CEGU

Geopoetics of Urban Rivers

Jennifer Scappettone

UChicago Global Workshop | 2024-2025

This project aims to link humanists with architects, artists, urban planners, geographers, computer scientists, and scientists between Paris and Chicago (and beyond) in order to remap our cities through the rivers that transgress fetishized urban masses—through the watersheds that link urban centers to their peripheries and hinterlands. It aims to promote cross-fertilization between institutions in their emerging commitments to urban and architectural change within a global context. It posits that the perspective of the humanities is crucial to maintaining a vision of the city as planetary tangle apprehensible at sporadic sites of rupture or deluge; it implicitly responds to Angela Last’s call for the undoing of geopolitics through geopoetics—proposing a re-imagination of global community fueled by cultural practices that acknowledge its origins in “violent human-nonhuman and interhuman relations,” and which would eschew the “fantasies of mastery, stability, and control” that shape classical Western geography and geopolitics. The symposia on the Rivers Seine and Chicago will ask practitioners across the humanities, arts, and sciences to present their current research in relation to specific conditions linked to points along the watershed (wetland ecology; underwater ecosystems; water quality issues and legacy toxins from industry; dammed and managed streams; navigable waterways; shipping port architecture; cultural heritage; informal river habitation; buried waterways; water purification and sewage facilities). The curators would be grateful for the chance to partner with the CNRS Institute of Ecology and Environment on questions of water pollution and reclamation, wetland ecology, wildlife habitat restoration, recreation versus industry, and urbanization against Anthropocene nature.