1) The document discusses how human activity has fundamentally altered the Earth's geology and environment, marking the end of the Holocene epoch and the beginning of the Anthropocene era. 2) It describes how rapidly growing urbanization and industrialization, particularly since the Industrial Revolution, have made cities the main drivers of global resource and material flows, transforming natural systems on Earth-shaping scales. 3) The Anthropocene challenges traditional concepts of nature and cities by revealing their interdependence and blurring boundaries, with human and technological systems now permeating the entire biosphere in complex "cyborg" assemblies.

1. The Anthropocenic City
Nature, Security Cyborg Urbanisation
Stephen Graham
Global Urban Research Unit
School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape
Newcastle University

3. “Our world, our old world that we have inhabited for the last 12,000 years, has ended.
This February […], the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London
was adding the newest and highest story to the geological story. To the question ‘Are
we now living in the Anthropocene?’ the 21 members of the Commission unanimously
answer ‘yes.’ They adduce robust evidence that the Holocene epoch -- the interglacial
span of unusually stable climate that has allowed the rapid evolution of agriculture and
urban civilization -- has ended and that the Earth has entered ‘a stratigraphic interval
without close parallel in the last several million years.’
In addition to the buildup of greenhouse gases, the stratigraphers cite human landscape
transformation which ‘now exceeds [annual] natural sediment production by an order
of magnitude,’ the ominous acidification of the oceans, and the relentless destruction
of biota. This new age, they explain, is defined both by the heating trend […] and by the
radical instability expected of future environments.
In somber prose, they warn that ‘the combination of extinctions, global species migrations
and the widespread replacement of natural vegetation with agricultural monocultures
is producing a distinctive contemporary biostratigraphic signal. These effects are
permanent, as future evolution will take place from surviving (and frequently
anthropogenically relocated) stocks.” […] Evolution itself, in other words, has been
forced into a new trajectory.” Mike Davis (2008)

4. Welcome to the ‘Anthropocene’: Capitalist urban-Industrialism
as the Planet’s most important geophysical force
• Human and urban manufacture of
‘Nature’ – climates, biospheres, carbon
cycles, hydrological and
geomorphological systems, even
organisms and ecosystems -- has
reached such an extent since the
Industrial revolution that we no longer
inhabit the post-glacial Holocene
• Instead we live in the Anthropocene
(term coined in 2000 by the Nobel
Prize-winning geologist, Paul Crutzen)

5. Paul J Crutzen
Holocene-­‐Anthropocenic
boundaries
can
now
be
discerned
in
ocean
sediments,
ice
sheet
cores,
pollen
cores
etc.

6. The “Factory Planet” Nick Dyer-Witheford
• Incredibly rapid growth and extension of cities
and capitalist urban-industrial systems
absolutely central to this shift
• World 50%+ urban; 70% by 2050
• 2.6 billion people, 0.75% land area
• Main hubs of global water, energy, food, waste,
carbon flows and demands; generators of
resource conflicts; foci of genetic, hydrological,
climatic, nano-, chemical and geological
engineering (intentional and unintentional) on
earth-shaping scales

7. • Already, cities consume 75% of world
energy and produce 80% greenhouse
gas emissions
• More than 50% global soils farmed,
grazed or logged; 1/3 of available
water used for planting grazing; 25%
rivers run dry before reaching sea
• Cities hubs of huge, geographicallystretched systems of infrastructure to
metabolise enormous flows of food,
water, energy, wastes, commodities,
raw materials resources from
distant sites through the city and the
bodies of its human (and non-human)
inhabitants within globalised and
‘neoliberal’ worlds of trade, flow and
exchange

10. Erle Ellis

12. Fundamentally Challenges Traditional Western
Concepts of Cities, Nature, Technology
• Modernist, post-Enlightenment ideas
based on imagining city as being
separate, and opposed to, an
externalised Nature, to be ‘conquered’
through masculinised, technoscientific
modernity
• ‘Nature’ seen to be totally separated
from the social, urban, human world
• Technological ‘progress’ a means to
heroically master nature, geography and
time: e.g. US “Manifest destiny”
• ‘Built’ environments threaten to
overcome and pollute ‘natural’ ones
• Deny social production of nature and
inevitable reliance of urbanisation on
ecological transformations
• Humans and cities not external to
ecosystems

13. Resonates With Posthumanist Ontologies Put
Forward by Actor-Network and Cyborg
Urbanisation Theories
• Imagined fixed human/machine, human/animal, physical/
non-physical, social/technological social/natural binaries
and boundaries blur away
• A subjectification of objects, and the objectification of
subjects (Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour etc.)
• “The characteristic of the factory planet is the capitalist
subsumption not just of production, not just of
consumption, not just of social reproduction (as in
Fordism), but of life’s informational, genetic and ecological
dimensions” Nick Dyer-Witheford
• Urban Technonature in a world of ‘post-humans’:
“Cyborgs are not creatures of pristine Nature; they are
the planned and unplanned offspring of manufactured
environments, fusing into new organic compounds of
naturalized matter and artificialized anti-matter” Tim Luke

14. “The entire planet now is increasingly a ‘built
environment’ or ‘planned habitat’ as pollution
modifies atmospheric chemistry, urbanization
restructures weather events, biochemistry
redesigns the genetics of existing biomass, and
architecture accretes new biotic habitats
inside of sprawling megacities.”
Tim Luke, 1997, At the end of Nature: cyborgs, 'humachines', and environments in postmodernity
Environment and Planning A 29(8) 1367 – 1380 )

15. Matthew Gandy: Cyborg Urbanisation
• Cyborgian thinking suggests a way of thinking about
cities as a whole
• Geographically and temporally-stretched hybrids of
human, organic, technological, continually connecting
urban sites and processes to ‘rural’ ones, both near and
far
• Helps create a new vocabulary for understanding what
we mean by the ‘public realm’ against the vulnerability
and inter-dependency of urban societies and the
complex technological networks and organic and
biospheric metabolisms, stretched across different
geographical temporal scales, that make them
possible.

16. Eric Swyngedouw
and Maria Kaika:
• Metabolisation of water
central to metabolism of
cyborg cities
• ‘Socionatures’ based on
distant sourcing, hydroengineering of whole
nations, and the
circulation of water
through the metabolic
spaces of the body and
the city

17. The
Poli:cs
of
Urbanised
Nature
Urban
Metabolism

18. Cyborg Urbanisation Revealed During
Disruption of Infrastructures
“Cyborgs, like us, are endlessly fascinated by machinic
breakdowns, which would cause disruptions in, or denials of
access to, their megatechnical sources of being.”
Tim Luke (above NYC blackout, 2003)

19. Of course for a billion urbanites or more, infrastructural failure, exclusion and
precarity is perpetually and profoundly visible imprivisation is constant
Infrastructures have “always been foregrounded in the lives of more
precarious social groups — i.e. those with reduced access or without access
or who have been disconnected, as a result either of socio-spatial
differentiation strategies or infrastructure crises or collapse.”
Colin McFarlane and Jonathan Rutherford (2008)

20. Tim Luke:
‘Denature’
• “After two centuries of industrial revolution and three
decades of informational revolution, Nature no longer can be
assumed to be God-created (theogenic) or self-creating
(autogenic). What is taken to be nature now is largely
human-created (anthropogenic), not only in theory but also
in practice. One need not wait for the science fiction of
advanced space travel technologies to contact other extraterrestrial life forms, the science facts of altered
atmospheric chemistry, rampant genetic engineering, and
unchecked species extinctions suggest that urban industrial
humanity is a race extra-terrestrial intelligent beings already
intent upon imperializing the Earth in cyborg colonies with
humachinic technologies. ” Tim Luke

21. Infrastructure disruptions reveal
often taken for granted and
normalised ‘infrastructures’ and
cyborg assemblies especially
blackouts
In cyborg cities, these increasingly
threaten life, not mere
inconvenience: Turning off
becomes suicide

22. • Also unerringly reveal the often
concealed politics of cyborganised
cities
• e.g. Katrina in 2005 not a ‘natural
disaster,’ ‘technical failure’ or ‘Act of
God.’ Rather, the inevitable result of:
• Climate change accentuating
hurricanes
• Hitting a city denuded of natural
protection and
• Very poorly covered by a levee
network that was systematically
racially biased over centuries of
constructed socio-nature in more
recent context of
• A Neoconservative and racist Federal
Government that had systematically
skewed Emergency Planning towards
terrorism for political ends

23. Dominant Responses:
Earth Systems Engineering,
Geoengineering, Securitisation
• “The world as design space” ; “The human as design space”
Brad Allenby
• “Earth Systems Engineering and Management is the capability
to design, engineer, and manage, through dialog and continual
feedback, integrated built/human/natural systems that achieve
the multivariate and sometimes mutually exclusive goals and
desires of humanity, including at the least personal, social,
economic, technological, and environmental dimensions, within
the constraints imposed by the states and dynamics of existing
complex adaptive systems.” Brad Allenby

24. We must be wary of ‘quick technical fix’ ideas of ‘Terraforming’,
‘Geoengineering’ and ‘Earth Systems Engineering’ in the
Anthropocene. These tend to depoliticise and commodify the
problems, legitimise an unchanged political economy, and would
inevitably bring major unintended effects

25. Securitisation and Weaponisation
of the Anthropocene
• Ole Wæver's Copenhagen School Securitization
Theory (1995)
• Security as a “speech act” where a securitizing actor
designates a threat to a specified reference object and
declares an existential threat implying a right to use
extraordinary means to fend it off.
• Such a process of “securitization” is successful when
the construction of an “existential threat” by a policy
maker is socially accepted and where “survival” against
existential threats is crucial.
• Strong Anthropocenic turn in securitisation discourse

27. • Neoliberalised ‘global’ cities often have a
parasitic relationship with near and
distant hinterlands
• “Bio-rifts of neoliberalism” DyerWitheford
• Resource (food, water, energy) grabs
organised and finance through the
financial centres and technopoles of the
North’s global finance capitals
• New highly regressive paradigms of
‘urban ecological security’ (Simon
Marvin and Mike Hodgson) E.g. Daewoo
(South Korean corporation) has just
leased half of all the arable land in
Madagascar to feed South Korean cities
in the future
The Anthropocenic
Global City System:
A New Imperialism?

28. Biopiracy and biofuels
push (indigenous
groups in Indonesia,
protesting, above)
Global
South
‘land
grab’
by
global
North
agribusiness

29. • Neoliberalised ‘global’ cities often have a parasitic The Anthropocenic
relationship with near and distant hinterlands
Global City System:
• Global neoliberal urbanisation has led to
A New Imperialism?
‘devastating disparities between the mobility of
capital and labour that have produced new forms
of economic serfdom in the global South’
Matthew Gandy
• Resource (food, water, energy) grabs organised
and finance through the financial centres and
technopoles of the North’s global finance capitals
• New highly regressive paradigms of ‘urban
ecological security’ (Simon Marvin and Mike
Hodgson) E.g. Daewoo (South Korean
corporation) has just leased half of all the arable
land in Madagascar to feed South Korean cities in
the future

30. Four Conclusions: (i) Conceptual Implications
• Throws “us onto a meta-historical playing field without a
clue as to how to play the game” Gibson-Graham and
Roelvink (2010)
• Drastically destablises concepts of ‘city’, ‘technology’,
‘nature’ and ‘scale’, along with persistent ‘urban-rural’,
‘natural-social’, ‘natural-technological’ and ‘global-local’
binaries
• Profound implications for conceptualisations of the ‘urban’.
Is the entire Anthropocenic biosphere, in effect, ‘urban’?
Tim Luke (2009) talks of the multiple interconnections and
new spatial practices of “urbanatura” (Tim Luke, 2009);
• “The accidental normaliity of greenhouse-gassing global
capitalism envelops humans, non-humans, and hybrids in
technonaturalized systems and structures” Tim Luke

31. (ii) Map on to Conventional Policy Paradigms
• Crucially, these processes map continuously onto, and
through, more usual policy paradigms and discourses
• “Whether they examine technoscience operations,
natural disasters, or socio-spatial collapses”, new
research must “scan the property boundaries of urban
space as they are stabilized in ordinary policy terms
such as urbanization, land use, environment, river
basins, industrialization, economic growth, sprawl, or
natural resources. Once scrutinized more closely, the
unstable, unconventional, and undetected properties of
multiple industrial hybridities do emerge out of foggy
phenomena, including the ’greenhouse effect’” (Tim
Luke, 2009)

32. (iii) But Reveal Their Limits
• Reveal limits of both ‘sustainability’ and environmentalist
debates: Sustainability discourses often involve elements of
‘greenwash’, over-aesthetic conceptions, or outright
bourgeois environmentalism. “Sustainability is too often a
self-absorbed mechanism for avoiding the complexity of
the Anthropogenic world” Brad Allenby
• Environmentalist tropes of pristine nature, meanwhile,
“suggest the importance of minimizing alterations of many
habitats; but so many habitats are now obviously ‘artificial’
that the invocation of a preservationist ethos is frequently
inappropriate if ecology, rather than aesthetics, is
considered as the basis for policy prescription” Simon
Dalby

33. (iv) Challenge of Politicising the Anthropocene
• New “technonatural formations” required based on a “foundational
reimagination of the innovations unfolding in many intersecting terns in what
are called “Nature” and “society”’ (Tim Luke)
• Need a new ethics and research paradigms for to politicise the Anthropocenic city: Must blur debates about global neoliberalised political economy,
global urbanisation, global environmental change and environmental justice
• “About human beings being transformed by the world in which we find
ourselves” Gibson-Graham and Roelvink (2010)
• Planetary, Anthropocenic, urban and human concepts of ‘security’ required
rather than national-militaristic ones
• Dangers that dominant responses -- earth systems and geo-engineering and
securitisation -- offer myths of technological panaceas based on further
securitisation, depoliticisation, commodification, colonisation centred on
global north corporate capital and ‘global’ metropolitan regions

34. “ Thus, in the Anthropocene we will be confronted with a form
of world political economy in which global warming and other
totalizing commodifications are risked in the pursuit of
progress. Whereas the initial stages of commodification tested
the statics of nature (namely the absorption capacities of land,
water, and air), the Anthropocene challenges the dynamics of
nature, in particular, the seasons, the tides, the breathing of the
planet, and the reproductive cycles of living things.
While the emblems of advancing industrialism remain
waste, pollution, and risk, there has been a fundamental breach
of the nature-society relation in the Anthropocene. Modern
life transpires not simply outside the constraints of nature, but
relegates nature to commodity status, to be purchased and
sold in the world along with other products and services.”
John Byrne, Leigh Glover and Cecilia Martinez 2002