The Ethological City

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Chapter 12

The Ethological City

Cameron Duff

First, the feet settle, a slight flexing of the ankles, toes exploring the surface of the ground for the purchase of a secure foundation. Breathe, look down, move. Balancing, tilting, the ground approaches, hands outstretched. Fingers probe the pavement, the feel of diverse sensations: the coarseness of the cement, fine differences in textures, the pressure of the body’s impending weight in the pads of the fingertips. Head down. Weight shifting to the hands, space inverting with the transition in ori-entation. Pause, breathe, look down once more, think of the movement to come. Kick (right foot). This is the point of the handstand; balance to motion to rest. Hands still, wrists strong, hips affecting gravity’s force in their alignment above the head, knees and ankles touching, stillness comes fleetingly. The body rests for a moment with the concrete; the spine like the wall it may yet need to touch against. Bodies moving and resting together, each involved. There is no handstand without the cement, the wall, gravity’s pull and sway, without the city, without the body. Hands and pavement, weight and movement, motion and rest. An ethology of bodies, cities, affects, relations, encounters and events. A handstand.

In this handstand, there is the body, there is the city and there is (a) life (Deleuze 2001: 27–32). Yet, there is also a call to abandon the convenience of a subject and its objects; the familiar taxonomy of a body willing its movements in the midst of passive objects, surfaces and contexts. Such conventions inevitably ignore most of the bodies assem-bled in the event of the handstand (Bennett 2010: 4–6). So, how might the body- becoming- city- becoming- body instantiated in this event be observed, theorised, cared for? How should the movements implicated in these bodies be identified and attributed? The movement and rest inaugurated in the event of the handstand describe a nexus of inten-sive and extensive forces, a society of bodies resonating together in the

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216 Deleuze and Architecture


Figure 12.1 Placement. Photograph by anon.

Figure 12.2 On the corner. Photograph by anon.




The Ethological City 217


transience of balance. Balance is a capacity, established and enacted in the meeting of bodies, in their becoming active. The resulting handstand is ethological – a function of bodies acting together, insinuating them-selves into the muscle- bone- concrete- gravity- belief- desire- motion of the inverted body – an instance of the environment entering ‘into the nature of things’ (Whitehead 1968: 138). Such is the life of the modern city, of bodies and assemblages. This chapter investigates this life, drawing insights from the writings of Gilles Deleuze and inspiration from the reports of urban inhabitants collected in ethnographic studies conducted in Melbourne, Australia (see Duff 2010, 2011 for details). The figure of ethology emerged as the primary object of this ethnography, revealing the force of the assembled city. Deleuze’s ethology (1988: 123) describes the assembling of bodies (both human and non- human) in permutations of subjectivity, materiality and corporeality, in ‘relations of motion and rest, slowness and speed between particles’. Taken together, the ethol-ogy and the ethnography essayed in this chapter highlight the felt sensa-tion, the feel and emotional resonance of place, unfolding the life of the city in its ‘free and wild state’ (Deleuze 1994: xx).

Steps to an Ethology of Place

The urban environments of the modern West inspire a range of affective encounters, shaping the dynamic experience of place while adding to the tenor of a city’s myriad identities. This imbrication of place, matter, affect and subjectivity is suggestive of Gilles Deleuze’s idiosyncratic cartography of lines, movements, speeds and slownesses (1988, 1992, 1994). These lines and speeds describe the ‘latitude’ and ‘longitude’ of complex bodies and the variable relations and affects that compose them. The subject as it is traditionally understood disappears from this account, replaced by an ethological body of events, affects and relations. This figure stands in contrast to the ‘molar’ forms of identity and subjec-tivity typically associated with the study of cities, urban planning, archi-tecture and place (Thrift 1999; Brott 2011). Ethology calls attention to the composition of complex bodies; human and non- human bodies, materialities, bodies of ideas, sound, infrastructure, crowds and forms; and as architects have long attested, the bodies of the built environment itself (see Dovey 2010: 13–20). Ethology speaks to this assembling, the drawing together of diverse forms in the collocations of the assemblage (human and non- human). Departing somewhat from more familiar Deleuzian themes of the smooth and the striated, of territories and terri-torialisation, this chapter explores Deleuze’s major writings in an effort






to describe an ethological city and the diverse assemblages and subjec-tivities such a city supports. The goal is to outline a practical and experi-mental ethics of urban life equal to the social, political and aesthetic becomings that transform this life. This should yield a novel diagram of the city’s movements and a means of harnessing these movements in the generation of new aesthetic and political expressions. It should also extend the use of Deleuze’s work in architectural theory and practice beyond the ‘exhausted’ notions of space and territory to embrace a new set of ethological resources useful for the analysis of urban ‘life’.

Central to this ethology are the inventive conceptualisations of affect, multiplicity and relationality that Deleuze (1988, 1992) proposes, and the novel accounts of subjectivity and embodiment that these concepts support. Deleuze’s ethology highlights the mutually reinforcing and recursive connections that enmesh bodies in diverse territories, places or milieus. This work draws attention to the individuation of bodies without presupposing a stable subject of this individuation (Brott 2011). Individuation ought here to be understood as something akin to an event, or the means by which diverse elements are composed and affected in the creation of new assemblages. Drawing together material and corporeal elements, the human and the non- human, objects and spaces, signs and values, organs and functions, assemblages define what an ethological body ‘can do’. A body’s affects, capacities, functions and relations are not fixed in this sense, but rather are forever becom-ing according to the specific assemblages a body is capable of entering into (see Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 260–3). Applied to the study of the ‘modern’ city, Deleuze’s ethology highlights the body- becoming- city, becoming- place, becoming- collective characteristic of the everyday experience of urban life. This logic applies as much to the body of the (post)human subject as it does to the bodies (material, relational and affective) of the built environment (Dovey 2010). The quality of urban life, its concrete richness, is enhanced in the provision of new affective sensitivities and new relational capacities, which extend the spatial and temporal range of the body- becoming- city- becoming- subject (Awan et al. 2011). Such an ethology has important implications for the ongoing development of a participatory architectural theory and practice, more alert to questions of sustainability, health, well- being and democracy in urban settings (Blundell- Jones et al. 2005; Brott 2011).






Ethology and the Subject of Becoming

The ethological account of encounters, affects and relations that Deleuze derives from the early modern Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza pro-vides a unique model of the immanent constitution of subjectivity, the body and ethics (Gatens 2000: 60–2). This account establishes a new method for philosophy: a philosophy of the body, of encounters and relations, ideas and affects (Deleuze 1988: 17). Deleuze (1992: 257) notes that Spinoza utterly transforms this philosophy in asking not what a body is, but rather ‘what can a body do?’ This empirical ques-tion holds the key to the development of an ethological account of the city and its diverse architectures, introducing new ways of conceiving of place and place- making while highlighting the co- constitution of subjects and cities in assemblages of human, non- human, organic and material bodies, actors, objects and entities (Dovey 2010; Grosz 2001). Deleuze’s ethology emphasises the composition – the assembling or ‘acting together’ – inherent in city life, including the organisation of infrastructure, the assembling of bodies and the modulations of move-ment and rest typical of these bodies. This analysis hinges on the novel characterisations of the ‘individual’ contained in Spinoza’s ethics and developed in Deleuze’s subsequent readings.

Spinoza’s ethics are concerned with the distinctiveness of individual bodies and the manifold affects and relations that comprise their char-acteristic structure. To ask what a body can do is to ask what particular relations a body (whether human or non- human) is capable of ‘compos-ing’ with other bodies (Deleuze 1988: 127). It is to ask what particular affects determine that body in its capacity to affect and be affected by other bodies, both organic and material (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 260–3). This approach defines individual bodies in terms of their ‘capac-ities’ rather than their ‘functions’ (Buchanan 1997: 75), while drawing attention to the differences that distinguish one body from another. Ethology, as such, concerns the ‘study of the relations of speed and slow-ness, of the capacities for affecting and being affected that characterise each thing [. . .] and the variations or transformations that are peculiar to them’ (Deleuze 1988: 125). This study involves two methods: one kinetic, the other dynamic. Following Spinoza, Deleuze (1992: 201) observes that individual bodies are composed of an ‘indefinite’ number of ‘simple bodies’ connected via ‘characteristic relations’. This body is ‘permanently open to its surroundings’ (Gatens 2000: 61) in that the simple or ‘extensive parts’ that make up the complex body are con-stantly entering into differential relations with other ‘external’ bodies






(see Deleuze 1992: 191–2). All bodies necessarily enter into relations with varied simple bodies in order to preserve those associations which ‘maintain the individual in its existence’ (Gatens 2000: 62). This logic is as true of the relations required to maintain ‘organic’ bodies as it is of the relations subtending material, non- human or ‘built’ bodies (Grosz 2001: 48–9).

The extensive parts that make up the complex body routinely pass through relations of ‘composition’ and ‘decomposition’ as certain parts of the complex body are lost while others are added. These parts are themselves organised in kinetic relations of ‘motion and rest’ (Deleuze 1988: 123), which determine the manner in which the complex body’s extensive parts are connected or composed, so defining its ‘individuality’ or identity. Yet this individuality also extends to the unique combina-tion of affects and sensations that express individual bodies. Spinoza argued that all bodies are characterised by dynamic capacities to affect and be affected by other bodies, both complex and simple. Affects are an emergent effect of a body’s encounters, with each encounter transform-ing the nature of that body’s relations and hence its manifest capaci-ties. Given the heterogeneity of these relations, and the encounters that sustain them, a body’s ‘capacity to be affected does not remain fixed at all times and from all viewpoints’ (Deleuze 1992: 222). Determined in each instance anew by their affects and relations, all bodies are defined by ‘continuous variation’, by their becomings rather than their continui-ties (Deleuze 1988: 123–7).

It is for this reason that Deleuze insists that we do not know what a body can do, because we cannot know in advance what distinctive affects and relations a complex body might become capable of. The range of affective capacities that determine the individuality of the body is itself the product of the ‘very great number’ of relations that compose that body (Deleuze 1992: 218). It follows that all complex bodies differ from one another by a matter of degree according to their capacities to affect and be affected, and by their capacities to enter into new relations with other bodies. This produces a ‘new conception of the embodied individual’ in which the analysis of affects and relations replaces the study of structure and functions (Deleuze 1992: 257). This new concep-tion requires that one consider individual bodies in terms of their ‘power of acting’, where this power stands as an index of a body’s capacity to enter into diverse relations and experience diverse affects. This power grows as a body becomes more capable of entering into novel rela-tions with other bodies, and thus more capable of affecting and being affected by these bodies. The powers of all bodies grow in this way,






from organic, ‘living’ bodies (Grosz 2011: 33–9) to the bodies of works of art like a painting or a novel (Deleuze 1998: 1–3), or indeed to the powers of the built environment, and the structures and enclosures that relationally and affectively activate the life or ‘passions’ of ‘lived place’ (Thrift 1999: 302–10).

This finally reveals something of the nature of affect in terms of its transitions and effects. Drawing on distinctions available in Latin – affectio and affectus – Spinoza notes that affect describes both the par-ticular state of a body at any specific moment, and its transition from one affective state to another, and thus from one quantum of power to another. Hence, ‘affectio refers to a state of the affected body and implies the presence of the affecting body, whereas the affectus refers to the passage from one state to another, taking into account the cor-relative variations of the affecting bodies’ (Deleuze 1988: 49). In each instance, affect constitutes a modulation of a body’s power of action, or its capacity to affect the diverse bodies, both human and non- human, that it encounters. All affects are a product of encounters in the world, in that every encounter subtly transforms a body’s affective capacities. Spinoza argues that two kinds of encounters – and the affects they give rise to – must be distinguished (Deleuze 1992: 239). First, Spinoza describes encounters in which diverse bodies meet in such a way that the characteristic relations of each body combine to augment or facilitate the power of acting of each body. These encounters are good for each body in that they ‘agree’ with each body’s essence or nature, thus pro-ducing the affects of joy. In experiencing joy, a body quite literally takes on new extensive parts that enhance its power or range of actions in the world. Naturally, bodies also experience encounters that involve a dimi-nution in their power of acting and so produce the affects of sadness. These encounters involve combinations of bodies and their attendant parts and relations that serve to undermine, decompose or even destroy one or several of the constituent relations that define each body. This is the reason why Spinoza argues that all encounters involve a shift in a body’s perfection or ‘force of existing’, in that good encounters involve the transfer of power from the affecting body to the affected body and so invest that body with joy and an increase in its power of acting, while bad encounters involve a decrease in the power of the affected body and so invest that body with sadness (Deleuze 1988: 50). The effort to increase one’s ‘good encounters’ and the joyful affects that attend them, while also attempting to minimise one’s ‘bad encounters’ and their debilitating restrictions, should be understood as the pragmatic, empiri-cal foundation of Spinoza’s practical ethics (Deleuze 1988: 17–29).






The individual that emerges in such an ethics is an assemblage of diverse simple bodies connected in extensive parts and composed in recursive encounters. Human bodies attain in this assembling an indi-viduality that is also a characteristic subjectivity (Deleuze 1988: 76–7). This is an embodied subjectivity, a situated or spatialised subjectivity that is always, already a multiplicity. It is a subject of connections and relations in the mind and of affects and relations in the flesh, all consti-tuted in the manifold encounters of immanent experience. In proffering such a model of subjectivity, Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza facilitates the development of an ethological account of urban life. Rather than distinguish bodies from the complex places they construct – subjects from their contexts – Deleuze’s ethology offers a processual vision of city life, highlighting events and encounters and the affects and relations by which these events compose or construct the city. Ethology suggests that subjectivity emerges in the city- becoming- subject of bodies in their assembling.

Fragments of Subjectivity

Ethology spatialises subjectivity. It distributes it among and between the diverse objects, encounters and bodies that characterise everyday life. Ethology discovers an ontological place for all bodies, the sentient and the inert, considering the affective and relational significance of their encounters in producing the effects of subjectivity, those ‘drops of expe-rience, complex and interdependent’ (Whitehead 1978: 18). Subjectivity should not in this respect be understood as an emergent effect of mind, of a bounded psychology, any more than it should be regarded as a trick of ‘our’ unique physiology or biology. Without denying the impor-tance of these categories – mind, psychology, physiology, biology and so on – subjectivity can’t be reduced to them in any simple ontological calculus (Grosz 2011). Subjectivity is the achievement of bodies acting together. Remove one or another of these bodies and the subject so con-stituted changes also, sometimes profoundly, other times imperceptibly. Subjectivity inheres in the assembling of bodies, in their affects and rela-tions, and in the ways these relations transform the capacities to affect and be affected immanent to the assemblage itself (Latour 2004; Rölli 2009). Bodies and parts, encountering one another in the event of their mutual affective and relational constitution, ‘express’ subjectivity in their concrescence. Subjectivity, in other words, lies in the hand meeting the concrete, palms pressing into the textures of haptic sensation, where each (hand and concrete) composes a subject. The subject is expressed






in the assembling of these bodies and not only in the flesh and brain of the human body rearranging its spatial orientations in preparation for the handstand.

It is for these reasons that Deleuze adopts the language of cartog-raphy, of charts, maps and lines, to develop the idea of a spatialised subject in his unique ethology (West- Pavlov 2009: 223–7). Tracing lines of latitude and longitude, the charts and maps that are the product of cartography become for Deleuze (1988) a means of ‘diagramming’ the particular conjunction of affects and relations that compose subjectiv-ity on a given ‘plane of consistency’. Distributed in space (and time) subjectivity is composed of pre- individual, asubjective singularities or ‘haecceities’ that combine in the course of their individuation, their sub-jectivisation (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 260–3). The combination of these singularities, these affects, events, relations and haecceities, each time produces a new individual, a new subject, differing by a matter of degree from the individuations that precede it. This is not to suggest that there is no relation of continuity between the moments of this individuation – that the subject differs unrecognisably from itself from one event to the next; only that subjectivity is defined by the ‘elements belonging to it under given relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness (longitude); the sum total of the intensive affects it is capable of at a given power (latitude)’ (ibid.: 260). Subjectivity should in this respect be understood as a multiplicity of diverse elements assembled in distinctive relations that are themselves ‘mobile, spread out across a surface, topographical’ (West- Pavlov 2009: 226). There is not a subject and its objects, but rather events of subjectivisation, of individuation, effectuated in the meeting of elements in space and time, of space and time. Subjectivity is ethological, combinatorial, an assembling of ele-ments acting together, resonating in their affects. Deleuze’s ethology provides a means of mapping the spatial distribution of these elements – these fragments of subjectivity – and the events of their becoming.

Recently, critics of this conception of subjectivity have objected to its apparent ‘flattening’ of all ontological distinctions between subjects and objects (Harman 2009: 221–3). Often targeting the renderings of sub-jectivity presented in actor- network theory (and Bruno Latour’s writings more narrowly), rather than Deleuze’s ethology per se, it is nonetheless contended that the ‘symmetrisation’ of subjects and objects enacted in this ethology reduces all bodies to inert matter, removing the means of distinguishing the discrete capacities that characterise individual bodies, the human and the non- human in particular (see Sismondo 2010: 89–90 for a review). It follows that the human actor is characterised in the






same way, and according to the same ontological assessments, as the material objects that he or she daily encounters (see also Fallan 2008: 81–7). There is no difference, in other words, between the hand and the concrete, to return to the leitmotif that has animated so much of the discussion in this chapter thus far. While there are certainly passages in Deleuze’s writings that when taken in isolation do little to refute such ontological propositions, it is clear that Deleuze’s mature philosophy is concerned with the imbrications of matter and force, of human and non- humans, the extensive and the intensive (Rölli 2009). Deleuze (1988: 125–7) is interested in tracing the becoming subject of bodies and forces encountering one another in assemblages, and the differential relations that give rise to the effects of subjectivity in these assemblages. Far from according all entities, all forces, the same finite measure of reality, Deleuze is concerned with tracing the processes by which ‘life’ is organ-ised in new individuals; with the ways ‘experience in the making’ gives rise to new subjects (Robinson 2010: 128). All kinds of entities, forces, signs and processes participate in this subjectivisation, which is not to say that they are all equal, just that each is indispensable to the subject so assembled. Indeed, it might be preferable to describe the subject as a kind of dense point radiating out through a series of intensive and exten-sive relations in and with the world. Such a subject describes a ‘segment of the world [. . .] a zone of intensity’ (West- Pavlov 2009: 231) that differs from other such zones only to the extent that it expresses differ-ent kinds of relations with the world.

The handstand instantiates one such ‘zone of intensity’, drawing together myriad forces in the expression of subjectivity; an inverted body- becoming- city- becoming- still. According to Deleuze’s ethology, the handstand is not merely the artful, athletic expression of an inten-tional agent, for the concrete is also active, as are the wall, gravity, the weather and the distractions of passing traffic, among other assembled forces (see also Deleuze 1998: 1–3). As a participant in one of the eth-nographic event–assemblages (see also Duff 2010) alluded to above observed:

The wall is very important when you are learning handstands. The wall takes away the fear of falling, so it kind of soaks up your anxiety. I’ve started seeing more walls now and going, just trying them out, that feeling. I see a wall that looks right and I feel like being upside down, just to see how things look.

The handstand is perhaps a trivial example with which to draw so radical a picture of city life, yet it dramatises what is at stake in any






ethological account of cities, bodies and subjects. As much as it solicits the expressive force of muscle, bone and desire, this handstand also relies on the reassuring stability of the city’s streetscapes: a wall, a locked door, a flat expanse of concrete, children’s playground equip-ment. While not every body assembled in this event is capable of the intentionality required to initiate it, the event is nonetheless impossible without these bodies. As Bruno Latour notes in another context, ‘there might exist many metaphysical shades between full causality and sheer inexistence’ (2005: 72). Perhaps the world should not be organised so neatly into intentional subjects and passive objects. In spatialising sub-jectivity, Deleuze’s ethology draws attention to the array of bodies at work in the everyday construction of the city. This is a relational city, an ethological city, an ethical city. It is surely a city that is familiar to archi-tects, despite the novelty of some of its terms. So how, in the service of a participatory city, may architects incorporate more of these intensive and extensive forces in the mobilisation of an expanded design theory and practice? Who, what else might be made to participate in the city?

A Participatory City: Bodies, Concrete and Things

The idea of participation, of ‘user’ involvement in design practice, has become an important feature of architectural debates in numerous con-texts (Jenkins and Forsyth 2010: x–xiii). While the goals of participation vary – from an interest in the ways architecture may promote ‘active citizenship’ to a more mundane interest in incorporating the perspectives of ‘end users’ within the design/build process – each seeks to expand architecture’s public franchise by shifting the practice of architecture from a narrow technical specialism to a more inclusive, empowering and/or publicly engaged activity (Blundell- Jones et al. 2005: xii–xv). Oftentimes, the shift towards a participatory architecture is presented as part of a broader historical and political movement for democracy, empowerment and enfranchisement, particularly among social groups typically excluded from everyday architectural praxis (see Blundell- Jones et al. 2005: 138–40; Awan et al. 2011: 37–9). A significant feature of this move has been the idea of ‘people determining their own environment’ in the context of a broader assertion of the public’s ‘right to the city’ (Harvey 2008: 23). As David Harvey has observed, such a right ‘cannot be divorced’ from a discussion about ‘what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values we desire’ (ibid.). As such, the discussion of access and participation in the city is less concerned with the distribution of social, economic and






material resources than with the ‘right to change ourselves by changing the city’ (ibid.). Participation in architecture thus assumes a broad remit, concerning both the ‘use value’ of individual buildings and the proper place of architecture within the broader web of social, economic and political governance in the city (see also Awan et al. 2011; also Jenkins and Forsyth 2010).

Existing discussions of participation in architecture have, however, largely confined themselves to the consideration of human participation in the design and construction of public buildings. The problem of ‘use value’ for example, has largely concerned consultation with a public identified as the likely end- users of a piece of architecture, and the attempt to incorporate their needs and preferences within the design process. Architecture in this way is positioned as an object of human fas-cination, of human occupation and human needs. Notwithstanding the emergence of a more ‘ecological’ architecture concerned with questions of climate change and sustainability, architecture defines the umwelt of the human animal and few others (Grosz 2001; Buchanan 1997). In keeping with the ethological analysis offered throughout this chapter, it is reasonable to ask what an expanded ‘right to the city’ more cognisant of the interests of non- human forces may consist of. What might a par-ticipatory architecture alert to the intensive and extensive forces that compose bodies and assemblages and cities actually look like? To ask such questions is to begin to explore the ethical, pragmatic, aesthetic and political implications of Deleuze’s ethology for thinking about cities, public space and design. It is to imagine a society of concrete, bodies and things active in the everyday making of the city, their rights assured in the care one takes to preserve this city. The first step towards such a praxis is arguably to make room for the array of ethological processes at work in the making of the city, including the production of subjec-tivities and the transformations of place described above. The buildings, objects and things that comprise the material city don’t merely have a functional, aesthetic or heritage value. They are also active in the living modulations of the city and their force must be preserved if the ethologi-cal city is to become the object of a participatory architecture. So how might these forces come to participate in such an architecture?

Concrete cannot be made to speak in a public meeting, but its resonances can be transmitted in other ways (Latour 2005). The photo-graphs reproduced in this chapter capture something of the affective and relational involvement of walls, concrete and matter in the ethological modulation of city life; their lingering haptic presence in the hands that press against them bear the traces of this modulation. Just as these traces






have become the object of an expanded ‘sensory ethnography’ (Pink 2009), it is possible that they may also inveigle their way into the delib-erations of a public and participatory architecture. Research innovations emerging in ethnography, the visual arts and architecture itself provide important inspiration for such a practice. Each suggests a further inter-vention in the ‘thinking- doing’ relay that sustains the design/practice of contemporary architecture (Jenkins and Forsyth 2010: x). Perhaps this relational diptych may yet acquire a third term in the expression of a thinking- affecting- doing. So how might one affect affect?

In much recent visual ethnography the body has been repositioned as a dynamic research instrument in an attempt to find new ways of regis-tering the affective and sensory traces of everyday life (Hesse- Biber and Leavy 2010). This has included the use of various emerging information and communication technologies which provide a basis for record-ing a broader array of sensory data (Pink 2009: 97–100). Drawing on memory, perception, whimsy, imagination, fantasy, reason and observation, the use of film and photography, auto- ethnography, crea-tive writing, interviews and walking tours, among more conventional observational techniques, provide a basis for documenting more of the affective transitions typical of the ethology described above (Hesse- Biber and Leavy 2010). This kind of ethnography takes seriously Deleuze’s insights into the production and reproduction of subjectivity in assem-blages of diverse human and non- human actors. It invites one to record the trace of concrete and grit on the hands of the city’s inhabitants; the feeling of spine becoming wall, becoming still of the inverted body of the handstand; the warmth of the sun resonating in the walls of buildings on a quiet suburban street. This ethnography cares for the assembled society of bodies active in the handstand and it is why this motif has featured so prominently throughout this chapter. Sensory ethnography in the social sciences, along with performative research methods in the visual arts, seeks to document in varying ways the acting- together of bodies in their ethological and affective assembling, and to make these documents available for yet more thinking- doing (see Pink 2009: 8–20). Each suggests a basis for including a wider array of forces in the delib-erations that inform participatory architecture, in that each furnishes various means of registering the trace of these forces in everyday life.

If such methods are to be useful to architects it may well be that the idea of participation needs to take on a more performative and affec-tive hue. Such an architecture will concern itself with research as much as practice, with affect as much as physics and with things as much as people. In developing a more performative and affective participatory






praxis, architects and designers will need to find new ways of becom-ing sensitive to the ethological modulations of the city. The dividend to be gleaned from such innovation is surely the opportunity to nurture the divergent subjectivities that thrive in our cities (Brott 2011). If Whitehead (1968: 138) was right about the ingressions of context into the nature of all things, then it is plain that architects (among other custodians of the city’s infrastructure) must care for these contexts as much as their human inhabitants. To do so is to protect the range of non- human actors – the concrete and walls, the breezes created in the gaps between office towers, the noise and bustle of the machinic street – that participate in the becoming- subject of the city assemblage. A participatory architecture more sensitive to the forces that produce subjectivity in the city will be more concerned to protect these forces through a form- making- design- praxis that fosters rather than silences them. It will create a place for handstands. It will cherish the feeling of the hand meeting the concrete, the tactile sensation of grit beneath one’s fingernails and the press of the surface into the palms of one’s hands. It will find ways to protect these affects in public places because it will be concerned with ethology as much as economics or even ecology. Above all, it will welcome ‘life’ back into the city.

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The Ethological City

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