Abstract
In this article we explore how the English post-industrial canal has gone from enclosed and abandoned urban ruin to thriving but contested urban landscape. We contend that canals deserve closer social scientific attention in and of themselves but also as a creative entry point for understanding the instabilities and ambivalences of contemporary urban life. We probe at three dynamics in the English context: uneven cycles of attention from state, capital and civil society that ‘revealed’ the canal over the course of the 20th century; how the contemporary canalscape is made ‘from below’ and how its unique materiality as a stretched, socio-natural waterway has been mobilised, latterly, in biopolitical ways. We note how the cultivated meaning of these previously enclosed industrial relics is now deeply entwined with the mood and mobility of urban dwellers. Methodologically, we excavate these three dimensions through a synthesis of phenomenological attunement and analysis of historical, literary and social scientific accounts.
Highlights
I met her on a bench, on the bank of the canal, one of the canals, for our town boasts two, though I never knew which was which
Using the revelation of the English urban canal as a case study, our paper has traced how different legibilities and intensities of order get woven through the urban landscape generating ambivalent and uncertain subject-object relations
We saw how industrial canalisation in the UK involved a harnessing of nature to aid capitalist modernisation
Summary
I met her on a bench, on the bank of the canal, one of the canals, for our town boasts two, though I never knew which was which.
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