Chapter 19 - Posthuman Cities

Summary

This chapter considers the idea of a posthuman city and its representation in American literature. Surveying posthumanism as a field of inquiry emerging from animal studies, which considers the blurring of species-based definitions of “human,” and cybernetics, which figures human agency as constituted by technological adjuncts, the chapter also traces the growing body of inquiry into urban life from these perspectives. Tracing the discourse of the smart city and earlier projects such as archologies and megastructures in experimental architecture, the chapter considers science fiction as a site for critiquing the social control nascent in smart cities by instead imagining intelligent cities. The chapter considers Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy (Ancillary Justice (2013); Ancillary Sword (2014); Ancillary Mercy (2015)) as emblematic of this critique and as a model for imagining cities that embody emotional intelligence in addition to standard sensing practices more widely associated with smart cities. Leckie uses a truly posthuman city to challenge how human agency is figured in architecture and urban planning.