiments that are already part of the general psyche: to speak of a globally interconnected society today no longer has the charm it had in the 19th century. In fact, in comparison with the work of Spanish engineer Ildefonso Cerdá, one can read AMO’s proposal only as a kind of contemporary reformulation of a far broader one put forward in Cerdá’s seminal work, Teoría general de la urbanización (1867)

Figure 1. Map of ‘world energy regions’ and ‘world energy grid’: The Energy Report by AMO in collaboration with the WWF and Ecofys (images courtesy of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture/AMO).

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(figure 2). In this text, just as in AMO’s proposal, Cerdá presented a world whose compounded crises were to be solved through modern infrastructure and joined together in a new kind of universal network of peace: material circulation to conspire against the political stasis of the state. He would accomplish this through the power of what he called urbanización—a term he coined 150 years ago, giving life to a concept and laying out the framework for a new, concrete order of modern life.

Figure 2. Frontispiece of Teoría general de la urbanizatión, Cerdá (1867).

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Far from delivering on such lofty ambitions, urbanism and urbanization have today become background terms. They are terms whose definition, meaning, and history are simultaneously vague and unquestioned. Originally a neologism conceived in 1861—the future object for his monumental Teoría—the term circulated throughout Europe alongside the great urban reconstruction projects of the time, eventually adopting its younger French derivative, urbanisme, as a more generic term for the same. By 1884, the words emerged in English, at which point they began to accrue distinct meanings (Cerdá, 1999, pages 90–92). ‘Urbanism’ came to refer to the ‘scientific’ knowledge of the city, its growth, demographic makeup, distribution of resources, etc, while ‘urbanization’ generally denoted the imminent, material processes constituting the city’s growth over time. Since then, their distinction has gotten muddled. Together, they have come to serve as a receptacle for all processes relating to the city that remain beyond question—the repository of facts we do not wish to doubt. They are words which no longer have meaning in themselves but instead persist as a set of universal constants—homogenous containers inside of which human action is expected to gain effective purchase. In short, they have come to describe a naturalized background against which the ‘artifice’ of human inventiveness can take shape.

Precisely for this reason, the various adjectives we find preceding them bear witness to an equally growing sense of immutability we ascribe to the terms themselves (primarily, to urbanism): unitary urbanism, new urbanism, landscape urbanism, participatory urbanism, integrated urbanism, sustainable urbanism, new suburbanism, to name but a few. What remains unchanged in all interpretations is, of course, the term ‘urbanism’. ‘The urban’, it would seem, is conceptually a fait accompli.

But why is this? For one, the urban remains a faithfully ambiguous category due to the vastness of the practices and processes that have come to accumulate under the banner of urbanism—a term whose meaning is so broad as to render it useless without some qualifying adjective. Furthermore, the processes either term describes tend to be bound up with (neo)liberal capitalist expansion occurring at a global scale, seemingly under the control of noone and everyone simultaneously. Urbanism and urbanization each depict a condition of ‘reality’ presenting in equal proportion crisis and opportunity—a reality which is to be understood only by learning from its tendencies; by monitoring its processes, mapping its effects, and issuing prognoses in order to know when and how to intervene. No doubt, such a blinding reality forecloses any critical access to the terms themselves precisely for the same reason.

What is startling is how quickly urbanization was accepted as a category at once intimately tied up in our daily experience of life, while also forever remaining outside of our critical jurisdiction. How can it be that precisely as 19th-century European and American society so painfully hurled itself into this new and strange urban world, that it could just as quickly accept it as a kind of fixed, transhistorical force—a background of human life? Why is it that such an attitude has only been reinforced over time? And most curiously, just when the history of modern urbanization seems to coincide so neatly with that of ecological catastrophe, how is it that today the figure of the city can somehow emerge from the ashes as a radically transformed vehicle of ecological redemption? Indeed, the nearly universal architectural consensus over ‘ecological urbanism’ is a telling reminder of just how naturalized the concept of urbanization has become.

Yet in asking these questions, we should not be tempted to simply revel in the disclosure of our latest ideological entrapments: nor should we settle for dismissing the technological advances being made toward these ends. Indeed, much more is at stake in this clever relationship between urbanization and nature that was so curiously forged back in 1867. For within this nexus, a very effective politics resides—one whose power comes in part in its ability to blur the two faces together into one indistinguishable whole. At the center of this

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relationship is perhaps the most fundamental principle of urbanization itself: circulation—a principle so paramount to urban design today as to make it a platitude.

In previous centuries, circulation was seen as anything but commonplace. From the observations of ancient Greek and Hellenic philosophy to the scientific discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo, and Harvey, circulating systems bore the distinct signature of divine work—of providential governance. And it is precisely because of this that such systems could proceed into modernity, hardening into political instruments, whether expressed in the physiocratic understanding of nature or in the ‘invisible hand’ of political economy.

Over this period, circulation lent itself as an analytical framework to the calculations of the modern state. However, by the 19th century, when Cerdá had introduced his general theory of urbanization, the stakes in the game changed altogether. Circulation would no longer identify a divinely endowed object of state control: instead, it would provide the very theoretical grounds on which the state could reconstitute itself in the service of a free, mobile society—sovereignty as circulation. As such, it would instruct a completely new configuration in which power would emerge in the purely technological relationship between population and government, permeating all aspects of life according to this new urprinciple of political order.

Indeed, it is in the privileging of circulation that urbanization stages its greatest coup d’état, providing the material rationale in which a new, isometric topology of power would project itself across the surface of the Earth in the form of an infrastructural grid. In this way, the process of urbanization persists precisely insofar as it is a background—a kind of meta-apparatus. It is a scaleless diagram for the ordering of life which both produces and coordinates a vast array of apparatuses which themselves circulate within the automatic, domestic society now set in perpetual motion. My use of the notion ‘apparatus’ here should not be seen in strictly Foucaultian terms, as a strategic, ‘overdetermined’ network of discourses and institutions (Foucault, 1980, pages 194–198). Rather, I will attempt to map Giorgio Agamben’s (2009) more explicit notion of the concept—that which separates life from itself through a continuous cycle of subjectification and desubjectification—onto Roberto Esposito’s (2008) ‘immunitary paradigm’. Esposito’s work is particularly revealing for the analysis of modern urbanization, shedding light on the conjunction of security, private property, and subjectification. In addition, Arendt’s (1958) extremely prescient analysis of the rise of ‘society’ will provide the groundwork for comprehending the broader biopolitical transformations that coincide with the birth of urbanization.

With this in mind, the current coupling of ecology with urbanization should hardly seem surprising. In fact, the rise of ‘sustainable’ urbanism, the ‘ecocity’, and the entire spectrum of green appears as something of a desperate tautology—a last ditch attempt to defend a certain ‘rootedness’ of urbanization as a process not only integral to nature but also capable of revivifying it. The arrival of ecological urbanism, far from signaling the dawn of a radically new form of human cohabitation, is a paradigm whose primary function is rhetorical, rather than technical as it purports to be: if urbanization presents itself as the technological expression of a kind of ‘natural process’ of human cohabitation, then with ecological urbanism we have effectively inverted these terms: it no longer depicts itself as a discursive effort to extract urbanization from nature; rather it appears as a manic attempt to derive nature itself from urbanization—a logic whose consequences are far more frightening than this rhetorical inversion may otherwise suggest. I should finally like to acknowledge Bruno Latour’s (1993; 2004) work on the category of nature here. Indeed, his provocations should resound within the present essay in the (at times playful) tone and manner in which ‘nature’ is deployed.

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Urbanization and natureIf Cerdá can be said to have invented urbanization as a category, he can also be credited as the first to naturalize it. He would do so by defining urbanization as both universal and transhistorical—an essential category of humankind itself. Published the same year as Marx’s Das Kapital, Cerdá’s Teoría, like the latter, draws on a universalist idea of history in order to illuminate a revolution yet to be accomplished—a broader sentiment foreshadowing the outbreak of the Glorious Revolution just a year later. Consisting of two volumes, the aim of volume I of the Teoría is to establish a universal model for the building of cities. It is supported by an extensive ‘history’ from which it draws to vindicate the invention of an ‘urbanizing science’. The entire volume, composed of four books, can be roundly divided down the middle into two halves, the first two books establishing the prehistoric ‘origins’ and history of the ‘natural’ processes of urbanization, while books three and four frame urbanization as a general, concrete theory, based on its ‘actual’ existence. It is down this division that the symmetry appears between what we now refer to as urbanization, on the one hand, and urbanism, on the other: natural process and normative science. This symmetry is centered on a nearly theological faith in the human capacity for technology—a kind of historical yardstick which Cerdá extends back in time to construct what he calls the ‘philosophy of history of urbanization’. The tone of the text is motivated by the arrival of a new-world civilization rife with scientific invention and technological capacities which promise to unite humanity. With the birth of telecommunications and the railroad, Cerdá announces the arrival of a fundamental principle which would motivate his entire theory of urbanization: the concept of free, unimpeded circulation, which Cerdá would call ‘vialidad’.

Throughout the entirety of his various Teorías, the Kantian influence is hard to overlook: from his emphatic drive toward a universal conception of history to a shared desire for the establishment of perpetual peace to an unwavering belief in civilization governed by the rational force of law to even certain notions of ‘nature’ as caretaker of civil society. In fact, the very idea of urbanization itself can stand in as the realization of Kant’s notion of cosmopolitan purpose—a drive that is innately inscribed within the human being’s capacity for technological invention. And just as Kant (1991 [1784] ) had responded to the growing political crisis of the late-18th century with his subtly provocative Was ist Aufklärung?,(1) Cerdá’s Teoría responded to the mid-19th century’s own plight—a period in which a general urban crisis had indeed reached a tipping point,(2) for which a ‘bloodless’ revolution lay imminent.

More than following a line of Kantian thought, what becomes apparent in Cerdá’s work is that it is also an attack on it. His Teoría is at once a model for a future form of cohabitation and a critique of the Enlightenment itself—a criticism based on the failure of Enlightenment thought to advance its goals into the material realm of human cohabitation. The crisis Cerdá (1999) so palpably felt could not be remedied through thought alone. For him, the “true root” of the “deep malaise which afflicts modern society” (pages 66–67) was the problem of the city. Cerdá’s task is clear: he must deliver mankind from its present state of crisis—the historical digression of the ‘politically abstract’ and ‘anachronistic’ ciudad (city)—and return him to his destiny which nature had originally intended: urbanization.

(1) In commenting on this essay, Foucault showed that when Kant asked the question ‘What is Enlightenment?’—when he discovered the present as such— another question simultaneously emerged as a result: ‘What is Revolution?’ Bound up with the notion of progress that the enlightened present inaugurates is the event which will fulfil its self-prescribed goals (see Foucault, 2010, pages 18–19).(2) If revolutionary activity is an indication of the general discontent brought on by the conditions of industrial capitalism, Barcelona was one of the most intense centers of what Cerdá would flatly categorize as crisis. As Engels states about Barcelona, the city “has seen more barricade fighting than any other city in the world” (see Engels, 1873).

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Urbanization, for Cerdá, is both prepolitical and modern, natural and technological. His theory of urbanization is based on a philosophy of history which finds as its origin the most basic of human needs: shelter. And it is this necessity, along with the human capacity for technological development, that together would give birth to a historical force capable of bringing about civilization itself:

“ [Urbanization] led him to the state of society; it taught him culture; it civilised him. In a word, to the urbanization which was born with him, and grew with him, man owes everything he is, everything he can be in this world” (page 97).Civilization cannot be attributed to the artificiality of political form, but rather it emerges

in the natural, immanent fact of human cohabitation. Cerdá’s alternate history overflows with the virtues of a reality governed by nature’s Providence, revealing the truly messianic force of urbanization, itself a kind of ‘second nature’ (Smith, 2008, pages 65-67) produced from the first.

If this ‘origin’ locates a latent Utopianism in the Teoría, Cerdá’s notion of ‘ruralized urbanization’ leaves no doubt in its form. Ruralized urbanization is a concept which describes at once the ‘original’, ‘historical’ form of urbanization and defines the template on which the ‘science’ of urbanization (today, urbanism) would subsequently be based. This essentialist concept based itself on the ahistorical single-family dwelling linked to others by a network of paths, whose connection to a pastoral nature was immanent to the configuration of the whole. It was an effort, like many of Cerdá’s, to unite opposites and overcome ‘obsolete’ barriers. In this case, he attributes the division between the rural and the urban as yet another ‘artificial’ remnant of the absolutist state. According to his philosophy of history, urban expansion across a rural landscape was the essence of historical (ruralized) urbanization; and it would therefore return as a meta-principle whose ambition was to reunite the rural with the urban in a semiurban, semirural, expandable network of dwellings, sprawling limitlessly across the earth: “Ruralize the urban; urbanize the rural: … Fill the Earth [replete terram] ” (Cerdá, 1867 frontispiece). It would designate a system of occupying territory no longer bound to the outdated dichotomy of city and country: ruralized urbanization would be a model of both city and country—both culture and nature.

“Until now, enlightenment and civilisation have displayed a resolute tendency to urbanize the countryside. The time has now come to think about ruralizing the major cities” (Cerdá, 1999, page 129, original emphasis).

It would be a vehicle for perfecting the human species by delivering measured doses of nature to each individual family, thus also uniting Jean-Jacques Rousseau with Kant.

The culmination of all of this would not only lead to a proposal for a new prototype of city; it would in fact do away with it altogether. Cerdá’s first task is to give it a name congenial to such a totality (page 80). He embarks on an exhaustive etymological study to identify a more accurate term to describe the “great beehives which are commonly called cities” (page 80). Ciudad, rooted in the Latin word civis and related to civitas, expresses a legal and political status of citizenship, which, like the term polis, privileges a political form of coexistence. The term ciudad, thus, implied the notion of a highly symbolic space whose meaning and form follow from the political concept. Working his way through the Middle Ages, Cerdá concludes that ciudad and all its derivatives are outmoded terms describing outmoded configurations no longer corresponding to the modern world (page 82). Not only obsolete, the root of this term has grown politically corrupt only over time in the same manner that such designations as ‘town’, ‘place’, ‘village’, ‘burgh’, ‘ranch’, and ‘homestead’ have—terms which he argues are hierarchical relatives of ‘city’. Thus, his term would need to be completely universal, apolitical, and generic. As opposed to civis, Cerdá (1867) argues that the term urbs is in fact the more accurate, more genuine etymological root of the two

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originally designating the material agglomeration of buildings, things, and infrastructure related to the technical management of the domestic sphere. With this, he proposed to replace the word ciudad with urbe:

“For what the word urbe does … is to express simply and generically a group of buildings with no concrete relationship to its size, which is almost of total indifference for the application of the fundamental principles of urbanization, nor to its hierarchy, since urbanizing science can recognize and acknowledge neither …” (Cerdá, 1867, pages 30–31, my translation).The urbe is thus universal: it preexists and presupposes the city (ciudad) together with

all of its declensions. The urbe eclipses it. Its singularity stands in contrast to the irksome complexity of meaning Cerdá identified in the term civis, denoting both a political order and a material organization. A simple historical lapse is now corrected, reducing the city to its bare, physical immanence of cohabitation and movement, dismissing the political form which had come to ‘obstruct’ it. The urbe, for Cerdá, is without political form, and therefore transcends any such category. The political, as it were, is displaced by the material fact of an assemblage of buildings and the infrastructure connecting them. The urbe is the condition of cohabitation and circulation fit not for a world governed by sovereign excesses, but one in which the triumphant recovery of a natural, fully domestic society would be achieved.

The urbeThrough a simple transposition, Cerdá projects his ‘history’ into a ‘science’. With this ‘urbanizing science’, he would rigorously calculate the mechanics of a new, generic, scaleless template of human cohabitation which he hoped would span endlessly across the earth, connecting both peoples and regions in a single urbe. Placed at its core is the principle of ‘vialidad’—a neologism suggesting unencumbered, perpetual circulation. More than merely denoting circulation, vialidad comes close to expressing the direct experience of the life force of human productivity itself. It is the central agency through which the perfection of humanity is to be achieved—a state of being attainable through the act of unlimited movement, exchange, and communication. Vialidad is, for Cerdá, the very ‘cause’ of urbanization. It would govern the design of each constituent element of the urbe, from its territorial organization and extents down to even the smallest and most domestic of details.

The urbe’s overall configuration takes its form as a universal matrix of circulation, the grid of streets or ‘network of ways’. From there, the network’s intersections, or ‘nodes’ (nudos) and the systematic differentiation of modes of transportation across the breadth of each street (via) can be determined. For Cerdá, each via is not just a ‘street’, but an ensemble of the street—its conjoined houses and the serviced infrastructure that connects them below ground. The spaces carved out by this network of ways—city blocks—he named tellingly ‘intervias’, which he described as ‘voids’ within the grid. In these mainly domestic intervias, Cerdá would evenly distribute certain essential functions—parks, churches, kiosks, police, municipal offices, etc—as a way both to preclude the possibility of centrality and to subordinate symbolic spaces to a mere statistical allocation within the grid. Indeed, the square grid conceived by Cerdá was a statistical projection—a device capable of sustaining and normalizing the new concerns of governmental administration such as the distribution of population; the movement of commodities, fungibles, and capital; the exchange of private property; the monitoring of disease; and the suppression of dissent. Transfixed by the emergent splendor of capitalism, Cerdá’s urbe was the machine in which a new ‘man of enterprise’ would rule a now global space of labor. He would even prescribe that every node of the urbe’s grid be fitted with a clock, visible from all sides, thus infusing the act of circulation with a phenomenology of capitalism: time, as Cerdá (1999, page 220) realized, is money.

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If the need to regularize the urbe was played out in Cerdá’s network of ways, it would arise as a paradox that the spaces ‘left over’ by this grid would constitute the site of a far more scrupulous, ‘scientific’ calculus of normalization. While initially considered a secondary, almost incidental element of the urbe, Cerdá soon came to view the intervia as its primary element. It formed the nexus of two critical areas of scientific concern: at once the terminus of the great vialidad, the intervia was also the site in which a vast new hygienist program of public health could take hold. Rationalized and regularized, the individual dwelling units making up each intervia would be the result of tireless statistical calculations. Through the intervia, the entire urbe could be seen as a biological continuum mediated by this new technology of dwelling. By simple extension, the dwelling is both the site of life’s repose, of its revitalization, while also precisely its opposite, the primary source of toxins and disease. Thus, Cerdá (1999) posited that they must contain reservoirs of ‘urban health’ (gardens)—“air tanks from which each of the houses is supplied” (page 235)—in order to counter the deadly toxins emanating from within. Such areas, in combination with the broad vias, would work to carry away contaminated air, replenishing it with fresh. Doubling as gardens, these ‘fields of action’ would also provide the urbe’s population with food and assist in erasing the ‘artificial’ boundary between rural and urban. And below ground, a vast network of ways, mirroring that above ground, would regularize the removal of waste from each dwelling, while providing fresh water and gas to all.

By necessity, the minimal condition of the grid would be offset by the overdetermined regulation of the intervia—the negative of the network of ways, whose character was rather determined by administrative and state mediation. The intervia, for Cerdá, was the precisely calculated locus of ruralized urbanization, and an “instrument of general health for the whole population” (page 252). And for this reason, despite (or indeed because of) his liberal pretensions, the intervia would also be the site in which nearly unlimited administrative intervention would take hold in the name of public health and security. Penetrated a thousand ways by the new infrastructures of services, shaped by a stringent set of building regulations, and monitored by new legal instruments, the ‘private’ dwelling, almost more than the network of ways, paradoxically was to become a new, permanent interface between government and its citizens. In this way, while vialidad clearly determines the urbe, endowing it with its raison d’être, the intervia remains its fundamental unit: it is an urbe in miniature. The opposition between the two is resolved in a dialectic whole: “Dwellings are the ultimate terminal point, yet at one and the same time, they … are the first starting point of the great universal vialidad ” (page 116). In total, this new order of vias and intervias allowed the individual to become bound up in a universal process of circulation which connected the immediacy of the individual dwelling with the ‘transcendence’ of vialidad.

Circulation and the metaphysics of powerIt is hardly surprising that Cerdá placed the concept of circulation at the center of his theory of urbanization in an age in which biological metaphors had themselves been circulating. Yet to assume that circulation became legible only in the shadow of biology is false; and the relationship Cerdá seems to have identified in vialidad, between spatial organization and (a) political form, indeed was no discovery of the 19th century. Rather, it was one born within the interstices of the modern state itself. It was a relation drawn from centuries of observations of the natural world, of the cosmos and of anatomy, uniting macrocosm with microcosm, theology and natural philosophy. Indeed, the metaphor of the circle had been a dominant principle of cosmic order since antiquity, reemerging in the 16th and 17th centuries as a common template not only for explaining many of the period’s greatest discoveries in nature (see, among others, Huntley, 1953; Koyré, 1994; Lowry, 1974; Mintz, 1952; Nicolson, 1960; Robinson, 1946) but also to give form to new perspectives on earthly order. It is no

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wonder that the emergence of circulation as an anatomical concept would provide a most potent model for a close friend of William Harvey and the author of the great Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes (1986 [1651] ):

“And in this also, the Artificiall Man maintains his resemblance with the Naturall; whose Veins receiving the Bloud from the severall Parts of the Body, carry it to the Heart; where being made Vitall, the Heart by the Arteries sends it out again, to enliven, and enable for motion all the Members of the same” (page 301).By endowing circulation with both power and vitality, the construction of the modern

European state had found far more than a metaphor. Hobbes had identified a central concern on which the ‘Body Politique’ could increasingly base its political calculations. Over the course of the 17th century, the movement of material wealth, resources, and people would increasingly provide the state with a political rationale as well as a reliable model in which to measure its relative power (Foucault, 2009). And just as most of the great discoveries of objects bound up in circulation described closed systems, so too would the state’s vitality and power be accessible to it only insofar as it could secure absolute control over the boundaries closing it off from the outside world. Thus the space of the state, no longer a qualitative cosmos whose political constitution emanated from its natural geographical character, gradually become a homogenous, measurable quantity—a territory open for the political calculations of state management (Elden, 2007; 2010; Galli, 2010). Within this spatiopolitical order a state’s power would increasingly be founded on its ability to manage circulation within its fastidiously defended interior, all the while measuring itself against those states on its exterior.

Indeed, the distinction between internal and external, as Carlo Galli (2010) argues, is one of the state’s most basic ‘geometries’, a distinction which, emanating from the discovery of the ‘original’ exterior—the Americas—would course through its entire logic. From the definition of its territorial boundaries to the construction of the subject—the newly crafted human type whose safety was guaranteed by a pledge to banish his passions and beliefs to the dark, secret interior of inner consciousness. Its closed, restrictive logic would be underscored only by networks of circulation which brought it its measure of material vitality and power. By the 17th century, Jean-Baptise Colbert’s administration would oversee the vast construction and standardization of roadways and canals within France as a direct outcome of a new ‘economic’ calculation of profitability (Picon, 1992, pages 100–101). By the 18th century, the work of Richard Cantillon and François Quesnay introduced a new economic analysis based on the free circulation and exchange of wealth, rendering it both mobile and transferable (Foucault, 1994). Around this same time, as the figure of the territorial state had matured in France, a distinction between architects and engineers was made for the first time with the establishment of the École des Ponts et Chaussées, as a direct response to administrative demands of the territory (Picon, 1992, page 100), requiring its own specialists to manage it. Following the work of the Physiocrats, this young class of civil servants would provide a new arm of the French state with a geographic knowledge of its territorial domain as well as the technological means with which to increase its power. Unlike in Giovanni Botero’s (1956 [1589] ) work, nature was no longer seen as a latent infrastructure to be harnessed, but as itself the source of wealth’s abundance. For this reason, “[n]ature was to be perfected by means of bridges and causeways … so as to facilitate exchanges between men” (Picon, 1992, page 109) Unlike architects, the engineers’ work in the open landscape outside the city took on a distinctly large-scale, holistic, and process-based quality, rationalizing a vast new space of mobility.

The economic turn in the management of the state had arrived; the infinitely ‘empty’ territory was now available to the rational geometries of modern politics. Its new state

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knowledge produced a concrete geography of infrastructure, whose expansive reach coincided with the boundaries of the state, at once promising the liberty of free circulation while violently restricting it to state interests. This contradiction would increasingly underscore the frustrated status of the subject, whose liberty was safeguarded only by public censure. Within the disciplinary space of the state, the boundlessly expansive space of human knowledge would eventually translate to an infinite pursuit of liberty (Galli, 2010; Koselleck, 1988; Schmitt, 2008). From the point of view of the subject, the state would be increasingly seen as corrupt in its artificial, mechanical composure. In direct contrast to this, the subject’s ‘natural’ universality, bound up with its desire to be mobile, sees liberty in its unrestrained movement and communication. Through the pervasiveness of this perspective over the course of the 18th century, the subject came to occupy a privileged position as nature, whose constitution appears yet again to be founded on unlimited circulation—a potency that could not be contained forever.

ApparatusFor centuries, in its reference to nature, the concept of circulation has provided the modern world a virtuous model on which to found political order. The importance of circulation—vialidad—for Cerdá is clear: it is simultaneously a weapon with which to destroy the state from within and a teleological paradigm from which to reconstruct it in the emergent outlines of the liberal nation-state. His program of urbanización would ‘lyse’ the city walls, allowing the apolitical, domestic realm to spill outward in all directions, harnessing the mobile energies of the subject to build not simply a different type of city, but indeed a new, depoliticized horizon of human cohabitation. The exteriority foreclosed by the state’s absolute interior would now open itself to the universal movements of ‘society’, collapsing this distinction in on itself. From now, the planet alone would provide the ultimate limits for a new human population unified by the historical task of urbanización.

Indeed, Cerdá’s obsession with removing obstructions and unifying opposites is no mere idiosyncrasy: it is the signature of the deeply political aims of his work and the mark of a project whose ambition is nothing short of the systematic overturning of nearly every ancient political distinction that had previously ordered the Western world. From the ancient Greek division between domestic management (oikos) and political life (polis), to the Hobbesian distinction between public and private that characterized two centuries of Absolutist rule, to the distinction between interior and exterior, to even the distinction between nation and state, Cerdá’s urbe would methodically evacuate each of these distinctions of its political force. If the ‘city’ had been delineated by spaces specific to politics, to the market, and to the household, the urbe would propose a single, domestic expanse in which all of these would intermingle in a single, universal space of nondistinction: the domestic sphere. Urbanization, most succinctly put, is the domesticization of the city—a phenomenon coinciding with Arendt’s (1958) poignant observations on the rise of ‘society’:

“The emergence of society—the rise of housekeeping, its activities, problems, and organizational devices—from the shadowy interior of the household into the light of the public sphere, has not only blurred the old borderline between private and political, it has also changed almost beyond recognition the meaning of the two terms and their significance for the life of the individual and the citizen” (page 38).However, the dissolving away of such distinctions does not leave a seamlessly confluent

spatial whole. Far from it. Cerdá’s urbe would be host to an obscure new set of partitions oriented perpendicularly to those they replaced and distributed at a much finer grain—divisions which would become immanent to life, rather than external to it. From his obsessive regulations determining the boundary between intervia and via to the legal/governmental overdeterminacy of dwelling spaces to the absolute isolation of modes of circulation across

Ecological urbanism, circulation, and the immunization of nature 23

the breadth of the via and underneath it, the new set of partitions arising within the urbe yield a far more infinitesimal and ubiquitous notion of ‘exterior’ and ‘interior’, orchestrating a vastly new relationship between population and government.

Within this homogenous yet fragmented order, a certain logic can be distinguished. In fact, a closer reading of the urbe discloses a new configuration between politics and life, splitting an otherwise uniform, apolitical space of indistinction down the middle, separating it into two functional spaces: spaces of life’s production (circulation and labor; exchange, communication) and those of its reproduction (the ‘home’; biological restoration and sexual reproduction). By shifting itself toward the administration of life’s processes, this basic diagram of power could replicate itself at all scales, from the statistically determined composition of the urbe down to the most intimate, inner constitution of man. No longer a strict, horizontal cut, separating sovereign power from its subjectivity, the division, now fractured a thousand ways, replicates itself at all scales, extending from the divided individual (the dividual) to the whole of society, revealing the fractal nature of Cerdá’s bipolar urbe. Hobbes’s inscription of an inner division of man, separating him into public and private halves, far from receding, would now be replicated in new terms—severing the individual into two equally irreconcilable entities: bourgeois and homme; ‘property owner’ and ‘human being’ (Habermas, 2010, page 55). While Arendt asserts that this line had become completely blurred with the rise of society, Cerdá shows us that indeed it can be traced, at least in part, through the spatial configuration of the urbe, circumscribing each intervia, flanking every dwelling within it. The emphasis Cerdá placed on freedom as one of the prime achievements of the urbe is directly related to its inverse—that is to say, the simultaneous enclosing of all of society in a new ‘urban’ order which systematizes (and thus politicizes) life’s natural cycles of production and reproduction. When the two formerly distinct spheres of public and private collapse into one social body, the new set of divisions that emerge is concerned not with sovereign signification, but with delineating a functional specialization within a universally domestic order. No longer the outcome of human action, this new order of life would found itself instead on the normalization and management of human behavior—a notion Arendt (1958, page 40) would confirm a century later.

In fact, it becomes clear that nearly all of Cerdá’s efforts to ensure unobstructed movement throughout the urbe are simultaneously measures taken to bolster this new separation, thus conditioning society’s behavior for life in an urbanized world. Freedom, far from expressing a newfound autonomy of life in space, is rather the guaranteed isolation of spaces of reproduction from those of production—an achievement not simply ensured by regulations, but by the very cues built into the urbe itself, prompting its population to act in accordance with its greater systematized logic. The ensemble of administrative divisions, regulations, and limitations together with the concrete spaces of the urbe thus constitute the anonymous face of modern biopolitics, captured perfectly in the idealism of Cerdá’s model. The rise of society forged as a single domestic continuum, despite the effort to do away with political subjugation, nonetheless must impose upon itself a new, albeit elusive, array of apparatuses of power. Caught in a perpetual cycle of transcendence and necessity, circulation and dwelling, exaltation and negation, its biopolitical composition gains clarity in what Esposito has called the immunitary paradigm.

The paradigm of immunization can be understood as a political form for a universal society. Just as in the practice from which it draws its metaphor, immunization is the form of preserving life by conditioning its body (individual or collective) with the very element it wishes to protect it from. In this sense, more than safeguarding a body from threats born outside of it, immunization is the protection of life from those which incubate within its very interior. While Esposito can trace its culmination in Hobbes’s Leviathan, it nevertheless

24 R Exo Adams

comes into its own in modernity in which ‘society’ constitutes a sovereignty with evermore-universal pretentions. Thus, unlike the Hobbesian Commonwealth, protecting its subjects from external dangers by subordinating them to the artificial space of a closed ‘body politique’, immunization conceives of only the body politique. It thus protects life by introducing a negative, ‘toxic’ element within it, which, instead of subjugating life to an external violence (Hobbes), becomes permanently bound to it:

“Rather than being superimposed or juxtaposed in an external form that subjects one to the domination of the other, in the immunitary paradigm, bíos and nomos, life and politics, emerge as the two constituent elements of a single, indivisible whole that assumes meaning from their interrelation. Not simply the relation that joins life to power, immunity is the power to preserve life” (Esposito, 2008, pages 45–46, my emphasis).Indeed, by guaranteeing a general division between processes of production and those of

life’s reproduction, freedom in Cerdá’s terms can be read more broadly as the promise that the processes of life’s preservation will remain separate from those of its enhancement, and vice versa. In other words, ‘freedom’ can be achieved only by the careful administration of life articulated by and circulating between these two distinct states of behavior. Cerdá’s urbe is precisely the apparatus which manages life constituted by this dialectic unity of preservation and enhancement—two conditions intimately bound to one another, yet forever foreclosed to their reciprocal separation. This exchange can be seen most poignantly in the internal division of vialidad itself. As we know, this notion not only accounted for the ‘free’ movement of individuals throughout the network of ways but also prescribed the flows of both toxic and life-preserving fluids below ground, plugging directly into each intervia. Above ground the interface between vialidad and the intervia consists in a carefully designed, preregulated, machinic construction of the urbe and its constituent elements—a space of economic life. Below ground, however, vialidad engages the intervia in a direct relationship of permanent monitoring, management, and regulation. Because it provides the biological necessities by which life can sustain and reproduce itself, unlike its counterpart above ground, it is the form of vialidad intimately bound to the province of dwelling, the space of biological life. While freedom above ground is proportional to the ease of circulation, below ground, as in the intervia, freedom is limited (if not eliminated altogether) by the perpetual requirement of administrative intervention. In other words, regulation in the network of ways above ground is limited to the layout of the urbe, while underground and in the intervia regulation is perpetual, essential.

In the terrain of biopolitics that conditioned Cerdá’s logic, the greatest threat to society is perceived to be the biological abnormalities residing within a population, within the urbe. The space of the intervia—which Cerdá took to be both the source of biological crises as well as their remedy—must therefore be the space of constant regulation requiring a boundless technological expanse of infrastructure guided by close governmental administration. In total, the two sides of vialidad cohere in a unified whole whose aim is to both elevate life to a status of limitless circulation while simultaneously forcing it to withdraw into the administered status of preservation in the intervia. At once inseparable from one another, the apparatus of the urbe ceaselessly works to divide life’s processes, thus cleaving its internal constitution in two. ‘Transcendence’, it appears, is merely the flip side of governmental regulation.

The question is, then, what is the relationship between the two? Let us recall that Cerdá’s idea of transcendence is that which occurs in a space defined by the absence of obstruction—liberty by negation. It is the experience of the mobile individual circulating across an urbanized territory free from the interference from another. Thus, the process he advocates of universal transcendence is possible only by assembling a ‘collectivity’ insofar as the individuals who constitute it remain radically isolated from one another. Furthermore,

Ecological urbanism, circulation, and the immunization of nature 25

this process is grounded in the fact that both its point of departure and its endpoint is the dwelling, or private property. As Cerdá attests, this notion of transcendence—of life’s enhancement—is not possible without the reciprocal retreat of life to an administered state of biological replenishment. The constant exchange between one state and its opposite binds the two realms in a zero-sum game. While one side of this cycle produces ‘freedom’ through the expansion of a life force (again, in a negative sense), the other side violently injects a negative form of the protection of life, terminating its expansive capacity.

This reciprocal exchange between preservation and enhancement can be explained as the process of life’s immunization, which is bound to a world increasingly lacking distinction. As Esposito (2008) explains, “the potential risk of a world in common—and for this reason exposed to an unlimited indistinction—is neutralized by … the relation of everyone with himself or herself in the form of personal identity” (page 66), a mechanism of self-recognition which is projected on the institution of private property. Following John Locke’s argument about the latter,(3) Esposito reveals a logic of self-preservation bound up in the modern conception of private property:

“Once the proprietary logic is wedded to a solid underpinning such as belonging to one’s own body, it can now expand into communal space. This is not directly negated, but is incorporated and recut in a division that turns it into its opposite, in a multiplicity of things that have in common only the fact of being all one’s own to the degree they have been appropriated by their respective owners” (page 66).

This logic is flawlessly reproduced in Cerdá’s notion of transcendence. Its paradoxical nature becomes clear: vialidad experienced within the network of ways, with its individualized lanes of traffic, the specially designed ‘nodes’, and its general elimination of conflict is in fact a product of private property. It is the logic which extends the mechanism of self-preservation bound up in private property into the ‘public’ sphere, transcribing it as the basis of a common mode of being—the ‘universality’ of vialidad. The negative sense of liberty which pervades throughout the urbe, is precisely the making-communal of that which springs from the isolated individual, telescoping the Lockean concept of private property from Man to dwelling to the entire urbe itself. When liberty is understood this way, spilling out of the private dwelling into the communal space,

“ the subtractive or simply the negative sense is already destined to characterize it ever more dominantly. When this entropic process is joined to the self-preserving strategies of modern society, the overturning of ancient liberties [libertates] into its immune opposite will be complete. … Without losing its typically polyvalent lexicon, immunity progressively transfers its own semantic center of gravity from the sense of ‘privilege’ to that of ‘security’ ” (Esposito, 2008, page 72).

Arendt (1958) recognized this long ago: “Society, when it first entered the public realm, assumed the disguise of an organization of property-owners who, instead of claiming access to the public realm because of their wealth, demanded protection from it for the accumulation of more wealth” (page 68).

The conception of liberty as freedom from obstruction, understood by Cerdá, limits it to the relation between the isolated subject and his will to autonomously circulate. Fused to the private dwelling as both beginning and endpoint of vialidad, the freedom permeating throughout the urbe turns out to be its opposite: it is the prerequisite for the preservation of life; and for this reason, despite all of his best efforts, his ‘science’ of urbanization would rapidly erode into a ‘single code’: an expanse of provisions and regulations which appears more like a kind of Hobbesian Social Contract turned inside-out, setting free to circulate that

(3) Private property, for Locke, springs from the necessary extension of the property nature bestowed on each man in his mastery over his body (see Locke, 1821 [1689] ).

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which was previously fixed in the disciplinary structures of the state. As Arendt (1958) would note, “[o]nly the government, appointed to shield the private owners from each other in the competitive struggle for more wealth, was common” (page 69).

Of course, the legacy of urbanization bequeathed to the Earth cannot be attributed to Cerdá at all. In fact, his work fell into obscurity until only recently. Rather, one should view it as a manifestation of a certain idealism that nevertheless has taken hold over the course of the past 150 years of ‘actually existing’ urbanization. The vast nexus of administrative institutions and legal mechanisms that have arisen throughout the 20th century around large-scale capitalist development only mirror Cerdá’s efforts to do the same. Yet just as his ‘science’ of urbanization—the body of knowledge Cerdá so diligently theorized—was in the end reduced to a ‘single code’ of ordinances, so too would urbanization over the course of the 20th century exceed its various idealisms, perpetually reverting to vague sets of regulations accompanying its permanent imperative to expand a formless, beige grid of habitation and circulation across the surface of the globe. Ironically, this remnant of urbanización, whose ecological consequences are only now becoming clear, is perhaps Cerdá’s true legacy.

Ecological urbanismIn a sense, the great urban projects of the 20th century, from Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City to Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse to the Metabolists’ organicism to even the recent upsurge in ‘participatory’ design, together constitute a long procession of mankind’s attempt to discover systems of nature and reproduce them as urban form. Endlessly echoing the same myths that founded Cerdá’s work, the historical task of the architect seems to be burdened by the embarrassing artificiality of the very conditions in which he or she condemns us to live. The architect presides uncomfortably over two domains at once: the urban, in which nature’s configurations reveal themselves, and the architectonic, which must fill this nature with the artificiality of objects. The reproduction of the basic tenets of circulating and dwelling, infrastructure and domesticity, production and reproduction must all be ‘scientifically’ mobilized in order to mediate these two domains, reinscribing the distinction between nature and artifice within the semantic play between urbanization and urbanism.

Today, this trajectory has reached its apogee with the introduction of ecological urbanism. On one hand, ecological urbanism provides little novelty to this history of the urban. It employs the very same scaleless diagram of circulation as a generator of spatial order: infrastructure is its primary tool with which to extend a domestic network across a functionally determined, formless space, spanning from the biological to the territorial. Like Cerdá’s vision of an urbanized world, ecological urbanism, too, offers itself as a kind of bio-economic system, where the categories of public health and private property are now retooled in a happy confluence of ecological amelioration and real-estate investment. All told, the commitment to the mythic origins of urbanization as a process of nature is now redoubled by the new status urbanism takes as ‘ecological’.

Yet this is precisely where things begin to change. This new status conferred upon urbanism has propagated a miraculous consensus of design strategies whose overall logic pledges to finally liberate form from the ‘artificiality’ of human design: under ecological urbanism, form now ‘emerges’ as an extrusion of the patterns and textures ‘naturally’ delineated on site. In this way, the urban designer can be reconceived as a kind of benevolent interlocutor in an otherwise ‘natural’ process. The ethereal imagery produced to advertise ecological urbanism reflects this achievement in what should rightly be called the ‘ecobaroque’. Hyperrealist renderings depict this new version of urbanism, masterfully reducing the urban to a background—at times barely visible at all behind layers of lush biomass, which, incidentally, comes to constitute the principle subject of these images: the moist atmosphere of a total nature. Celebrating the apparent triumph of nature over that ever-troublesome category, the

Ecological urbanism, circulation, and the immunization of nature 27

‘city’, the urban now appears (if at all) as the virtuously benign scaffold on which an afflicted nature has been able to take root and flourish (Adams, 2010). Ecological urbanism proposes that urbanization is no longer merely synonymous with nature, but it is now its provider, its precondition.

Within the epistemological horizon of ecology, nature has (once again) entered into the socioeconomic sphere through its availability to management. But because of this (unless it is to vanish altogether), it must at once recede to a purified status, which it takes in the utter and total capriciousness attributed to climate change. It is precisely in this transition that ecological urbanism bears its greatest stroke of genius. Today, the preservation of life can no longer be limited to the careful calculations of the urban expanse. It must now be accomplished by remediating the delicate ecosystems—the nature—into which we urbanize, as it is nature (via the unpredictability of climate change) that has become pathological to our existence. Likewise, if circulation has been associated with life’s enhancement, today this is possible only by simultaneously ‘enhancing nature’ itself: just as the engineers of the Ponts et Chaussées sought to ‘perfect nature’ by expanding networks of circulation throughout the territory, so too does ecological urbanism promise to refine nature by offering itself as nature’s infrastructure, by allowing it to circulate. Nature must be channeled into its own calculated corridors and passageways, cultivated in reserves, distributed across matrices, and decentralized throughout districts. It must be made mobile, exchangeable. In this shift, life’s preservation and enhancement are no longer the outcome of urbanization: ecological urbanism now proposes the heroic capacity to fold these tasks into the very process of urbanization itself, at once normalizing the menacing climate while managing its life-sustaining potency. Urbanization now intervenes as a program that can be understood only as the immunization of nature in which the technology of the urban acts as the vaccine.

Such a reading is emphasized only when disclosing the ne plus ultra of ecological urbanism—the ecocity—for what it really is: an enclave constructed for real-estate speculation. Indeed, the entire spectrum of sustainable technologies all too often hedge their bets within the cozy neoliberal fantasy of the ‘green economy’, propagating the delusion that the most common of concerns that has ever faced the world can be solved by private investment (Adams, 2010). In a desperate act of self-preservation, radicalized by the fear of ecological catastrophe, the ecocity proposes itself as an entirely private domain whose population is a predetermined economic quantity, and whose isolation from the outside is guaranteed by its parallel, self-sufficient grid of energy and resource production. It mobilizes the entire apparatus of ‘sustainable’ technologies into a single security mechanism, protecting its inhabitants from the deteriorating world outside. Here, the notion of self-preservation as a strategy of private property takes on vastly new proportions, converting the technology of ecological salvation into its immune opposite: a divisive infrastructure of apartheid.

With ecological urbanism, a rhetorical inversion has taken place: urbanization no longer rests on its claim to be synonymous with nature—now it recasts itself as a science whose aim is to reconstitute nature as urbanization. Ecological urbanism, with all of its ‘sustainable solutions’, by no means aims as it proclaims to remediate a stricken nature, resuscitating her back to health: instead, it is a strategy to colonize the empty space of an empty category, whose only promise is to fill the Earth (‘replete terram’) with the fertile networks of chartreuse circulation—a spectacle to witness in which a miraculous nature is finally able to fulfill herself in humankind’s most domestic, Edenic image of cohabitation and movement. ‘Sustainability’ comes as a most sinister of terms whose obscurity is understood only in light of the revelation that what is truly the object to be ‘sustained’ is, at best, a process without beginning or end, and whose only promise is the managed expansion of the urban regime. Of course, this new flavor of urbanism does not need to naturalize this. Instead, it is now

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the natural world which presents itself as a substance which must also circulate, connect, expand; it is both infrastructure and the fluid green consensus which courses through the urban-everywhere, trading in its limitless abundance for our sprawling horizon of gray–beige inevitability. Remarkably, what AMO presents is exactly an urbe: a new pharmakon for ecological illness; a single urban expanse stretching across a single Dymaxion continent whose commitment to renewable circulation confirms its promise to stave off the barbarism of environmental havoc once more, all the while leaving no terrain on Earth untouched by the supremely comfortable guarantee of perpetual movement.

Clearly, this rhetoric is only the global face of a new ‘urbanism’ marshaled to assure the continuity of urbanization. Yet, up close, a different picture emerges. Fueled by a new essentialism born of the pandaemonium of ecological crisis, the logic of urbanization today reveals only what it has always been truly capable of. The utopia of a world unified and integrated into a single confluent whole—a pure interior—has today reached a kind of limit condition. Now, in the face of ecological meltdown, its bipolar logic produces precisely its opposite, charging its infrastructural networks with the dastardly task of isolating, dividing, protecting at an unprecedented scale: the precarious ‘making-communal’ of property ownership has now reverted to a regime of pure security aimed at closing off the bleak uncertainty of the world outside. Indeed, this binary logic has always constituted the biopolitical apparatus of urbanization, at once connecting and isolating, integrating and alienating. It is a divisive logic tempered by the same depoliticized, technoscientific rhetoric that has characterized urbanization from its birth. Yet today it is precisely the perception of a world bearing no exterior to itself that validates this radical turn inward, revealing the purely negative form of liberty at its heart. No longer promising freedom from obstruction, amidst the horrific plight of the environment, such liberty provides a vastly different effect: the intoxicating utopia of ecological urbanism promises rather the freedom from the sublime and indiscriminate communality of environmental collapse.ReferencesAdams R, 2010, “Longing for a greener present: neoliberalism and the eco-city” Radical Philosophy

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