Atmospheric Urban Geopolitics

Abstract

This chapter results from discussions at the John Harvard colloquia around the felt quality of urban place and the ‘complex entanglements between space and subjectivity’ that shape our experience of cities. It uses atmosphere as a lens to show how the felt experience of impending violence is a crucial empirical level at which urban politics and conflict ought to be understood. More widely, researching urban geopolitics atmospherically reinforces the link between literature in urban geopolitics with a more general view of urbanism. The chapter responds to that gap by attempting to look beyond the physical and infrastructural manifestations of urban conflict and to account, instead, for the felt qualities of these processes. Such an atmospheric approach, authors argue, allows readers to bring into sight (and into dialogue) a constellation of human and nonhuman actors, with which they can envisage different urban political maps.