Abstract
This paper is about the relationship between cities and brains: it charts the back‐and‐forth between the hectic, stressful lives of urban citizens, and a psychological and neurobiological literature that claims to make such stress both visible and knowable. But beyond such genealogical labour, the paper also asks: what can a sociology concerned with the effects of ‘biosocial’ agencies take from a scientific literature on the urban brain? What might sociology even contribute to that literature, in its turn? To investigate these possibilities, the paper centres on the emergence and description of what it calls ‘the Neuropolis’ – a term it deploys to hold together both an intellectual and scientific figure and a real, physical enclosure. The Neuropolis is an image of the city embedded in neuropsychological concepts and histories, but it also describes an embodied set of (sometimes pathological) relations and effects that take places between cities and the people who live in them. At the heart of the paper is an argument that finding a way to thread these phenomena together might open up new paths for thinking about ‘good’ life in the contemporary city. Pushing at this claim, the paper argues that mapping the relations, histories, spaces, and people held together by this term is a vital task for the future of urban sociology.
Highlights
In October 2012, Alison Abbott, one of Nature’s regular editorial writers, published a News Feature in the journal, under the title ‘Stress in the City: Urban Decay’ (Abbott 2012)
The article pointed out that while many of us intuit a connection between cities, stress and mental health, recent research has started to concretize this link: ‘scientists are [] tackling the question head on, using functional brain imaging and digital monitoring to see how people living in cities and rural areas difer in the way that their brains process stressful situations’ (2012: 163)
Abbott was referring to work from the group of Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, director of the Central Institute for Mental Health in Mannheim: a paper from this group, published in Nature, showed how people who had been brought up in cities, or who lived in cities, had distinctive neurological responses to a stressful stimulus (Lederbogen et al, 2011)
Summary
In October 2012, Alison Abbott, one of Nature’s regular editorial writers, published a News Feature in the journal, under the title ‘Stress in the City: Urban Decay’ (Abbott 2012). This marks an important transition point: if, a century ago, intellectuals argued that cures for the ills inherent in urban existence required a focus on pathological urban immigrants, the prescription today is much more likely to be about the presence of green spaces, and the density of particular areas, rates of poverty and welfare dependency, the preponderance of loneliness, and so on.3 Research on the urban brain, that is to say, does not attempt to know and manage the incidence of mental disorder in the city; it is part of a broad, heterogeneous trend of thought that is bringing cities into existence as neural phenomena, and spatial ones.
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