Colin McFarlane

Durham University, Geography, Faculty Member

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Colin McFarlane is an urban geographer at Durham University. His work focusses on urban theory, experience, and politics. This has involved attention to a set of connected questions: how do people learn to make their way in the city? How are lives in precarious neighbourhoods made and unmade? How does the politicisation of urban life emerge and how does to force new conditions and possibilities?

He is author of 'Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage' (Blackwell), a book focussed on the intersections between urban inequality, materiality, resistance and learning, as well as related edited collections, including: 'Smart Urbanism: Utopian Vision or False Dawn?' (Routledge, with Simon Marvin and Andres Luque-Ayala), 'Infrastructural Lives: Urban Infrastructure in Context' (Earthscan-Routledge, with Steve Graham), 'Urban Navigations: Politics, Space and the City in South Asia' (Routledge, with Jonathan Anjaria), and 'Urban Informalities: Reflections on the Formal and Informal' (Ashgate, with Michael Waibel).

This work has focussed on several cities, including Mumbai, Kampala, Berlin, and Cape Town.

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/ColinMcFarlane3
Blog: https://cityfragment.wordpress.com
Webpage at Durham: https://www.dur.ac.uk/geography/staff/geogstaffhidden/?id=4570

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Papers by Colin McFarlane

Future Densities

Grammars of the Urban Ground

Density is key to how cities are understood and composed, and in recent decades has been position... more Density is key to how cities are understood and composed, and in recent decades has been positioned as the solution to all kinds of economic, ecological and social questions in the city. Despite its centrality to cities, density has come to be known through a particular set of sources, actors and concerns, with important consequences for urban inclusion. Yet there has always been an alternative archive of knowledge about urban density. While there are considerable challenges in bringing that disparate archive more centrally into the production and management of cities, doing so could disclose more progressive urban futures. Indeed, as cities become increasingly unequal, and as certain kinds of densities are ever more at stake, that task is a vital one. I examine this alternative archive across multiple contexts, ranging from racial inequalities to street densities and the force of the urban crowd, and conclude with four recommendations for an alternative knowledge politics of density.

De-networking the poor: revanchist urbanism and hydrological apartheid in Mumbai

Introduction Conceptualising the City in South Asia

Politics of Sanitation: Informality and the Constitution of Urban Metabolic Life in Mumbai

Smart urbanism: cities, grids and alternatives?

Introduction: The Informal-formal Divide in Context

The politics of urban sanitation

Citizenship and Infrastructure, 2019

Infrastructure, ‘Seeing Sanitation’ and the Urban Political in an Era of Late Neoliberalism

The Urban Political, 2017

In an urbanizing world, the inequalities of infrastructure are increasingly politicized in ways t... more In an urbanizing world, the inequalities of infrastructure are increasingly politicized in ways that reconstitute the urban political. A key site here is the politicization of human waste. The centrality of sanitation to urban life means that its politicization is always more than just service delivery. It is vital to the production of the urban political itself. The ways in which sanitation is seen by different actors is a basis for understanding its relation to the political in an era of late neoliberalism. We chart Cape Town’s contemporary sanitation syndrome, its condition of crisis, and the remarkable politicization of toilets and human waste in the city’s townships and informal settlements in recent years. We identify three tactics—poolitical tactics—that politicize not just sanitation but Cape Town itself: poo protests, auditing and sabotage. We evaluate these tactics, consider what is at stake, and chart possibilities for a more just urban future.

Social infrastructure, citizenship and life on the margins in popular neighbourhoods

Citizenship and Infrastructure, 2019

How do residents learn to navigate the topographies of everyday life in the city and on the margi... more How do residents learn to navigate the topographies of everyday life in the city and on the margins of citizenship? An old question for research on cities, development and poverty, to be sure, but one that now has a new urgency and is the focus of this chapter. In particular, the growth of informality – i.e. precarious housing, labour and lives predominantly in the global South, but increasingly in the global North too (Comaroff and Comaroff 2015) – demands that we develop a better understanding of how people live in the city

Crowdfunding cities: Social entrepreneurship, speculation and solidarity in Berlin

Geoforum, 2020

The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, ... more The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.

Colin McFarlane

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