Lindsay Bremner
Biographic Data
| ID | 158455 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lindsay Bremner |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lindsay |
| FAMILY NAME | Bremner |
| SIGNATURE | BREMNER L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Westminster |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7687-8325 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 93 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Sensing Chennai from the air with Barad
This paper offers a relational strategy for approaching the urban as elemental, focusing on the airs of Chennai in South India. It contributes to the field of elemental urbanism, which is concerned with how earthly forces pervade and come to matter in and shape contemporary cities. It approaches these questions through a performative, Baradian methodology, whose analytical starting point is the author’s immersion in Chennai’s airs, from which wha…
Contested Good City Stories From a North Chennai Littoral
This article investigates the wilful destruction of Ennore Creek, a littoral wetland system in north Chennai, Tamil Nadu, by a series of shifting statist good city imaginaries expressed in plans, research reports, environmental impact assessments, government orders and court judgements. We show that these media built a powerful scaffold of legally sanctioned and scientifically backed good city narratives that reformulated the creek as a sacrifici…
Counter‐Mapping, Counter‐Histories, and Insurgencies of Subjugated Knowledges in the Fisher Struggle for Ennore Creek
The Ennore wetlands in North Chennai, India were once dense with diverse habitats and interwoven histories. Many of these histories began to unravel from the 1960s onwards, when state‐sponsored heavy industry began encroaching into and polluting the wetlands. Local fishers, whose lives, livelihoods, and cultural worlds were ignored by these changes, fought back in a campaign to reclaim and restore the wetlands. This paper analyses how the Save En…
Anthropocene Desire Lines: A Coal Story
In this experimental visual essay, we follow an imaginary lump of coal across space and time from its Gondwanan beginnings, through its extraction from the Talcher Coalfields in Odisha in India, combustion in a thermal power plant in Ennore in Tamil Nadu, and into the future through its multitude of postcombustion afterlives. We do so through the figure of ‘anthropocene desire lines’, which draws on Karen Coelho’s idea of ‘water lines’ (Coelho 20…
Monsoon as method
This paper is a reflective discussion of the research method developed by a small research team over a 5-year period as it intra-acted with the south Asian monsoon in three south/southeast Asian cities. It reflects on how the team's practice was transformed from being research on or about the monsoon as a discrete unit of analysis, to research in the monsoon and with its agential materiality. The paper first outlines the theoretical resources fro…
Introduction: Thinking with the Monsoon
This GeoHumanities forum arose out of three symposia convened by the European Research Council funded project, Monsoon Assemblages over a three-year period: Monsoon [+ other] Airs, held in April 2017, Monsoon [+ other] Waters in April 2018, and Monsoon [+ other] Grounds in March 2019. The ambitions of the symposia were to develop new intersectional understandings of monsoonal esthetics, agencies, epistemologies and ontologies, and to engender mon…
Sedimentary Ways
This paper is a thought experiment to attune to the geo-physical and geo-political materialities of sediment, a terra-aqueous substance produced when the earth's continental surfaces intra-act with the atmosphere and are chemically transformed by it. The paper is framed by questions of how to engage more closely with the dynamics of earth systems and of how social and political agency emerges alongside earth forces. Sediment is important to such …
Sedimentary logics and the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh
This paper adopts a geosocial approach to sociopolitical research by thinking with sediment as a forceful mode of terraqueous mobility driven by interactions between dynamic earth systems inflected by social processes. It demonstrates that sediment is an active and vital state of matter, with the potential to erupt into and disrupt human politics. Unpacking sediment as a form of movement challenges assumptions of the earth as a stable platform on…
Planning the 2015 Chennai floods
This paper approaches the floods of 2015 in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, as the consequence of policies, plans and procedures that, over many years, had erased monsoon water and wetness from the city and its imaginary. In order to do this, it examines a number of plans that authorized spatial development in Chennai from the early 20th century onwards. It approaches them as urban cosmograms, in which heterogeneous entities were accommodated, congea…
Thinking Architecture with an Indian Ocean Aquapelago
This article takes up the charge of thinking architecture with one of the Indian Ocean’s central coral atoll formations, the Maldives archipelago. It is undertaken as a critique of the concept of the archipelago as deployed in architecture since the 1970s. Architects have used the archipelago as a metaphoric metageographical concept based on a land–sea binary, to conceive of architecture as autonomous from its environments. This permits the disci…
Observations on the Concept of the Aquapelago Occasioned by Researching the Maldives
In my recent work on the Maldives (Bremner, 2016), I drew on Hayward's notion of the aquapelago (Hayward 2012a, 2012b) to theorise the Maldives and to develop a new metageographical concept for architecture in today's globalised world. In this short contribution to Shima debates, I will highlight my observations on the Maldives and the concept of the aquapelago occasioned by this work
Fluid ontologies in the search for MH370
This paper gives an account of the disappearance of Malaysian Airways Flight MH370 into the southern Indian Ocean in March 2014 and analyses the rare glimpses into remote ocean space this incident opened up. It follows the tenuous clues as to where the aeroplane might have come to rest after it disappeared from radar screens – seven satellite pings, hundreds of pieces of floating debris and six underwater sonic recordings – as ways of entering in…
The Political Life of Rising Acid Mine Water
Folded ocean: The spatial transformation of the Indian Ocean world
This paper presents experimental research on the Indian Ocean being undertaken within the context of what has been termed architecture's contemporary geographic turn. It investigates how oceanic practices and protocols fold into spatial and architectural products on land, figuring both sea- and land-based logics. It frames this ocean through three tropes: as contact zone, with which are associated ideas of creolisation, transnationalism, entangle…
Featured Graphic. Taxi Hand Signals in Johannesburg
Towards a minor global architecture at Lamu, Kenya
Major accounts of globalisation from a built environment perspective bring global cities and celebrity architects into focus. In this paper, I resist this and give an account of globalisation from the perspective of one of its minor architectures. A minor architecture is not a minor architectural language, but rather one that a minority constructs within a major language, encoding it differently and subverting its prevailing myths. The paper inve…
Bounded spaces: Demographic anxieties in post-apartheid Johannesburg
This paper attempts to shape a way of thinking about race, crime and the increasing privatisation and enclosure of space in contemporary Johannesburg, through the concept of terror. It examines the ways in which terror fuses with the figure of the criminal to create a city of new, post‐apartheid exclusions and segregations. It argues that the figures of the criminal, the boundary wall and the house are the symbolic objects of the new city, throug…
Reframing Township Space: The Kliptown Project
Research Article| September 01 2004 Reframing Township Space: The Kliptown Project Lindsay Bremner Lindsay Bremner Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (2004) 16 (3): 521–531. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-16-3-521 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Lindsay Bremner; Reframing Township Space: The Kliptown Project. Public Culture 1 September 2004;…
Reinventing the Johannesburg inner city
Development and resistance: The lessons for the planners of Phola Park
Space and the Nation: Three Texts on Aldo Rossi
In this paper the spatial dimensions of political practice and the historical dimensions of architectural practice are examined. The author argues that these two practices intersect when, in the life of a city and a nation, time is transformed into space. The productivity of death in this regard is explored. In developing this argument, reference is made to the works and writings of Regis Debray and Aldo Rossi, as well as events in the recent pol…
Reinventing the Johannesburg inner city
Towards a minor global architecture at Lamu, Kenya
Major accounts of globalisation from a built environment perspective bring global cities and celebrity architects into focus. In this paper, I resist this and give an account of globalisation from the perspective of one of its minor architectures. A minor architecture is not a minor architectural language, but rather one that a minority constructs within a major language, encoding it differently and subverting its prevailing myths. The paper inve…
Bounded spaces: Demographic anxieties in post-apartheid Johannesburg
This paper attempts to shape a way of thinking about race, crime and the increasing privatisation and enclosure of space in contemporary Johannesburg, through the concept of terror. It examines the ways in which terror fuses with the figure of the criminal to create a city of new, post‐apartheid exclusions and segregations. It argues that the figures of the criminal, the boundary wall and the house are the symbolic objects of the new city, throug…
Sedimentary logics and the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh
This paper adopts a geosocial approach to sociopolitical research by thinking with sediment as a forceful mode of terraqueous mobility driven by interactions between dynamic earth systems inflected by social processes. It demonstrates that sediment is an active and vital state of matter, with the potential to erupt into and disrupt human politics. Unpacking sediment as a form of movement challenges assumptions of the earth as a stable platform on…
Sedimentary Ways
This paper is a thought experiment to attune to the geo-physical and geo-political materialities of sediment, a terra-aqueous substance produced when the earth's continental surfaces intra-act with the atmosphere and are chemically transformed by it. The paper is framed by questions of how to engage more closely with the dynamics of earth systems and of how social and political agency emerges alongside earth forces. Sediment is important to such …
Fluid ontologies in the search for MH370
This paper gives an account of the disappearance of Malaysian Airways Flight MH370 into the southern Indian Ocean in March 2014 and analyses the rare glimpses into remote ocean space this incident opened up. It follows the tenuous clues as to where the aeroplane might have come to rest after it disappeared from radar screens – seven satellite pings, hundreds of pieces of floating debris and six underwater sonic recordings – as ways of entering in…
Planning the 2015 Chennai floods
This paper approaches the floods of 2015 in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, as the consequence of policies, plans and procedures that, over many years, had erased monsoon water and wetness from the city and its imaginary. In order to do this, it examines a number of plans that authorized spatial development in Chennai from the early 20th century onwards. It approaches them as urban cosmograms, in which heterogeneous entities were accommodated, congea…
Folded ocean: The spatial transformation of the Indian Ocean world
This paper presents experimental research on the Indian Ocean being undertaken within the context of what has been termed architecture's contemporary geographic turn. It investigates how oceanic practices and protocols fold into spatial and architectural products on land, figuring both sea- and land-based logics. It frames this ocean through three tropes: as contact zone, with which are associated ideas of creolisation, transnationalism, entangle…
Reframing Township Space: The Kliptown Project
Research Article| September 01 2004 Reframing Township Space: The Kliptown Project Lindsay Bremner Lindsay Bremner Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (2004) 16 (3): 521–531. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-16-3-521 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Lindsay Bremner; Reframing Township Space: The Kliptown Project. Public Culture 1 September 2004;…
Thinking Architecture with an Indian Ocean Aquapelago
This article takes up the charge of thinking architecture with one of the Indian Ocean’s central coral atoll formations, the Maldives archipelago. It is undertaken as a critique of the concept of the archipelago as deployed in architecture since the 1970s. Architects have used the archipelago as a metaphoric metageographical concept based on a land–sea binary, to conceive of architecture as autonomous from its environments. This permits the disci…
Monsoon as method
This paper is a reflective discussion of the research method developed by a small research team over a 5-year period as it intra-acted with the south Asian monsoon in three south/southeast Asian cities. It reflects on how the team's practice was transformed from being research on or about the monsoon as a discrete unit of analysis, to research in the monsoon and with its agential materiality. The paper first outlines the theoretical resources fro…
Introduction: Thinking with the Monsoon
This GeoHumanities forum arose out of three symposia convened by the European Research Council funded project, Monsoon Assemblages over a three-year period: Monsoon [+ other] Airs, held in April 2017, Monsoon [+ other] Waters in April 2018, and Monsoon [+ other] Grounds in March 2019. The ambitions of the symposia were to develop new intersectional understandings of monsoonal esthetics, agencies, epistemologies and ontologies, and to engender mon…
Development and resistance: The lessons for the planners of Phola Park
Space and the Nation: Three Texts on Aldo Rossi
In this paper the spatial dimensions of political practice and the historical dimensions of architectural practice are examined. The author argues that these two practices intersect when, in the life of a city and a nation, time is transformed into space. The productivity of death in this regard is explored. In developing this argument, reference is made to the works and writings of Regis Debray and Aldo Rossi, as well as events in the recent pol…
Reinventing the Johannesburg inner city
Bounded spaces: Demographic anxieties in post-apartheid Johannesburg
This paper attempts to shape a way of thinking about race, crime and the increasing privatisation and enclosure of space in contemporary Johannesburg, through the concept of terror. It examines the ways in which terror fuses with the figure of the criminal to create a city of new, post‐apartheid exclusions and segregations. It argues that the figures of the criminal, the boundary wall and the house are the symbolic objects of the new city, throug…
Reframing Township Space: The Kliptown Project
Research Article| September 01 2004 Reframing Township Space: The Kliptown Project Lindsay Bremner Lindsay Bremner Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (2004) 16 (3): 521–531. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-16-3-521 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Lindsay Bremner; Reframing Township Space: The Kliptown Project. Public Culture 1 September 2004;…
The Political Life of Rising Acid Mine Water
Folded ocean: The spatial transformation of the Indian Ocean world
This paper presents experimental research on the Indian Ocean being undertaken within the context of what has been termed architecture's contemporary geographic turn. It investigates how oceanic practices and protocols fold into spatial and architectural products on land, figuring both sea- and land-based logics. It frames this ocean through three tropes: as contact zone, with which are associated ideas of creolisation, transnationalism, entangle…
Featured Graphic. Taxi Hand Signals in Johannesburg
Towards a minor global architecture at Lamu, Kenya
Major accounts of globalisation from a built environment perspective bring global cities and celebrity architects into focus. In this paper, I resist this and give an account of globalisation from the perspective of one of its minor architectures. A minor architecture is not a minor architectural language, but rather one that a minority constructs within a major language, encoding it differently and subverting its prevailing myths. The paper inve…
Fluid ontologies in the search for MH370
This paper gives an account of the disappearance of Malaysian Airways Flight MH370 into the southern Indian Ocean in March 2014 and analyses the rare glimpses into remote ocean space this incident opened up. It follows the tenuous clues as to where the aeroplane might have come to rest after it disappeared from radar screens – seven satellite pings, hundreds of pieces of floating debris and six underwater sonic recordings – as ways of entering in…
Thinking Architecture with an Indian Ocean Aquapelago
This article takes up the charge of thinking architecture with one of the Indian Ocean’s central coral atoll formations, the Maldives archipelago. It is undertaken as a critique of the concept of the archipelago as deployed in architecture since the 1970s. Architects have used the archipelago as a metaphoric metageographical concept based on a land–sea binary, to conceive of architecture as autonomous from its environments. This permits the disci…
Observations on the Concept of the Aquapelago Occasioned by Researching the Maldives
In my recent work on the Maldives (Bremner, 2016), I drew on Hayward's notion of the aquapelago (Hayward 2012a, 2012b) to theorise the Maldives and to develop a new metageographical concept for architecture in today's globalised world. In this short contribution to Shima debates, I will highlight my observations on the Maldives and the concept of the aquapelago occasioned by this work
Sedimentary Ways
This paper is a thought experiment to attune to the geo-physical and geo-political materialities of sediment, a terra-aqueous substance produced when the earth's continental surfaces intra-act with the atmosphere and are chemically transformed by it. The paper is framed by questions of how to engage more closely with the dynamics of earth systems and of how social and political agency emerges alongside earth forces. Sediment is important to such …
Sedimentary logics and the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh
This paper adopts a geosocial approach to sociopolitical research by thinking with sediment as a forceful mode of terraqueous mobility driven by interactions between dynamic earth systems inflected by social processes. It demonstrates that sediment is an active and vital state of matter, with the potential to erupt into and disrupt human politics. Unpacking sediment as a form of movement challenges assumptions of the earth as a stable platform on…
Planning the 2015 Chennai floods
This paper approaches the floods of 2015 in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, as the consequence of policies, plans and procedures that, over many years, had erased monsoon water and wetness from the city and its imaginary. In order to do this, it examines a number of plans that authorized spatial development in Chennai from the early 20th century onwards. It approaches them as urban cosmograms, in which heterogeneous entities were accommodated, congea…
Introduction: Thinking with the Monsoon
This GeoHumanities forum arose out of three symposia convened by the European Research Council funded project, Monsoon Assemblages over a three-year period: Monsoon [+ other] Airs, held in April 2017, Monsoon [+ other] Waters in April 2018, and Monsoon [+ other] Grounds in March 2019. The ambitions of the symposia were to develop new intersectional understandings of monsoonal esthetics, agencies, epistemologies and ontologies, and to engender mon…
Anthropocene Desire Lines: A Coal Story
In this experimental visual essay, we follow an imaginary lump of coal across space and time from its Gondwanan beginnings, through its extraction from the Talcher Coalfields in Odisha in India, combustion in a thermal power plant in Ennore in Tamil Nadu, and into the future through its multitude of postcombustion afterlives. We do so through the figure of ‘anthropocene desire lines’, which draws on Karen Coelho’s idea of ‘water lines’ (Coelho 20…
Monsoon as method
This paper is a reflective discussion of the research method developed by a small research team over a 5-year period as it intra-acted with the south Asian monsoon in three south/southeast Asian cities. It reflects on how the team's practice was transformed from being research on or about the monsoon as a discrete unit of analysis, to research in the monsoon and with its agential materiality. The paper first outlines the theoretical resources fro…
Contested Good City Stories From a North Chennai Littoral
This article investigates the wilful destruction of Ennore Creek, a littoral wetland system in north Chennai, Tamil Nadu, by a series of shifting statist good city imaginaries expressed in plans, research reports, environmental impact assessments, government orders and court judgements. We show that these media built a powerful scaffold of legally sanctioned and scientifically backed good city narratives that reformulated the creek as a sacrifici…
Counter‐Mapping, Counter‐Histories, and Insurgencies of Subjugated Knowledges in the Fisher Struggle for Ennore Creek
The Ennore wetlands in North Chennai, India were once dense with diverse habitats and interwoven histories. Many of these histories began to unravel from the 1960s onwards, when state‐sponsored heavy industry began encroaching into and polluting the wetlands. Local fishers, whose lives, livelihoods, and cultural worlds were ignored by these changes, fought back in a campaign to reclaim and restore the wetlands. This paper analyses how the Save En…
Sensing Chennai from the air with Barad
This paper offers a relational strategy for approaching the urban as elemental, focusing on the airs of Chennai in South India. It contributes to the field of elemental urbanism, which is concerned with how earthly forces pervade and come to matter in and shape contemporary cities. It approaches these questions through a performative, Baradian methodology, whose analytical starting point is the author’s immersion in Chennai’s airs, from which wha…
Sociology (12 works) · Political science (11 works) · Geography (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Politics (7 works) · Water Governance and Infrastructure (7 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Archaeology (5 works) · Geology (5 works)