The Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities' Fall 2017 research forum is curated by Andrew A. Johnson (Anthropology) and Curt Gambetta (Architecture).

A growing body of contemporary research about infrastructure in architecture, the humanities and social sciences takes as its object large-scale, seemingly immaterial infrastructures. Against assumptions about the invisibility of infrastructure, new scholarship accounts for the materiality of systems that range in time and scale from global networks and longue durée processes, to fleeting, microscopic phenomena. In working across different registers and sites, what possibilities and problems do work on materiality pose to theory, methods and critique? In order to understand this, our series creates dialogues across disciplinary boundaries that focus on a particular material, including water, carbon, biota, cargo and building materials, among others. In doing so, we seek to explore how material shapes the possibilities for human worlds, be they social, political, religious, cultural, or otherwise.

For a complete listing of sessions, visit https://arc-hum.princeton.edu/forum.

December 6: Water

The material of water is everywhere, even when we don’t see it. But as this week’s forum will discuss, water is not a homogeneous medium. It has different scales, qualities and tastes. It is used and defined in different ways, by different people and institutions. This week’s forum examines water in an urban milieu, exploring how water changes our conception of urban politics, space and landscapes. Architect V. Mitch McEwen will discuss the politics of water infrastructure in Detroit and Mexico city, and anthropologist Nikhil Anand will examine the different scales and conceptions of water in Mumbai. How do the manifold qualities of water pare with efforts to manage and control it? In other words, to homogenize it? Do its differences invite diverse claims over its use? Or do new technologies of control seek to manage and separate its differences, removing it from the commons of cities, regions and larger systems?

Nikhil Anand is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the political ecology of urban infrastructures, and the social and material relations that they entail. Through ethnographic research, Anand studies how natures, technologies, and specific gatherings of experts and publics are mobilized to effect environmental projects and relations of difference in postcolonial cities. His first book, Hydraulic City (Duke, 2017), explores how cities and citizens are made through the everyday maintenance of water infrastructures in Mumbai.

V. Mitch McEwen is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Princeton University School of Architecture. She is principal of McEwen Studio and co-founder of A(n) Office, an architecture collaborative of studios in Detroit, Los Angeles, and Brooklyn.  McEwen's design work has been awarded grants from the Graham Foundation, Knight Foundation, and New York State Council on the Arts.  A(n) Office and McEwen Studio projects have been commissioned by the US Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and the Istanbul Design Biennial.  McEwen Studio projects in Detroit have produced a series of operations on houses previously owned by the Detroit Land Bank Authority.  These include a combined residence and flower incubator for an engineer at 3M, a strategy for 100 houses selected by the City of Detroit to densify the neighborhood of Fitzgerald, and an award-winning repurposing of a balloon-frame house titled House Opera.

Discussant: Anthony Acciavatti (Princeton-Mellon Fellow)