The potential politics of the porous city

Dados Bibliográficos

ID4476492
AutoresTheresa Enright (0000-0002-8949-2499, University of Toronto, autor correspondente), Nathan Olmstead (University of Toronto), Nathan A Olmstead (0000-0002-1766-6533, University of Toronto)
Ano2023
Volume41
Fascículo2
Páginas295-309
Data de publicação2023-04-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoEnvironment and Planning D Society and Space (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0263-7758 • E-ISSN: 1472-3433
EditoraSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/02637758231170635
PMID37143696
OpenAlexW4367178751
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas8
Referências citadas41

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

Geotechnical engineering · Political science · Politics · Porosity · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Urban Planning and Governance · Water Governance and Infrastructure · Geology