The Biopolitical Production of the City: Urban Political Ecology in the Age of Immaterial Labour

Abstract

This paper explores the potential of immaterial forms of work for a renewed politics of urban metabolisms where the production of emancipatory subjectivity is recast as a crucial moment in the process of making urban space. Through a critical engagement with the works of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, it will be argued that their investigations of the current condition of labour provide a powerful toolkit to get a glimpse of the dense, intricate entanglements between human and nonhuman worlds that emerge from science, innovation, affects, arts, and so forth, in the constitution of radical political ecologies. The paper then analyses the case of the struggle for water in Bucaramanga, a city in Colombia threatened by a large-scale mining project, which illustrates how collaborative engagement, communicational strategies, technoscientific debates, and legal action—among others—can produce political solidarities and social subjects that enhance the democratic and socioecological content of contemporary urban worlds.