About the event

This event is part of the Urban Life at the Extensions Programme which draws together five thematic working strands in an intensive 5-day series of ‘dialogues’ convened in Paris, at the Institute and locations within travelling distance from central Paris, and led by scholars, activists and urbanists drawing from their respective domains and locations. 

Key to a propositional politics around urban habitability is that the idea that life might be an open, non-linear and exponentially chaotic system is increasingly behind us. We seem to have reached a point where the market is re-imagined as the primary mechanism for the validation of truth. Since markets themselves are increasingly turning into algorithmic structures, the only useful knowledge today is supposed to be algorithmic. At the same time, Bernard Stiegler argues that only a diversity of local knowledge, engaged in a genuine contention of standpoints, possesses the wealth and the strength to produce genuine leaps. Here, differences generated, are different, in that there is no ready language to account for and incorporate them, and so they are marked initially by intensities and thresholds rather than conceptual categories. They act as sources of illumination that enable a visualisation of the space in which distinct enactments are seen and felt as having a relationship with each other. As these differences within the differences are themselves situated ambiguously between the captive architectures of both subjugation and “freedom”, what political technical interventions hold out possibilities for new ways of looking, reading, and deciding. By steering improbable connections toward new instances of gathering and collaboration, a concrete imagination is made available to those otherwise increasingly uncertain as to how to act in an increasing precarious world.

How might we coax such connections along? How do we take on the challenge of enabling a more viable life for urban residents, when the very terms of viability may differ, may entail different maneuvers and emphases. How might such an exigent multiplicity “sing” in concert?

Speakers

Anne Alombert

Cristina Cielo

Giacomo Gilmozi

Emma Shaw Crane

Irene Peano

Moderator

AbdouMaliq Simone