The potential politics of the porous city

Abstract

This article discusses the concept of porosity and what it might offer critical urbanism. It engages recent scholarly and practical writing on the “porous city,” outlining three sets of contributions that porosity offers in analyzing contemporary urbanization patterns and in orienting planning, policymaking, and knowledge production. First, the porous city offers a critical epistemological lens focused on flow and relations, which supports mobile and infrastructural ways of viewing and knowing the city. Second, the porous city suggests the ontological features of interpenetrating geographies and temporalities, which take the urban to be a topological space of potential politics. Third, the porous city entails an ideal to which planning practice should aspire, particularly in relation to forms of urbanism and city-building that are open to multifunctionality, difference, and dynamism over time. While each of these represents a promising direction in critical urban praxis, we argue that porosity also has its limits. The porous city is conceptually malleable and normatively ambiguous and it risks overreach as well as recuperation within exclusionary and exploitative urban development agendas. We claim that the porous city should not be treated as a comprehensive global ambition, but rather, is most valuable when used to discern and build discrete architectures of power.

Rebuilding cultures of community on a post-COVID-19 university campus

“…The work of 'infrastructure' scholars such as Susan Leigh Star, 26 Lauren Berlant, 27 and a more recent generation of cultural geographers 28 guides us to understand that infrastructure is more than just inanimate information, resources and background structures of support. 29 Marc Auge similarly shows how infrastructural sites or 'non-places'-like airports-that function primarily as sites of transition generate connections and cultures that rely on complex multilayered systems.…”

Politicization, postpolitics and the open city: Openness, closedness and the spatialisation of the political

“…And, that they become operative through their ability to close down or guide the politics of openness (and closedness). Thus, we wish to emphasize the importance of reading the urban condition for the moments of openness and closedness (see also Ernwright and Olmstead, 2023). And, indeed, seeing the Grenfell Tower tragedy as moment where these opennesses and closednesses are both revealed and challenged – yet not quite as Swyngedouw would suggest, through the properly political.…”

“…In this vein, Ernwright and Olmstead (2023) have argued that openness (in their terms, porosity) can be used as an analytic capable of revealing power relations in urban design and planning practice (see also Lorne, 2020; or Simone’s notion of the surrounds, 2022). In this conception, openness both reveals the interpenetrating geographies of the city and offers a critique of the power relations that might block or thwart multifunctionality, difference, and the capacity for new/better urban forms to be created.…”