As the making of the human is the moral project of modernity, the making of the city is its worlding. In what ways is the design of the city, in both its metropolitan and colonial configurations, also the design of the human?

Metropolitan civilisation and the human being are the foundational historical constructs of modernity. The scientific study of ourselves, the ‘humanitas’, rather than the divine, is consolidated in the European Enlightenment to produce the modern disciplines. The human is an aesthetic liberal project, bestowed with the transcendent intellectual capacities to attain universal knowledge, limitless prosperity, and ever-accumulating freedoms. Kantian and Hegelian philosophy also provided the human with a spatial ontology, whereby the ‘West’, or Europe and its settler extensions, is the wellspring of the human.

Yet this Enlightenment schema also institutes the ‘Anthropos’, the barbarian subject, and the ‘Antipodes’, nativist territories in want of civilisation, producing a racial capitalism and global knowledge apartheid in the colonisation of the Global South. The social sciences and humanities in modern Western epistemology have historically marginalised the spatial conditions under which science and freedom are produced, rendered non-political and universal. However, a radical tradition of black, feminist, Muslim, Jewish, indigenous, and queer perspectives in critical phenomenology decentres the universalist claims of modern subjectivity, instead underscoring the embodied and relational nature of the human.

‘The City and the Human’ invites multidisciplinary contributions in the spatial humanities, including urban anthropology, urban sociology, urban political economy, literary and religious studies, and architecture and urbanism, to frame critical spatial coordinates of the human as a material, intersubjective and relational assemblage. Spatial economies of the human/ barbarian may include, but are not limited to, readings of the city from the plantation, the prison, the camp, the university, the church, the museum, and the ghetto.

Convenor: Sadiq Toffa (UCT, Hamilton, Canada)