INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH 1

DOI:10.1111/1468-2427.12875

— (NON)URBAN HUMANS: Questions for a

Research Agenda (the Work the Urban Could Do)
ABDOUMALIQ SIMONE

Abstract
This interventions essay deploys the notion of the (non)urban human to address
the conundrums associated with identifying spaces, operations and entities outside of
urbanization’s planetary encompassment. In the piece, the objective of which is to call
for a programme of prospective research collaborations, it seeks to explore domains of
intersection among that which appears ‘left out’ of urbanization’s purported advantages,
that whose time has yet to come, and forms of the human that exceed the possibilities of
self-reflexive consciousness and free will. The essay draws upon the temporalities, rhythms,
spatial arrangements and sensoria generated through histories of blackness and ‘natural
worlds’ and their interactions, to posit extensionality––a dispersal of bodies and their
capacities into more reciprocal and mutual enactments with the earthly surrounds––as a
generative by-product of extended urbanization.

Introduction
One of the most productive strands in contemporary urban research has been
the focus on extended urbanization. Here, urbanization not only becomes more
extensive as an ongoing, increasingly dominant process of spatial production and
realignment, with a coherent set of constitutive dynamics, but also extends itself into a
wider multiplicity of situations and histories (Brenner, 2014). It offers a particular
working out of the dilemmas, tipping points and conjunctures settlements are faced
with, and this working out entails various equations of subsumption, adaptation,
erasure, remaking, conciliation and improvisation. Urbanization is then something that
not only spreads out as a function of its own internal operations, but is something
contributed to through an intensely differentiated process of encounter, enabling it to
change gears and operate through a wider range of appearances and instantiations
(McGee and Greenberg, 2002; Monte-Mór, 2014; Keil, 2018; Schmid, 2018).
In this way, extended urbanization takes on all kinds of dispositions: Iowa
corn and soy fields that have become hi-tech and largely depopulated factory floors,
Amazonian mining-boom cities that mushroomed and whose populations then dispersed
across elongated yet largely ghost-like municipalities, the vast hinterlands of Delhi and
Kolkata whose built environments are constantly being recomposed, or the transport
and logistical corridors of West and East Africa that amplify and accelerate historical
movements of people and goods––all are intensely operationalized landscapes widely
articulated with diverse mechanisms of circulation (Adams, 2018).
Yet, if urbanization proceeds through the appropriation and deployment of
multiple logics of spatial production and articulation as the very means to remake and
extend capitalist accumulation, what possibilities are there for engendering multiple
forms of human life not measured against each other? If urbanization is being composed
through the interplay of a wider range of processes and sites, to what extent is it still
possible to talk about the ‘human’ as that self-reflecting subject that inhabits the urban?
Is there not a more extensive repertoire of bodies and subjects that are the consequences
of such extensivity? And what do these bodies look like, and how do they operate? What
might be a form of the human that stands aside, both articulated and detached from the
ways in which the urban proceeds to encompass seemingly everything?
This work has emerged from collective discussions among the senior team of the Urban Institute: Vanesa Castan
Broto, Michele Lancione, Simon Marvin, Beth Perry, Jonathan Silver and Aidan While.
© 2020 Urban Research Publications Limited
 INTERVENTIONS2

In this essay, by foregrounding the possibilities of an urban yet to arrive and, at

the same time already reaching its limits in terms of geological, atmospheric and human
life implications, we posit the notion of the (non)urban human. Through this designation
we seek to imagine spaces of inhabitation and becoming that exist within the urban yet
are not fully apprehendable by it. What kinds of spaces and inhabitants are emerging
together within this extensiveness of urbanization but not fully recognizable by it?
We suggest that this (non)urban human concerns ways of human life extending
itself through and with the earth, in diverse configurations of sense and embodiment.
Instead of the human reflecting an individuated consolidation of capacity, will and
self-reflection, the (non)urban is a dispersal of those features through the body
extending itself to other figurations of life, as if lending a hand, opening itself up to the
metabolisms and sensibilities of multiple entities and forms of liveliness. This is what
Fanon (1963) would call more-than-conscious bodies in relation. Our contribution is to
think through such extensionality from a re-engagement with the refrains of so-called
‘natural worlds’––deserts, seas and forests––and from histories of blackness, where the
endurance of Black life was anchored within intricate ecologies of nurturance, tending
and interweaving.
The notion of the (non)urban human is used here as a heuristic device, rather
than a definitive category. It points to possibilities of interruption, temporal glitches
(Berlant, 2016) and provisional detachments in the processual generation of urban space, in
urbanization’s seemingly self-generated expansiveness and ability to encompass and enfold
everything that exists. While urban areas across the world have incorporated multiple
ontologies of inhabitation (Graham and Penny, 2014; Alexiades and Peluso, 2015; Escobar,
2016), the normative figuration of the human as an individuated, self-conscious entity
has largely been generalized in terms of the mechanics of territorial governance, through
individualized statuses of belonging and accountability. But as new forms of territory
emerge, what kinds of sensoria and ways of paying attention will come to the fore or be
deployed that might be able to keep open the possibilities of an urban life less destructive,
less unequal and thus potentially sustainable past the climatic impasses currently at work?
To start this discussion, I begin with a minor vignette of a form of people tending
to each other beyond the confines of language and within an environment at the height
of a civil war, where crossing from different parts of the city was fraught with difficulties.
There was a small bar near a famous all-night bakery in Treichville, Abidjan, where in
the mid-1990s restless autodidacts, prostitutes, soldiers, preachers, brokers and drivers
who made their living crossing those tense borders of a city polarized in almost every
way imaginable would pass a time organized around the availability of fresh bread and
pastries. Everyone knew that no one could be trusted nor was likely to be anything
approximating the self-image they ‘put on the table’, but it did not matter. So nights
were passed in feverish speech, rattling the thick, lugubrious night with imperatives
that never seemed to run out of steam.
As the proprietor’s refrigerator would constantly break down, there wasn’t
even cold beer to add calm to rampant speculations as to what those gathered could
potentially do with and to each other. At times, the convocation would seem to actually
speak in tongues, completely indifferent to whether anyone could linguistically
understand each other, and it was in these moments that deliberations seemed to take
on a life of their own, with the clientele signing makeshift agreements on soggy napkins,
exchanging money, telephone numbers, car keys and wallet-size photos. And as the
smells of the freshly baked bread wafted along the pre-dawn avenue, the crowd would
cross to the other side and in silence assemble in an orderly queue to take the bread.
Within this gathering were the seeds of a method for trying to piece together a life worth
living beyond the demonstration of human capability or sense, and such gatherings will
be increasingly important as the locus of figuring out how to live across the multiple
extensions of the urban in forms that may not have an available lingua franca.
 (NON)URBAN HUMANS 3

A heuristics of the (non)urban human

Whatever viable figure of the human might emerge in the long run will ensue at
the intersection of three forms of contemporary non-presence, but a non-presence that
may be more than what it appears. In other words, these are the dimensions of urban
life that concern that which is to end (an end which could itself be invented), that which
is left out, and that which is yet to arrive. Yet, instead of pointing to temporalities and
spaces set apart, that which is left out points to a future that is already here, and that
which is over or excluded perhaps has not yet arrived (Nancy, 2008; Povinelli, 2016).
Let’s take these dimensions, one by one. First, the (non)urban human refers
to persons kept out of the locus of free will and enactment that the urban implicitly
promises, such as the capability to chart out a life trajectory as a self-reflexive individual
endowed with a basic set of protections and rights. From the psychiatrically vulnerable
homeless crowding the downtown streets of San Francisco, the thousands of bodies
packed like herds into prison cells in Quezon City, the hundreds of thousands of Syrian
refugees in the Zaatari camp outside of Amman, the micro-territories to which youth
are incarcerated in Englewood, Chicago, those constantly evicted from makeshift
settlements, drug addicts living in the tunnels of Bucharest, to police executions of
Black folk doing ordinary things in the US, the world is replete with bodies unable to
participate fully in the purported benefits of urban existence.
Secondly, the (non)urban human refers to a form of life yet to come or, alternately
and simultaneously, a form of human enactment that not yet possesses a mode of visibility
or a vernacular to be sufficiently recognizable. Here the (non)urban human is not that
which exists in a stabilized space external to the urban, such as the rural or peripheral,
since the designations of such an outside have been substantially de-stabilized by the
extensiveness of urbanization processes. The (non)urban is rather that which exists
outside the available frames of recognition, as shadow, absence, immanence or spirit,
but which could, sometime in the future, turn into something else.
Thirdly, the (non)urban human is a means of designating a mediation among
three dimensions of the urban: (1) the urban as the concrete manifestation of the human
capacity of continuous self-invention; urbanization––as the continuous rearrangement
and intersection of things––exemplifies the human as something without any
fundamental nature, as something open-ended, and where the ‘end’ of the human is
itself indicative of such open-endedness, i.e. the capacity of the human to decide for
itself the terms of its own finitude and of the fundamental distinction between life
and nonlife (Povinelli, 2017); (2) the urban as the very limit of that very capacity of
continuous becoming; since the implications of urbanization posit the real possibilities
of human extinction; and (3) the urban as a concrete platform for the unhuman––for a
form of inhabitation that does not rely upon the constitution of particular subjects––but
rather ‘strange’ assemblages of force, technicity, bodies and liveliness (Colebrook, 2014).
Here the unhuman refers to entities that defy comprehension, the ways in
which djinns, monsters, demons and figures of pestilence have long inhabited urban
space. In Jakarta, for example, Facebook pages are full of videos documenting the
siting of hantu, the walking dead. No matter how settled and calculable urban life has
become, the presence of the unhuman introduces possibilities and anxieties around
other perspectives through which human life is actively viewed. As such, the urban can
express the ways in which the human has always already been unhuman (Colebrook,
2015; Weinstein and Colebrook, 2018). As Thacker (2010) points out, unhuman life is
brought into the body politic––not only to regulate that which is considered dangerous
to the larger order of things, but also to animate the normative notions of life itself
through its capacity to perturb and provoke. Yet it is excluded from the status of the
living.
All three facets––self-invention, the limits of invention and the unhuman––sit
uneasily with each other. They can be conceptually applied to all of those who are left
 INTERVENTIONS4

out of human fruition and urban promises, as well as the limitations of how we imagine
what is yet to come. To what extent is the human to come the product of an invention
in the present? How could this invention circumvent the limits of human finitude
signalled by the rampant destruction of the earth as long as so many humans who are
not really considered as such are left out the process of invention, or whose inventions
and finitude do not really count? How would that inclusion take place in a form that is
not simply the reiteration of the primacy of the self-reflecting subject, of a ‘we’ formed
through linguistic solidarity? As the urban extends itself away from the city and its
preoccupations with self-reflexivity, and even the struggle to be fully human, does the
extensiveness of urbanization, its extensions across different landscapes and histories
perhaps signal other forms of human life more distributed across diverse agencies and
sensibilities?
Urban modernities have been reflected in the ways in which space and time have
been organized in rational ways that reflect linear progressions, differentiated functions,
ordered relations of cause and effect, and the configuration of circulatory systems that
placed landscapes, resources and productivity in relationship to each other. Still cities
were haunted by something ‘out there’, beyond the capacity to control, beyond the
ordering of sovereignties that attempted to identify that outside. Beyond the incursions
of potential enemies, disease vectors or wayward natural occurrences, this ‘out there’
pointed to the unanticipated implications of modernity’s own accomplishments. The
capacity of the urban to interrelate different ways of life and materialities generated
unanticipated excesses and trajectories that sometimes escaped the ability of
governments to fold in disorder as an instigation to continuous progress (Pløger, 2008;
Magnussen, 2011). This ‘out there’ came to be represented in forms of life that were not
to be considered fully human.
These conditions are then antecedents for the (non)urban human and for the
prospects of a life that exceeds both the capacity of the urban to individuate life, to
enhance its productivity, and to consider how human life itself might be remade to
insulate it from the adverse conditions that urbanization itself has largely generated.
That which is to come, that which is to be invented, either as new beginning or end, that
which constrains any invention, and that which can be considered left out, removed
from full participation in human life––all intersect in ways that upend clear distinctions
between the inside and out, the urban and non-urban. Yet if these divides persist
in both concept and everyday experience, how do we situate a way of being human
that is something else besides an all-encompassing urbanization––something that
coexists with it in intimate proximity but yet is not of it, neither as contradiction nor
as alternative? Something that remains ‘out there’, of uncertain distance and form. As
urbanization becomes more extensive and extended, it would also seem to be moving
in the direction of an ‘out there’, taking on the risk of the interruptions and glitches to
which Berlant refers.

‘Out there’
One way of thinking about this ‘out there’ is through the temporalities of
blackness, which are potentially important, because they signal the obdurate inclusive
exclusions that are at the heart of modernity––the persistent need to banish and oppress,
no matter the particularities of the individual human histories involved. But these
temporalities also signal a way of existing that stands outside of measured time, that
holds open the abolition of gradated measures of human worth, of calculating who
counts and who doesn’t (Wynter, 2003). In her work on the plots of plantation life as
an integral aspect of an economy of sustenance based on attunements and reciprocities
with the slave quarter’s physical surroundings, Wynter demarcates an interstitial
position through which slaves could demonstrate their humanity differently. McKittrick
(2013) picks this up and extends this practice to the urban centres where tending to
 (NON)URBAN HUMANS 5

the very physicality of bodies and the grit and messiness of streets trafficked by these
bodies generated an economy of sustenance as Blacks were largely kept out of ‘official’
urban life.
The constitution and appropriation of blackness have been at the heart of the
development of modernity in its continued extensions of imperialism and coloniality
(Hanchard, 1999). The capacity of the human to operate according to the maximization
of its position required a notion of free will, of the ability to act freely among otherwise
constraining interdependencies (Hartman, 2007). This freedom necessitated relegating
certain bodies to the status of property, capable of circulating only through the
transactional circuits of economic exchange and valuation (Wynter, 2003; Bogues, 2012).
Yet, as Michele Wright (2015) points out in her work, the inauguration of blackness
ushered in a time that not only progressed in terms of the linear, capitalist temporalities
it facilitated.
Still, modernity, staked on the protracted and relentless constitution of blackness
as the concretization of an unhuman that humans overcome in order to recognize
themselves as free, must continuously demonstrate a capacity to keep blackness in line.
If this unhuman is that vast chasm indifferent to human striving, which is the terror
that would potentially immobilize any sense of free will, to what line is blackness kept
if blackness does not line up with any specific known category? For it is in a world of its
own, ineligible from being a world. That unhuman must be kept close but away. But this
doubled pairing of closeness and distance does not line up (Marriott, 2018).
Urbanity built on antiblackness keeps the expendable, the nothing, close as a
constant reminder of what it is not, as something available to be operated on, lacerated,
extinguished and penetrated. In doing so, such urbanity sets racialized bodies at a
remove, ineligible for the desires and stabilities of that deemed normatively human
(Terrefe, 2018).
But this calculus sets up a necessary inversion. For what becomes removed is
the spatializing of something that is not quite a world, territory, city, landscape or
ecology––something else besides these things, yet close enough to being them to generate
an incessant unease in our ability to secure any clear notion about what a world, a
territory, a city might be. In other words, there is a modality of existence uninhabitable
in any clear terms, yet which is lived in and lived with in ways that defy definitive
judgement or assessments of viability. It is these zones zoned out of categorical policing
that remain ‘out there’ as the remainders of dispossession.
But then what becomes ‘here’ and proximate is the harrowing unease that the
supposed self-sufficiency of the human project, the white project, is insufficient in
its own terms; that it is something that needs always to be propped up. After all, ‘out
there’, beyond the pale, over the hill, on the outskirts, is a life where work doesn’t seem
necessary, where sex is plentiful, where games of chance prevail, where spells are cast,
where a monstrous skill at making something out of nothing endures, no matter how
much it is beaten down (King, 2016).
So closeness entails both the certainty that bodies can be made completely
instrumental and kept in line, but also points to the uncertainty that there is something
else besides this ability to waste and make expendable that burns at the very interior
of standard notions about a coherent, ordered life. And so distance also entails the
certainty that the unhuman, and all the threats that it poses, is something way over there,
far removed from the operations of everyday normative life. At the same time, this ‘out
there’, this place of ‘nothingness’ is also thought to occlude spectacular interweavings
among things, spirits, sensibilities and infrastructures that can only be hinted at,
apprehended with a vague sense of discernment.
There are, of course, attempts to close the gaps between the diffracted sense of
two forms of proximities and two forms of distance. These attempts at closing the gap
take place through the pervasiveness of a culture of valuation and the indeterminacy
 INTERVENTIONS6

that is at the heart of them. Here, attempts to restore the clear hierarchical sense of
things, their ‘proper order’ of distance and proximity, of what lives have to do with each
other, occur through the extending of value production to the entirety of life experience
(Lilly and Papadopoulos, 2014). All life becomes financialized at its very core––flesh,
genetics, language, affect and neurophysiology. The ‘out there’ is then imagined as a
place to be harvested or extracted. The prevailing conceit is that somehow forms of
calculation can be invented that balance the countervailing spatialities of closeness
and distance, as well as the temporalities of the ‘not yet arrived’ that might be already
here, even if this is the ‘end’ of life as we know it or the insurgencies of the not-included.
Here we find the accelerated pursuits of artificial intelligence, gene manipulation and
bio-hacking.
There is another form of the ‘out there’ that is relevant to this discussion,
particularly as it concerns the extensions undertaken by residents faced with rapidly
changing landscapes, as the urban now comes closer to formerly rural areas, where the
extensions of that urban allow other residents to disperse into less labour-intensive and
more affordable conditions while still feeling included in city life.
The hinterlands of many large urban regions in the global South are replete
with the intensive proximities of multiple built environments––industrial estates, golf
courses, upscale gated communities, large tracts of cheap pavilion housing, farm and
grazing lands, waste dumps, squatter settlements, self-constructed migrant hostels and
small factories––all with different life spans. It is difficult to tell a coherent story about
where these landscapes are headed, given the various degrees to which things endure or
disappear. Many residents of these areas with whom we have spoken in our research talk
about the need to extend themselves across different situations, across different ways of
being in these landscapes so as to be exposed to what is really going on. At the same time,
they often hesitate about the prospects of whether or not this is even really possible.
But what this uncertainty does precipitate, even for those with few opportunities and
resources, are practices of collaboration, where different family members and friends
attempt to cover different angles, compare and contrast. Here, extended urbanization
prompts an extension of attention, and of life practices themselves, into more uncertain
surrounds––a remaking of the human sensorium.
At times, the proximity of these disparate built environments would seem to
suggest a mutual shaping and accommodation, that things do respond to each other.
But simultaneously, at other moments, they appear to be completely separate and
insulated worlds, with few contacts and reciprocities. Likewise, in a range of diaspora
communities, dispersal and distance hardly seem to matter. It is as if residents at a far
remove coordinate their lives with the intricacy and determination associated with
being physically close to each other (Appadurai, 2003).
Thus the politics of witnessing––what gets paid attention to and how, witnessing
being not only an act of visual perception, but an embodied, deeply felt taking of
responsibility to things and others––is often enacted in ways that are difficult to trace.
Enacted in ways that are difficult to attribute to a specific economy of attention among
clearly defined actors with clearly defined places of belonging. Rather than seeing
urbanization as contributing to the remaking of the human simply in terms of providing
prostheses, calculative procedures, robotics, artificial intelligence––all very real and
pertinent concerns but ultimately conceived as enhancing the capacities, will and
endurance of the conventionally modern, individualistic human subject––is there
something about the notion of extension that potentially recomposes the human in
other forms?
This is the challenge this intervention poses. It is addressed here by returning to
the familiar tropes of the non-urban, i.e. the so-called ‘natural’ landscapes and worlds,
but viewed as a series of material refrains. Additionally, given the very limitations
urbanization processes exert on these natural landscapes, through climate-change
 (NON)URBAN HUMANS 7

ecocide––where the intensification of human will seems to inevitably burn itself out,
is there something in the long history of blackness––that which has been structurally
denied the full status of the human––that posits important knowledge of new forms of
life in which the human is a participant but of which it is not the centre?
Here, histories of the ways in which Black bodies have extended themselves into
their surrounds––not in the interest of individual or contractual consolidation, such
as in the familiar tropes of freedom and citizenship (Moten, 2018), but in a strategic
detachment from the human and a collective enactment of an unhuman earthly
sensibility––may offer an image of another urban life (Escobar, 2018). If the spatial
products of extended urbanization already make it nearly impossible to discern what
eventually these vast landscapes of disparate built environment will become, why not
then engender many different kinds of stories––empirical, phantasmagoric, mythic,
improvisational––about the very figures of inhabitation? Instead of universal pictures
of citizenship that never really materialize, or rights to the city, or judicious resolutions
for trauma and disenfranchisement, what other kinds of scenarios are being enacted in
those murky interstices where bodies are aligned or remade?

The conceits of calculation

The difficulties in conceiving extensionality as a practice that enables a human
life that is ‘something else besides’ that of a self-aggrandizing, reflexive subject concerns
the ways in which forms of calculation are extended across more and more domains of
everyday life. One such form of calculation is the hegemony of the axiomatic. This refers
to the unquestioned, self-evident and perpetual continuity of capital as the operating
system for human transactions. Long having moved on from simply defining the logic of
economy––the process through which things that are made enter into particular kinds
of use and valuation––capital is the DNA of reproduction, a mathematics that penetrates
into nearly all domains of existence (Gago, 2017). It is aimed at the maximization of
value based on the extensive harvesting of nearly everything as a cheapened resource. In
urban contexts, the degree of capital’s coverage can be witnessed in the generalization of
real estate from land and the built environment to the very affective dimension of human
life (Colebrook, 2011; Saldanha, 2015).
This means that urbanization entails a political economy of land organized
around human inhabitation, but also a political economy of affects and experience,
where humans are not only inhabitants but also marketable resources as purportedly free
subjects. Affects, as the pre-conscious, trans-individual propensities and inclinations of
human bodies to act, to feel, collaborate and decide, become materials to be harvested,
codified and transacted (Moreno, 2018).
What would seem to be one of the key defining features of the human––affect
becoming consciousness––is converted into an extension of the commodity form. It is
aggregated, traded and calculated so as to maximize the powers of pre-emption deployed
by corporations and states. Pre-emption refers to the capacity to shape and intervene
into eventualities no matter what; to deploy eventuality––an uncertain something to
come, a potential for unanticipated transformation that lacks definition––as a tool
within the present. Pre-emption is a way of acting on the present that owes no allegiance
to the agendas or strivings of the past; it is a modality of knowing and acting that need
not respect the integrity of any specific entity, context or circumstance (Massumi, 2007).
Rather, it relies upon perpetual calculation, the running of algorithms to
generate multiple associations of data derived from the proliferation of parameters
across the environment, which question the nature of any entity. Uncertainty, about
what things are, how they are assembled, and what they are capable of doing, is brought
within the present as a means of constantly hedging and leveraging the potentialities
of various combinations of action to generate specific dispositions of events (Konings,
2018). In other words, as urbanization processes are organized not simply around the
 INTERVENTIONS8

maximization of ground rent or spatial fixes and platforms for circulating capital, but
on maximizing the productivity of uncertainty itself, the very notion of the human is
altered as well.
Here, the archives of human memory, the histories of human valuation, and
the forcefulness of a ‘human will’ become increasingly insignificant markers for
engendering a future. As Leszczynski (2016: 19) points out, using what she calls, the
‘urban derivative’, cities are dissolved ‘into discrete codifications of places, denizens,
flows, and events reassembled across data flows via an algorithmic calculus that
speculates on the imminence of particular kinds of city-assemblages that loom on the
horizon of possibility’. For modernity, as a particular mode of reflexivity, a means of
regarding one’s actions simultaneously as a participant and a detached observer, is
further intensified as it is coupled with the proliferation of media and technicities that
supersede human cognition in their capacity to interrelate an always expanding series
of data, variables and events considered relevant to human prospering (Hansen, 2014).
In environments where everything counts and can be counted, where
unanticipated actions are pre-empted through continuously reworked measures
of probability, what, then, are all of the refusals of such calculation? What kinds of
manoeuvres, however faint, suggest the possibilities of life beyond measurement, of
more experimental and judicious extensions of human life with its surroundings that
are not immediately subject to probable outcomes and the instrumentalization of
uncertainty?

Material refrains: repeating natures

To further explore the possibilities outside of calculation, for the extensionalities
of life with and across the earth, of navigating the strange geographies of an ‘out there’
that might be here, and of the excluded whose practices may suggest the terms of an
urban life to come, it is perhaps important to start again with the earth. Through a
series of returns or refrains, the concern here is not with a return to nature, but rather
with the ways in which particular scales and landscapes become technologies of (non)
urban human sensibilities. For those who have long lived under the oppression of the
‘city’, of being denied the status of the human or who are not interested in pursuing
the struggle to be human, the engagement with the earth––its generativity, volatility
and stalwartness––has been a critical dimension of developing life within conditions
otherwise adverse to particular kinds of liveliness (Wynter, 2003).
Such refrains raise the question of the role of ‘nature’ as a force, regardless
of whether nature is viewed as something constructed, all-pervasive or replete with
multiple ontologies. For the specific properties of resources, what they are on given
occasions, how they last and for whom they are available entails continuous work and
recalibration among many different entities and sites (Richardson and Weszkalnys,
2014). Here, political ecology has done important work in showing how the development
of capitalism is contingent on the appropriation, enclosure and commodification of
nature, and how economic relations are embedded in ecological domains (Harvey, 1996;
Heynen et al., 2007; Neuman, 2008). More recent iterations have demonstrated how
the metabolic, ecological and affective dimensions of nonhuman labour are integral to
the reproduction of capital, in both its production and commodity forms (Barua, 2019).
Distinctions between nature and infrastructure can also be blurred as each reciprocally
manifests itself through the other (Carse, 2014; Arboleda, 2016).
One site from which to commence these refrains is forests. While plantations
attempt to simulate forests, such as in the massive conversion of ‘actual’ forests to
the production of palm oil, forests are in some ways similar to the urban in that they
circumvent precise definition, and are subject to variegated legal regimes, ecosystems,
cultural practices, modes of occupation and genealogies. The forest also suggests
particular practices and rhythms of navigation. There are few bypasses or expressways;
 (NON)URBAN HUMANS 9

it is impossible to travel in a straight line; you have to make your way, albeit adhering
to the forms and contours of the forest, as it ‘guides’ you rather than you navigating it
(Lingis, 2004). In contrast to the extension of urban form, where both urban cores and
vast suburbs begin to look alike, with their repetitive spatial forms that seem the result
of globalized production formats, and which occlude the highly situational intersections
of forces and actors that give rise to these urban fabrics, the forest represents a terrain
of nonscalability (Tsing, 2012). It does not subsume its heterogeneities into a larger
scale. Rather, it embodies a transformative diversity of relations, where entities are
identified through the affordances they offer to others, even in circumstances of
predation (Kohn, 2013).
Another refrain is the desert and the multiple processes of desertification, where
agriculture collapses. Deserts have long been arenas of transgressive crossing, foraging,
constantly changing sides and barely viable livelihoods, the playgrounds of scholar-
warriors, bandits, jihadists, rogue armies, and actual and prospective sites of vast riches
beneath the surface. They are also sites of new forms of policing, tracking and mapping,
and experiments with controlled environments. For the Tuareg, the desert was not
navigated by sight, but rather by sound. Navigating the terrain was only possible by
discerning the aural waves shaped by the wind and the terrain, for otherwise sight was
too prone to hallucination. In cultures of the desert, the wind is at the centre of cults,
possessions, illness and possibility (Kenyon, 2012).
The desert sometimes enters the city through strong winds, completely
blackening the atmosphere. In Khartoum, desert storms known as haboobs may last
only a few moments. There have been times, following the haboob, where police records
report massive thefts from houses, such as the complete disappearance of furnishings
and automobiles that suddenly vanish without trace. Usually, households are reluctant
to talk about these occurrences, fearing that adverse judgements will be made about
their moral stature or sanity. Many residents in Khartoum’s upscale neighbourhoods
have used all of their resources simply to purchase land and build large edifices in high-
status areas, and have nothing left with which to populate the interiors. Attributions
of such theft could easily be viewed as an excuse for having built beyond one’s means.
Yet in Haj Yousif, Mayo and Umbada, the predominant areas of Dinka, Nuer,
Shilluk and Nuba residency in the city, there is a nearly precise recounting of these
disappearances. Waybills are soon displayed about how the loot is already on lorries
heading toward South Sudan and maps are drawn to outline the best ways to avoid
police roadblocks. Large numbers of residents in these neighbourhoods seem to be
in possession of the most intimate details concerning the households that have been
‘appropriated’ as if they have been the objects of ‘stake-outs’ for long periods.
Verification is shrouded in ambiguity, as it is only possible to anecdotally confirm
the truth of situations, since police records are the only official documentation. But
this is not the point. For the appearance of winds, grand theft, extensive distributed
knowledge of details and the coordination of discussions reveal a collectivity without
specific form, yet a tangible intervention into the city––a momentary reversal of powers
(Simone, 1994).
Seas and oceans have been platforms for sometimes rapid alternations among
social regimentation, containment, piracy, mutiny, failed migrations and miscalculation.
Even if the seas and oceans are being folded into the discourses of planetary urbanization
(Couling, 2018), one need only witness John Akomfrah’s installation ‘Vertigo Sea’ to feel
the unleashing of forces that exceed any available understanding. If Paul Gilroy (2018)
wants to think of an historically informed humanism at sea level, which is a provocative
offering, then a challenge emerges from rising sea levels. What is sea level in the current
moment and in this moment of warming currents? Increasingly, land can become
water and arable land can become desert, all in the Ovid-like metamorphoses of nature,
with the elements composing the universe battling or playfully transforming into one
 INTERVENTIONS10

another––as Empedocles theorized long ago. What we are witnessing now is a rapid
reshaping of the very materiality of the planet. Many humans in urban areas continue to
be seemingly impervious to this reshaping, in spite of high winds, hurricanes, typhoons,
floods and drought. The conceit of much of so-called ‘smart city’ technology is to predict
and control turbulence, to move around it, incorporate it, but not be moved by it (Marvin
and Rutherford, 2018).
At the geological level we can get a sense of deep time that places human tem­
porality in a particular perspective, especially as it pertains to urban forms. The geological
bases of much that constitutes urbanism––from infrastructure to the built environment
and digital technologies––opens up ways of finding the non-urban securely embedded in
the urban. Thinking geologically then operates at scales of temporality and materiality, of
wealth accumulation and dissipation, of colonial and postcolonial political formulations,
and of the inseparable connection of the extractive arts and racial construction (Baucom,
2012; Clark, 2014; Szerszynski, 2017; Yusoff, 2018).
All of these levels and landscapes are neither virtuous nor debilitating. They
are capable of killing as much as sustaining. They are as much fundamental aspects
of the extension of urbanization as they are an externality. Given such ‘doubleness’,
how are they generative, and of what? In a remaking of the human sensorium they
offer particular ‘technologies’ of sense, rhythmic, visual and aural, impacting upon
neurophysiological circuits that modulate affect, sympathy and a preparedness to act
(McKittrick, 2016).

Bodies beyond calculation: extensions into the world

What can be taken from the protocols and technologies of calculation that
would highlight the sensorial capacities associated with the materialities of forests,
deserts and seas, and that could stitch together alliances among urban residents across
territories––beyond self-contained diasporas, or religious belongings? Instead of
counting on urbanization to eventually standardize and equilibrate a consensually
determined model of the ‘good human’, why not embrace urbanization’s capacities
to take the human apart in the assemblage of new bodies of sense and feeling? Here,
important work has been done in queer and feminist studies (Barad, 2011; Luciano and
Chen, 2011; Chen, 2012; Frost, 2014).
There are numerous circumstances, both fortuitous and precarious, where bodies
are remade in ‘strange ways’ not clearly discernible in terms of either ‘good’ or ‘bad’.
Take, for example, the kinds of simultaneous generosity and parasitism that characterize
the ‘migrant trains’ from Central America to the US borderlands; the caravans of trucks
that make dangerous runs between Maiduguri and Khartoum completely attuned to
each other’s every move; the solidarities among Uighurs in Guangzhou who use the
extreme densities of their residential locations to constitute a collective body attentive
and prepared to respond to all of the movements and events of their larger surrounds;
the overcrowded vertical social housing of Klong Toey filled with multiple diasporas
that keep running accounts in each building of jobs, prices and opportunities of all
kinds, despite constant bickering; the appropriation of toxic environments in Colonia
Periférico, Mexico City, as a means of ensuring internal solidarities and a heightened
quality of everyday social life even as residents are made vulnerable to those toxicities
(Roberts, 2015).
La Polvorilla in Acapantzingo, Mexico, is organized simultaneously as a
community of households and a plurality of shared memberships in various activities
and functions of the area. It is ‘set back’ from the surrounding area by a series of gates
and autonomous transport, schooling and governmental structures. It seems to insulate
itself. Yet, at the same time, residents experience the place as a secured platform from
which to infiltrate and influence surrounding districts, an intentional attempt to curate
a heterogeneous outside that does things differently––providing a sense of contrast
 (NON)URBAN HUMANS 11

and ongoing experimentation––that is yet protective of the hard-won stability of La

Polvorilla itself. It perceives its future only in terms of not repeating itself, of over time
cultivating the conditions that will be required for a future that cannot be read so easily
now (Stavrides, 2014).
The entanglements of various materialities are by definition compromised and
impure; there is no ideal state to attain or to aspire to. While catastrophes potentially
loom, they should be regarded not as specific destinations but as a process of precluding
further entanglements, of the potential inherent in things to entangle. So these
remakings of bodies outlined above are not deliberated transformations of the polis:
they largely operate in the background, perhaps silently rearranging the brackets of
the world (Kioupkiolis and Katsanbekis, 2016). Yet they seem to intensify the work of
urbanization; extend what urbanization could do.
At the same time, solidarities need to be visible, make claims, assume power, and
so the issue is how to think about the simultaneities of both acting under the radar and
infiltrating the institutions that make policy and rule. Black practice may provide some
ideas about the nature of such simultaneity. As indicated earlier, blackness remains
in a process of both constant repetition but also reinvention, sometimes prophetic,
sometimes that of quantum entanglements. As such, blackness might posit modes of
human generation not dependent upon the primacy of the time of the Middle Passage.
As Moten (2018) points out, it does not consent to being a single being. It is something
disobedient. It is a time that co-relates past, present and future, needs to be recuperated
outside the terms of judicial resolutions (Thomas, 2016) and directed toward the repair of
a humanness fundamentally broken. It is broken in its very self-reflection, living out the
idea of itself as sufficiently detached from the world to be its orchestrator (Mbembe, 2017).
Hortense Spillers (2003) talked about the complicated strategic choices Black
people face in the Americas in terms of ensuring their endurance. Blacks could insist
upon their humanity in contexts in which this humanity was structurally foreclosed,
where the insistence would be construed as evidence of disobedience or the very
absence of humanity, but which, nevertheless, in this assertion of will, despite the odds
and consequences, could be construed by a Black self, with no official recognition, as
evidence of being human. Thus the affirmation that Black lives matter is a continuation
of such determination.
In contrast, indifference to the value of a self-formed human subject could be
manifested in the capacity of the Black body to extend itself into the very surrounds,
terrain and materiality of their limited world of operations. Here an extraordinary
attunement to the operations of the earth and its varying atmospheres and ways of
being signalled a detachment from the need to be human. Thus, the processes of social
reproduction were experienced in concert with the rhythms of other forms of liveliness
(King, 2017). What can such extensionality as a Black practice indicate to us today in a
world of extended urbanization? How can disobedience and extending into the world
be simultaneously coupled as a critical urban practice in light of the possible end of
urbanity itself?

Conclusion: tentative gatherings

What is the (non)urban human being made at the margins of the extensionality
of urban processes? Through Black practices we see how particular templates
of engagement with the earth have been there for a long time. Yet, as the basic
infrastructures of social reproduction disappear, as automated, artificial-intelligence
functions make many kinds of bodies expendable, and as the struggle to be human (or
not) intensifies, there are many instances of those who attempt to figure out how to live
in these spaces without having a clear story about where things are headed and what
they should do. But this doesn’t mean that inhabiting these extended spaces forecloses
strategic decisions or the semblance of planning.
 INTERVENTIONS12

In contradistinction to the seemingly predominant tendencies of urban residents

to retreat into insular spaces of security or to narrowly circumscribed forms of belonging,
it is important to pursue those moments where residents attempt to expose themselves
to a ‘larger world’––of considerations, bodies and circumstances. What methods can
be applied to trace these emergences? At the outset, then, of any such research agenda,
closer attention needs to be paid to how residents of different ‘extensions’ are thinking
with each other.
For example, from Jakarta to Kupang to Jayapura to Salvador to Bangui and
Omdurman, I have witnessed inexplicable gatherings, sometimes of hundreds, saying
whatever is on their mind, where no sense of eligibility to speak or judgements about
usefulness are made. People gather in the most inhospitable surrounds, in the dead of
night, telling stories, full of analyses of the events of their surrounds, almost randomly
detailed, with no linear progression or logic, but with a plenitude of propositions, of
what they could conceivably do with each other beyond any instrumental function. Of
course, these gatherings are surrounded by intricate webs of police violence, where
the old tactics of dealing and brokering are no longer applicable; they are surrounded
by warlords and druglords and paramilitaries––extreme violence could happen at any
time. But the participants are adamant. The material conditions may not get any easier;
vulnerability and precarity may persist, but important gestures are made to a life worth
living, a different way of being human.

AbdouMaliq Simone, The Urban Institute, University of Sheffield, 219 Portobello

Street, Sheffield S1 4DP, UK, abdoumaliqsimone@gmail.com

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