IN-PERSON Barcelona. Section A
Abstract
Who are cities designed for? The comfort of the body is understood to inform urban planning but the body implied in architectural design is highly circumscribed and entrenched power relations structure the discourse that determines how bodies inhabit space and whose comfort matters in the provision of housing. In this paper I will propose a theoretical framework for interrogating what I am calling ‘the politics of comfort’ in the context of urban pasts and futures with a particular emphasis on how the design of houses informs what it means to be human. Drawing on posthuman theory and the philosophy of orientation, I will examine the potential for developing a new approach to how we inhabit the space of the city that does not presuppose the body or presume the human.
Debra Benita Shaw is a Reader in Cultural Theory at the University of East London. She is the author of Technoculture: The Key Concepts (2009), Posthuman Urbanism (2018) and co-editor of Radical Space (2016). She has published numerous papers on urban culture, concepts of home and posthuman theory and has also writes about science fiction (Women, Science & Fiction, 2000 and Women, Science and Fiction Revisited, 2023). She is currently working on a book that explores how concepts of comfort inform the politics of housing and structure ideas about what it means to be human.
3:30 pm - 5:00 pm
Monday 15th July, 2024