Liveability and urban architectures: : mol(ecul)ar biopower and the �becoming lively� of sustainable communities

• Autores: Peter Kraftl
• Localización: Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, ISSN-e 1472-3433, Vol. 32, Nº. 2, 2014, págs. 274-292
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Contemporary analyses of biopolitics and the governance of �life itself� have concentrated on molecular processes in domains such as medicine and neuroscience. In this paper, I turn an analytical lens on urban architectures, with a focus upon a particular programme of large-scale housebuilding in the UK: the Sustainable Communities agenda. I argue first that Sustainable Communities constitutes a resonant but qualitatively different attempt to plan for and govern life itself, particularly encapsulated by the term �liveability�. Significantly, according to policy and technical documentation, Sustainable Communities appears to address the future at both molar and molecular levels, and through a focus on obduracy in ordinary, banal, everyday spaces (rather than in exceptional or border architectures). My analysis is, however, interwoven with attention to the �becoming lively� of urban architectures. Drawing on a large, ethnographic research project, this paper offers three navigational aids to understanding how professionalised deployments of �liveability� become co-opted into, resisted by, or creatively reinterpreted through, practices of inhabitation by residents of sustainable communities