Governing

the resilient city

Stephanie Wakefield and Bruce Braun

Addressing risks incumbent to global climate change, Mike Davis (2010) recently
declared the city to be its own solution. While for Davis this meant investing in the
citys social infrastructure as a way to reduce vulnerability to climate change and erase
its uneven geographies, it is the scale of his proposed solutions that now stands out. In
the face of climate change, and the failure of international efforts to curb carbon
emissions, the city is now viewed as the most pressing and promising site for
anticipating and addressing uncertain futures. To the extent that we inhabit a planetary
urbanism, in which the city is the site of metabolic exchanges that are global in reach
and extent, the future of humanity is increasingly understood in terms of the citys social
organization and physical design.

Today Daviss scalar arguments are something of a truism, as cities across the world
experiment with new infrastructures and technologies designed to respond to a world of
new threats that are simultaneously social, political and environmental. In some cases
these are merely thought experiments, such as the 2010 Rising Currents exhibition at
the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, one among countless efforts to imagine
and design the resilient city (see Braun, this issue). In other cases these experiments
are real-time responses to concrete events, as occurred during Hurricanes Katrina and
Sandy, events which placed in stark relief the differential vulnerability of cities,
neighborhoods and specific populations to unexpected adversity. At still other sites,
such as the Grand Paris initiative launched by President Sarkozy, urban planners,
philosophers, climate scientists and architects are working together to design and
implement concrete changes to urban form. In this post-Kyoto Paris a cavalcade of
green roofs, urban forests, techno-economic research clusters and airports would be
connected into a decentralized, seamless and well-policed metropolitan fabric, stitched
together by a high-speed automated super-mtro whose construction is to begin later in

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2014.1 Perhaps more important than any one design, event or plan, has been the
pervasive imagining of cities as integrated socio-ecological networks, intimately tied to
global systems in a recursive process in which cities are understood as at once
transformative agents and vulnerable subjects, a relationship played out in different
ways across local and international divisions of labor, from New York City to Bombay.

Running through each design, plan or experiment is not just the same presupposition
that cities are integrated and extended socio-ecological networks but also the same
problem: how to govern this totality. Through what modes of arranging and ordering
urban life might resilience be achieved? What is this life that is imagined, and how is it to
be constructed? How does one field events, such that urban life can carry on in a
particular form? The papers in this special section all circle around a shared recognition
that the question of the resilient, sustainable or ecological city is also, and
significantly, a question of government.2 But the perspectives and critical tools they
bring to the question vary. Might it be that in the context of the Anthropocene -- with its
strange spatio-temporalities and novel socio-technical and ecological risks -- what
government is, and how it works, is undergoing marked transformation? Or do new
practices and techniques merely represent the extension and deepening of existing
modes of administering life? A common thesis is that while in the past, technologies of
government sought to prevent this or that specific crisis, projecting a utopian future
beyond all crises, today government evokes and seeks to manage an inherently volatile
world in which crisis is ubiquitous and the disaster-to-come is inevitable. By this view,
the beyond is forever deferred, and crisis is no longer that which is to be warded off,
eliminated or overcome, but that which must be absorbed, attenuated and survived.
Indeed, for Giorgio Agamben (2011), administration (oikonomia) today enacts precisely
this infinite deferral, wherein being is reduced to the indefinite extension of the present.
From oyster farms designed to absorb storm surges, to automatic sensors designed to
respond to changing flows of people, information or energy, administration seeks to

1 Ministre de lgalit des Territoires et du Logement, 2013, Grand Paris,

http://www.territoires.gouv.fr/Grand-Paris
2 In this essay, we understand resilience as a mode of governing the ecological city.

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continuously reorder systems so as to sustain them, in a movement that is as incessant
as it is aimless. For others, including some of the authors in this section, one of the
defining aspects of resilience as a mode of government is not just the government of
integrated and highly technologized socio-ecological systems, but government through
such systems, such that it is no longer clear that government seeks to produce subjects
in any way like it did before. Government, from this view, is as much about managing
circulation and modulating flows as it is about molding individuals.

The goal of the papers in this section is to begin to map the logics and logistics of
resilient or ecological urbanism -- to outline resilient urbanism as a set of discourses,
practices, architectural forms, regulations, laws, knowledges, technologies and designs,
that together and in their relations form what Foucault called a dispositif or apparatus.3
We will say more about this below, but wish to highlight from the start the centrality of
the last two elements, technology and design, in emerging modes of government.
Importantly, the goal in these papers is also to begin to imagine how such a dispositif
might be inhabited, occupied, appropriated or experimented with as part of a new
politics of and for the Anthropocene. The analysis of any dispositif of government always
runs the risk of overstating its coherence and effectivity, and overlooking its failures,
gaps and openings. Gilles Deleuze (1998) insisted that a dispositif be seen as a
multilinear ensemble, composed of lines that are subject to changes in direction,
bifurcating and forked, and subject to drifting. One must position oneself on these lines,
he argued, attentive to their possibilities. Likewise, in his essay concluding this section,
Agamben asks whether today it has become necessary to imagine not a constituent
power, but a destituent power that deactivates or profanes the dispositif -- that renders
its disparate elements and relations inoperative, opening them to new possible use.
Amid the dispositifs of the ecological city, what might it mean to do so?

Dispositif


3 Dispositif is often rendered in English as apparatus, especially in translations of

Giorgio Agambens recent work (e.g., 2009).

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Why do we use the concept dispositif? What is its specific power, and what does it enable
us to see or imagine at this particular juncture?

Although the concept is often attributed to Michel Foucault, it has been taken up in
different ways by subsequent writers, like Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben and
these differences are evident in the essays that follow. Foucault (1980) used the term to
name the network of discourses, practices and institutions, variable across space and
time, by which life was governed. For Foucault, government did not emanate from an
external source, or sovereign power, as if something imposed on life from the outside.
Rather, it was immanent to the elements of these networks and the relations drawn
between them in and through them life was at once known and made available to
power. Government thus named a double operation, one in which life was administered
and managed and, in the same movement, imagined and constructed as governable.
Crucially, for Foucault there was neither an essential or authentic life that existed prior
to, or outside, the elements and relations of a particular dispositif, nor was the life
constructed one that followed a plan or intention set out in advance.

Indeed, we argue that the unique force and purchase of Foucaults concept is best
expressed in his understanding of government as a provisional or ad-hoc arrangement
that comes together in response to crises of one sort or another:
[a dispositif] has as its major function at a given historical moment that of
responding to an urgent need. The dispositif thus has a dominant strategic
function (Foucault, 1980a, p. 194).
Factory regimes, prison architecture, urban sanitation, street lighting, wide boulevards,
each corresponded with and presupposed other actions and forces: insurrection, riots,
disease, crime. Individually and together these governmental forms can be read as a
history of attempts to manage and prevent crises, provisionally stitching together
disparate knowledge, practices and designs in order to cope with situations as they
arose. As the papers in this section show, government is not synonymous with order;
instead, it names an ongoing activity or operation: to manage, to administer, to respond,
to order. Like a centuries long chess game, techniques of government are always forced

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and contingent, reordering an order that is always out-of-order. Only retrospectively do
these moves appear to be part of a plan devised in advance.

Given Foucaults emphasis, it should come as no surprise that Giorgio Agamben (2009;
2011) has in recent work linked the concept dispositif (apparatus) directly to
Heideggers notion of Gestell an ordering which did not cover over an essential or
natural order, so much as install or effect order. For Agamben, this mode of ordering
must be understood as fundamentally biopolitical insofar as it continuously produces
and maintains a separation of life from its form or use, placing it in a separate sphere as
so much stuff to be administered. What Agamben names bare life similar to what
Heidegger called standing reserve is nothing other than this act of separation. Where
Agamben differs from Foucault is in his extension of government to name a historical-
metaphysical paradigm that stretches from the ancient Greeks to the present. Crucially,
this is not to posit an ahistorical and continuous mode of governing from Aristotle to
Karen Quinlan. Agamben, after all, is careful to acknowledge the historical and
geographical nature of specific biopolitical regimes. Rather, it is to identify in
government a key operation, always different in time and space, which separates life
from its use and preserves it in its separation, reordering bodies, gestures, spaces and
affects to particular ends. For this reason government can be said to be devoid of any
foundation in being: it names an operation, not a ground.

Whether this operation is enacted in the ecological city, and if enacted, how so, are
questions explored in the papers that follow. In recent work, Agamben has underlined
the central role played by technical objects and technological systems in the activity of
government today, and this provides one part of the answer given by contributors to
this section. A computer, a cellphone, an electrical grid, each of these things carries and
discloses a relation to the world; in each a history, a set of power relations, and a way of
life are spoken. In a fashion similar to Bernard Stiegler (1998), Agamben inverts the
who and the what, such that technics becomes the who to the what of the human as
much, or more, than the inverse. Once we begin to use a cell phone, Agamben insists, we
are in a new world in which what life is, and what it can be, has been irrevocably

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changed, and in which subjectification works in new and different ways. This is precisely
why Heidegger a strong influence on both Stiegler and Agamben argued so
vigorously against an anthropological or instrumental understanding of technology.
Technology is not something that we invent and employ as a means to an end: it shapes
us as much as we shape it. With each device, and with each technological system, come
new modes of ordering life.

Agambens emphasis on technology on the question of technology is part of what
allows him to understand government in historical terms. In his expansion of the
concept beyond Foucaults work on hospitals, prisons, and schools to include everyday
technical devices such as phones, computers and the systems of which they are part, he
evokes a shift toward a more contemporary mode of government, perhaps paralleling
the shift registered by Deleuze from the spaces of enclosure that characterized discipline
to the space of the open environment that characterize societies of control. Whereas
enclosure concentrated, distributed and ordered subjects and objects so as to compose a
productive force the school, factory and barracks being its paradigmatic forms -- the
projects underway to make cities resilient recalibrate subject and object into complex
adaptive systems, reuniting humans and nature in a cybernetic meshwork that is
simultaneously technical, biological and geophysical, and that is characterized above all
else by communication in and across these domains. Is this not the mode of government
proper to the Anthropocene? Insofar as we today inhabit a world in which political,
technological and ecological systems are seen to feed back into each other in a
continuous, crisis-ridden manner, is not government precisely the administration of
flows? Each paper takes up this proposition in a different way, but what is common to all
is the idea that government today seeks to modulate flows and affects as much, or even
more, than it seeks to produce subjects who understand and relate to themselves in a
particular manner.4

4 Reflecting competing interpretations and political strategies, the (non) subject of these

flows has been variously referred to as the Bloom (Tiqqun, 2012), dividual (Deleuze,
1995), ambividual (Gabrys, this issue), or, simply, dynamic system-environment
coupling in the straightforward terms of cybernetics (Clarke and Hansen, 2009).

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While the authors of the following papers agree that the outlines of these forms of
administration are clearly discernable in the ecological city, they agree less about their
novelty. Recalling the late 19th century writings of the Spanish Engineer Ildfonso Cerd,
Ross Adams finds the current coupling of ecology and urbanization to be entirely
consistent with early understandings of urbanization in terms of perpetual circulation.
Indeed, insofar as urbanization is understood to immediately encompass the rural (and
vice versa), and insofar as it is characterized first and foremost by circulation, ecological
urbanism proposes nothing other than reconstructing nature as urbanization, along with
the need to simultaneously facilitate and govern its internal flows. For Cerd, the dream
of urbanization is that of the pure interior, in which nature must be made to circulate
and by which nature comes to be seen as at once necessary and pathological to our
existence. Ecological urbanization is thus at once presupposed by urbanization itself,
and necessarily governed through an immunological paradigm of administration that
safeguards life from threats incubating within it.

In their essays Jennifer Gabrys and Bruce Braun tend to see the resilient or ecological
city to be inaugurating a unique network of elements and relations, even if many
elements are not themselves novel. Arguably, this is consistent with Foucaults emphasis
on a dispositif as the combination or gathering of disparate elements into a system of
relation. Some of these elements are the result of responses to earlier crises, others are
attempts to escape such orderings, and still others were previously coded as neither. For
Gabrys, the networked life of smart cities reveals a transformation in what Foucault
(2008) called environmental government. Looking in particular at MITs and Ciscos
joint Connected Sustainable Cities plan, she finds projected a cybernetic environment of
ubiquitous computational feedback and communication, and new forms of governance
that operate in and through the circulation and processing of real-time data. Far from
homo economicus, the citizen is herein called upon as a sensing node within an
integrated city-wide system that combines infrastructure, information, and political
participation and whose efficiency is ensured through the constant generation and
reporting of actionable data. In this biopolitics 2.0, citizen sensors log air pollution

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levels on their commute while devices coordinate their evening dinner, each
participating as relays in the continuous maintenance of an efficient, intelligent urban
system (except of course, when it is not, and smart bikes end up in the creek). Through
two vignettes, Braun shows resilient urbanism to draw together very different
techniques that at first glance have very little in common: on the one hand technologies
that give real-time feedback and that operate on us even as we operate them, and on the
other, the reimagining and redesign of the environment as critical infrastructure,
perhaps echoing Cerds 19th century dream of the pure interior. For Braun, resilience
as a mode of government draws diverse techniques into a system of relation, a new
dispositif that is heterogenous and decentered, continuously incorporating elements that
are not of its own design.

Destituent power? Deactivation, profanation and new use

What approach are we to take to this new dispositif? What tasks does it pose for
thought? And what new spaces and opportunities does it open for politics?

We argue that a critical mistake is made whenever we imagine a dispositif as a coherent
and unified totality. Or, when we evaluate a dispositif in moral terms as good or bad.
Understood as a network of relations between elements, its forms of analysis are not
critique, but investigation, mapping, and the vignette. About a dispositif we should ask:
how does it work?5 What operations does it perform? What kinds of life does it require
and produce? Where are the cracks, the lines of fracture? How to make it not work? The
point is not to situate ourselves outside its elements and relations in order to compile its
atrocities one by one, nor is it to expose its repressions so as to peel them away and
unveil a true life hidden beneath their orderings. There is no secret to be revealed, no
foundation or ground that can be uncovered and returned to. Instead, we argue that the

5 These are the questions motivating Foucaults method described in the lectures at the

Collge de France: Let us not, therefore, ask why certain people want to dominate, what
they seek, what is their overall strategy. Let us ask, instead, how things work at the level
of on-going subjugation, at the level of those continuous and uninterrupted processes
which subject our bodies, govern our gestures, dictate our behaviors, etc. (1980b, p. 97)

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task of thought is to locate ourselves within this world, mapping it so as to get to know it,
to construct other lines that, in their elaboration and connections, take the map with
them. Like hackers, we must get to know the network from within and to locate its
exploits.

How then does it work and what are its effects? To dwell in the Anthropocene, to
experiment with its indeterminate and often terrifying futures, is to seek answers to this
question. One answer a key one is that as a mode of government, resilience works to
restrict and blunt the political. That is, by positing a crisis-laden future, without end and
without hope of redemption, the resilience dispositif paradoxically works to maintain the
homogenous time of the present.6 Likewise, if life is now seen as the nonpolitical as
merely that which must be governed so as to preserve and protect it -- then the political
can only appear to be outside of life, as a norm or law to be applied to life, as resistance
in the name of a natural life, or as the awaiting of an unknown salvational event
somewhere in the future. The apocalypse reveals its own aim, Deleuze wrote, to
disconnect us from the world and from ourselves (1998, p. 49).7

The last essay, by Giorgio Agamben, begins to chart a response to this condition. Based
on a 2013 lecture in central France, it develops the notion of destitution or destituent
power. For Agamben, destituent power is not merely another name for existing
concepts use, profanation, deactivation, form-of-life, the Ungovernable but rather
what all of these have in common. For Agamben, echoing Benjamin, the classical
definitions of revolution and politics remain fully caught within the governmental
machine, and no matter what their historical manifestation, are fated to reproduce its
structure, in an eternal repetition that finds ever new ways to separate life from its form.
Destituent power, which Agamben has only just begun to elaborate, locates the horizon

6 Resilience, as a mode of government, can be said to operate as a katechon, continuously

withholding and deferring the possibility of exiting the governmental paradigm entirely
(Agamben 2011, see also Schmitt 2003; Taubes, 2009).
7 Cf. Swyngedouw, 2010

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of politics in the breaking out of this cycle, and breaking free of classical politics, with its
restrictive binaries of inside/outside, negation/construction, life/politics.

Destituent power does not affirm one side of these pairs, nor does it seek merely to join
them: rather it names a using of the world as not that itself deactivates the
governmental machine that produces and sustains them as separate in the first place. To
destitute, or use, a dispositif is thus to neutralize its governmental operation, to return to
common use what has been separated in it.8 It is not the posing of a new law. Nor is it
another word for negation. Even less is it the realization of a world that is already here,
waiting to be uncovered and seized by the multitude. Against the denial of world
effected by Gestell, it is instead the power to world to be in the world, to have and
form a world, to be in common with others, humans and nonhumans, to love, to struggle,
to make history. Destituent power and profanation are not acts on the world, but the
elaboration of worlds, putting to new use the factical conditions into which we are
thrown. Destitution is thus never a final form, but a form-of-life.

Critics are sure to find this approach too limited, too nave, too anarchic or too optimistic,
to address todays problems and populations. It is certainly not the only approach being
imagined, nor that to which all essays in this section directly point. But the power of a
destituent power is not difficult to imagine, just as possible ways to use a dispositif are
not difficult to identify. Consider the repurposing of schools, FEMA supplies, and streets
into autonomous organizing centers, shared supply banks, and communal street
kitchens in New York City neighborhoods devastated by Hurricane Sandy. Post-storm
these efforts have been extolled and promoted, in a vision that portrays self-organizing
neighborhoods and communities as 'vital systems' equally critical to the city's resilience
as the wetlands or 4G networks with which they are coupled.9 Yet, perhaps as much as

8 One does not resist resilience, as Neocleous (2013) suggests; rather, its apparatuses

must be profaned.
9 We disagree with those readings of resilience that see it as simply reproducing the

self-reliant and adaptive subject of neoliberalism (Joseph, 2013; Neocleous, 2013).

Insofar as it seeks to connect citizens to their neighbors, skills, and resources, resilience

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the occupied parks and squares of 2011, these post-Sandy moments also provided
images of another life a life in common that illuminated, concretely and
immediately, what it might take to construct pathways out of the governmental
paradigm. In the Anthropocene there is neither reason nor sense in waiting for the next
breakdown or catastrophic event: if government appears as an endless deferral of the
end and of any hope of redemption, perhaps what Rebecca Solnit (2009) calls paradise
in hell can be constructed not just in disasters, but anywhere, at any moment. If the
function of resilience qua dispositif is ultimately to right a foundering shipor, as co-
chair of the post-Sandy New York commission on long-term resilience put it, to avoid
the unmanageable and manage the unavoidable10 might it be possible to use all those
techniques it gathers toward that endas not? Might we take advantage, for example,
of city-run community emergency response trainings,11 not to help get the Stock
Exchange back online, but to construct new collectives and elaborate new worlds that
are not about sustaining the present order?

Four weeks after Sandy, invoking sanitation ordinances similar to those used to evict
occupiers in Zuccotti Park, New York Mayor Bloomberg called upon the NYPD to close
remaining outdoor sites of relief organization. Bloombergs reaction to street kitchens
that continued on past the official recovery period provided ample evidence of the
threat these new territories posed, and evidence also of the fact that any form-of-life
must become a force capable of enduring. If, as the resilience dispositif lays bare,
government is the material ordering and conservation of a certain way of life, really
exiting that paradigm continuing on past the initial joyful days of an uprising or the
spontaneous communal moments after a hurricane may require the material
organization of forms-of-life as forces, lest the need to go back to work leaves us hostage

as a mode of government may paradoxically produce conditions for the dismantling of
this subject.
10 Rodin, J, 2013 Rebound: Building a More Resilient World in Huffington Post, January

23 Available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/judith-rodin/rebound-building-a-

more-r_b_2526870.html
11 NYCs Office of Emergency Management runs a 10-week training program for groups

to become Community Emergency Response Teams.

http://www.nyc.gov/html/oem/html/get_involved/cert.shtml

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to an order upon which even our basic survival depends. At a larger scale, this could
entail organizing profane existences and practices into a plane of consistency, one that
does not reinstantiate government, but rather renders circulation ungovernable.12 How
might we do the latter, while warding off the former?


* * * * *

Citizen sensors, smart ovens, a global power grid, oyster farms to ring Manhattan,
backyard beekeepers: working at the level of connection and circulation, the ecological
city reconnects us to the world while denying our capacity to world. The papers that
follow take this contradiction as their task: tracing the emergence and stitching together
of new modes of ordering and administering life, investigating their functions and
effects, and beginning to imagine lines of flight new territories -- within their varied
techniques, knowledges and designs. A response to the resilience dispositif may not be a
new what, but an ethics or care for the how in every situation: how to deactivate the
governmental aspect of any thing and open up new possibilities of use? What will we use,
what will we leave idle, what will we destroy? How to take care of each other? How to
remediate toxic soil? How to live in a flood zone? How to erase debt records, property
deeds? How to ward off the separation of life from its form, and to continue to do so?
How not just to survive the Anthropocene, but to dwell in it?


References
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12 Gilles Deleuze (1987, p. 20) suggests something similar, noting that what matters is

the way in which decoded and deterritorialized flows boost one another, accelerate
their shared escape and augment or stoke their quanta.

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