What are the limits of the planet in Planetary Urbanisation? An exploration of the final frontier to the city

Keywords: planetary urbanism, urban theory, outer space
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 37

Abstract

In 2017, a New York based architectural design firm developed a piece of ‘speculative’ architecture called Analemma. This ‘building’ is suspended from an asteroid, and effectively dangles approximately 1000ft above the Earth’s surface. The highest point of the building above the ground would be around 32km, and it could move in a geosynchronous orbit, allowing the luxury accommodation situated nearer the Earth to view entire continents in just one day. While clearly a piece of speculative urbanism that has been modelled on science fiction discourses, it points towards an inconvenient truth about the limits (or perhaps lack thereof) of one of the most obdurately present urban debates of the last decade, namely planetary urbanisation (Brenner and Schmidt, 2010).

Critiques of this seemingly all-pervasive narrative with post-colonial (Roy, 2011) and cosmopolitan (Millington, 2016) hues have articulated how it sees the urban as dominating space in toto, thereby negating any sense of an ‘outside’ (Jazeel, 2018). But if (outer) space really is the final frontier, will we now have to expand our epistemological understandings towards an extra-planetary urbanisation? This paper seeks to exhaust the limits of the planetary urbanisation debate by taking it beyond the planet and into what is perhaps the ultimate ‘other’ of the cold, dark, lifeless reaches of outer space. Via a cultural geographic approach that foregrounds contemporary debates around atmosphere, mobility and verticality, the paper argues thinking the urban in outer space has the potentially to radically shift how we conceptualise the city back here on Earth.