21.

  Sociality, materiality and the city

Sophie Watson

21.1 INTRODUCTION
The city can be conceived of as a complexity of interconnected sites
of vibrant matters, embodied entanglements and passionate affects.
This chapter considers how sociality and materiality in the city are co-
constituted and entangled in the city. Cities are constantly inventing and
reinventing themselves, and are spaces where the ‘social’ and sociality is
enacted and emerges in unpredictable ways. Cities are not static but are
brought into being and in a state of flux, constituted by the bodies and
the interconnections that are enacted there through shifting environ-
ments, senses and atmospheres. Cities are material/social spaces which
are historically contingent and can be made and unmade in different
configurations over time, constituted by sociomaterial and technological
connections and networks, and entangled spaces of bodies, affects, things,
urban infrastructures, pleasures, aesthetics, which are formed within fluid
temporalities, spaces of flows and interconnections. In this complex array
of connections, interconnections and networks, differences and socialities
are performed and enacted, both constituted in the spaces of the city, and
themselves constitutive of the very city itself.
The chapter is divided into three sections. The first section charts some
of the key ways that sociality and materiality in the city have been con-
ceived together in the city prior to the ‘material turn’. The second section
outlines some of the major trends in contemporary thinking of materiality
and sociality as co-constituted and entangled/intertwined not necessarily
separated in any meaningful way. In the final section, I think through
sociality and the materiality in the context of public space.

21.2 A (VERY) BRIEF EXCURSION INTO

TWENTIETH-CENTURY URBAN THEORY

Until the latter part of the twentieth century the ‘material’ and the ‘social’
in urban thinking were more or less distinct categories and realms, which
produced one another – usually in a unilateral direction – from the material
to the social, but which were not co-constituted or inextricably entangled

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 Sociality, materiality and the city  ­329

with one another. It was not uncommon for the theorizing of sociality and
social relations in the city, to make little reference to the material, and vice
versa. Of course, there is a danger in such sweeping generalizations, since
there are always traces, exceptions, meanderings from dominant trends in
geographical and sociological thought.
In this section of the chapter, I indicate how the ‘material’ did neverthe-
less figure in understandings of the social and sociality in the city, with
different preoccupations from those that engage many geographers today.
One guiding framework that has informed urban analysis of the particu-
larities and social formations of city life was historical materialism (Bridge
and Watson, 2010, p. 3). In 1844’s The Condition of the Working Class in
England Engels (1987) brought forensic attention to the material life of the
factory workers in Manchester – the poverty of their dwellings, clothes
and food, drawing on Marx’s arguments about how materials are imbued
with the wider social relations of their production, and the class exploita-
tion and profit extraction from these materials. In an illuminating, and
early attention to the body, Engels read from distortions of body shape
and development to explore the particular interminably repeated tasks in
the factory production process in which the body was involved. Marxist
inspired analyses of the economy and what Harvey (1978) called the urban
process in capitalism, became a dominant trope that underpinned much
thinking of social life in the city for several decades. In this formulation,
class was the major social division and social life in the city was highly
structured and segregated by where people were placed in relation to the
ownership of capital and the division of labour. This was a notion of the
society ‘founded on the principle of “accumulation for accumulation’s
sake, production for production’s sake”. . . (where) accumulation cannot,
therefore, be isolated from class struggle’ (Harvey, 1978, p. 110).
Such an account of social life in the city, though dominant in particular
through the 1970s and 1980s, as the 1980s unfolded came under a growing
challenge from feminist theorists, who saw class and the economic/material
base as inadequate for explaining gender inequalities and a social world
where women had less power, took greater domestic responsibility, and
were discriminated in a whole raft of sites and ways that could not be simply
reduced to capitalism, or the economy. Patriarchy was mobilized as a
concept (Walby, 1990; Beechey, 1979) to explain men’s power over women.
But it was far less possible to situate within any material structure – though
some radical feminists attempted to do so through locating men’s power in
the body/penis (Firestone, 1970) – despite its material manifestation in a
host of ways, from gender segregated labour markets to domestic violence.
From the early Chicago school, cities as material forms that were
distinct from rural life were imagined to produce particular forms of

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 330  Handbook of urban geography

sociality. Tonnies (2001) famously coined the notions of gesellschaft and

gemeinschaft to describe the (idealized) more integrated and connected
communities of rural life (gemeinschaft) as compared to the looser social
bonds of association (gesellschaft) characteristic of city life. Another influ-
ential interrelated strand of thinking derives from the German sociologist,
Georg Simmel, writing in 1903, whose notion of the ‘blasé metropolitan
attitude’ (Simmel, 1948) was developed to describe a response to the over-
whelming stimulation and assault on the senses which was characteristic of
modern city life, and which produced an individual who was not engaged
with others, but was rather a detached and rational observer looking in.
Walter Benjamin (1999), also influential in urban thought in the early
nineteenth century, similarly developed the notion of an abstracted
individual – the ‘flaneur’ wandering through the city enjoying the urban
spectacle but somewhat detached from it.
Finally, in this necessarily brief excursion through a wealth of urban
writing on materiality, sociality and the city, there has been a considerable
body of work that celebrates the city as a built form which through its
density, complexity, and intensities affords possibilities first, for a vibrant
public life, and, second, for social differences to coexist in relations of
mutuality and acceptance. Famously, Jane Jacobs (1961, p. 35) writing
about New York, postulated the city streets as core to a working, vibrant,
safe and mutually respectful social life: ‘buildings on a street equipped to
handle strangers and to ensure the safety of both residents and strangers
must be oriented to the street’. Since then urbanists have drawn attention
to urban design elements which are argued to enhance urban social life,
such as flexible borders rather than firm boundaries which segregate
people from one another (Sennett, 2010), or material forms such as gated
communities constructed to respond to the fear of dangerous others,
which arguably only serve to exacerbate them (Blandy et al., 2003). Others
have emphasized the significance of marginal or liminal city spaces for
social differences to be articulated and coexist or for vibrant publics to
emerge (Watson, 2006).

21.3  THE MATERIAL TURN

Intellectual thought inevitably proceeds, in part, as an encounter with that

which has been written before. With the influence of cultural studies that
spread through the social sciences from its 1970s origins in the influential
Centre for Cultural Studies in Birmingham, led first by Richard Hoggart
and then Stuart Hall, a new cultural geography emerged which drew on
post-structuralist theory, particularly Foucault, feminist, post-colonial

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 Sociality, materiality and the city  ­331

and psychoanalytic theory to place culture at the centre of geographical

endeavours. Research thus shifted into studies of the body, identity, the
home, tourism, sexuality, at the same time as reconfiguring more tradi-
tional areas of geography such as inequality, poverty, work, community,
neighbourhood to ask new questions about culture, power, subjectivity,
affect and so on. This shift in thinking brought its own reaction – the
material (re)turn in geography (Anderson and Tolia-Kelly, 2004), which
shifted the analytical lens, for some geographers once more. Geographers
took different avenues. Latham and McCormack (2004), for example,
approached the question of materiality, the sociality and the city from
an angle which aimed to bring the immaterial into the immaterial as
something which gives it liveliness and expressive life. In so doing, they
took the examples of automobility and intoxication to open up the ways
in which the material city can be thought, which involved seeing the urban
affectively also as a site of desire and attachment.
This renewed attention to matter, materiality and materialism started
to gain momentum in the early 2000s (e.g. Jackson, 2000; Lees, 2002;
Whatmore, 2002) and like the cultural turn was influenced by theory
developed in other disciplines – amongst others Bruno Latour’s actor-
network theory (1993, 2005), Daniel Miller’s (1987, 1998) exploration
of material culture, Arjun Appadurai’s (1986) attention to the social life
of things, and Jane Bennett’s work on the enchantment of modern life
(2001) and vibrant matter (2009). Anderson and Tolia-Kelly (2004), in
a special issue of Geoforum, identified several strands of these material
geographies – those which were rethinking the object, feminist work on
embodiment, and a series of literatures attuned to the ‘more than human
world’. In this special issue, the papers were chosen ‘to enact the differ-
ences between the figures of matter and materiality’ (Anderson and Tolia-
Kelly, 2004, p. 670) that emerged from, amongst other traditions, cultural
materialism, actor-network theory or non-representational theory, and
to show that there was no single direction for the material turn. This has
certainly been the case.
Through the following decade, the material turn in geography has
weaved a complex and textured path, the breadth of which cannot
be easily captured here. Five years later, Anderson and Wylie (2009,
p. 318) capture some of this work under the following clusters: ‘a vibrant
material-cultures literature . . . a swathe of writing concerned with the
varied intertwined materialities of nature, science and technology . . . and
a third cluster . . . around the spatialities of the lived body, practice, touch,
emotion and affect’. Rather than argue for a new theory of matter, these
authors began from an assumption that matter is always ‘beyond itself ’
and that qualities, such as excess, animation and enchantment, that are

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 332  Handbook of urban geography

usually associated with ‘immateriality, figurative or affective effects, are

of matter, rather than standing in opposition to it’ (Anderson and Wylie,
2009, p. 332).
The question I want to address next is how these approaches intersect
with the notion of sociality. One direction of thought, connected and
imbricated in notions of materiality, comes under the umbrella of what
has been termed non-representational theory, again a heterogeneous body
of work which originated in the UK, and particularly in Bristol, with
the work of Nigel Thrift (2007) and developed in different directions by
many others (see Anderson and Harrison, 2010). In a very useful review
of the book Taking Place: Non-Representational Theories and Geography,
Cresswell (2012) points to some of the key features of NRT. These include
its insistence on:
[T]he practical and processual fluidity of things (rather than finished and fixed);
on the production of meaning in action (rather than through pre-established
systems and structures); on an ontology that is relational (rather than essential-
ist); on habitual interaction with the world (rather than ‘consciousness’ of it);
on the possibilities of things emerging surprisingly (rather than being predeter-
mined); on a wide definition of life as humans/with/plus (rather than strictly
humanistic); and on an all inclusive materiality where everything produces the
‘social’ (rather than on an already achieved ‘social’ constructing everything
else). (Cresswell, 2012, p. 97)

Although not all scholars, by any means, attach themselves to the label of
non-representational theory, Cresswell’s summary of its key tenets here,
points to many of the main ways of conceiving materiality and sociality
together in the city. Influences come from many different theories, par-
ticularly developed within philosophy and sociology by, amongst others,
Bourdieu and Butler (a focus on practice), Deleuze and Guattari (vitalist
philosophies), Latour (actor-network theory), and Bennett and Massumi
(the idea of vibrant matter and the potential of the ‘event’). In these ways
of thinking, sociality in the city cannot be thought of separately from
materiality. Rather, they are co-constituted, in process, fluid, multiple,
contingent, interconnected and unpredictable. This points to different
kinds of research on the social in cities, as we see shortly.
First, though, what kinds of critiques have emerged in relation to these
approaches? The predominant argument, with which I have some sympa-
thy given the focus of my early research on gender and more recently on
differences more widely, is that relations of power can easily be forgotten
and eradicated from these accounts. If everything is possible, in process
and contingent, how can we make sense of social inequality in the city and
divisions which seem hard to shift, and which are rarely fluid? In the last
decade or more, in many cities, there has been a growing economic and

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 Sociality, materiality and the city  ­333

social inequality (Piketty, 2014) where the lives of rich people in almost
every respect bear no relation to those on low or no incomes, and even
to the middle classes. In a recent study of the North London borough of
Highgate, Webber and Burrows (2016) expose the increasingly rarefied
and privileged lives of the rich in what they term the ‘Alpha Territory’.
These divisions are materially driven, in particular through fast rising
house prices in global cities, and the spatial arrangements of cities where
some have access to resources and amenities, and others do not. Gender
relations in many cities are also far from fluid, entrenched in relations
of power, where violence and rape (e.g. Kabeer, 2015), or exclusion
from the public sphere or inability to gain access to resources, constitute
everyday life for women. Meanwhile, there has also been an increase in
racist attacks, particularly towards Muslims, across most European and
American cities following the 2015 attacks in Paris.
Second, and relatedly, the question has been put as to what remains
of the human in relational thinking and in this ‘ontological flattening of
the world into an undifferentiated sea of actants, machines, objects or
entities’ (Simpson, 2013, p. 180). Simpson (2013, p. 193) addresses this
question by arguing for an ‘ecological approach’ that focuses attention
on the ‘irreducible interrelation of the organism-and-its-environment
rather than, for example, the tracing of the coupling or de-coupling of
actants in a network as with [actor-network theory] . . . or the processes
of assembly and disassembly of assemblages as in assemblage theory’. In
this view, organisms are always enmeshed with the environment, such that
the place to start is with the relations themselves, which thus gives agency
to the ‘full range of vibrant materials that populate the environment, both
“thingly” objects and ambient-atmospheric conditions’ (Simpson, 2013,
p. 193). According to Simpson, an ecological approach thus brings to light
patterns, routines and norms that are relatively stable and organized, and
rather than imposing a top-down structural imposition, it opens up an
‘affective, molecular micropolitics whereby continuity emerges in the not
already (pre) determined circulation of habits, routines and discourses in
and through the playing out of the ecologies of practice’ (Simpson, 2013,
p. 194). Such an approach arguably goes some way to opening up the pos-
sibility of addressing relations of power in the formation of social worlds.
Tonkiss (2013) approaches the materiality/sociality of a city through
the lens of urban design. For her, then, the physical forms of the city – the
housing stock, the buildings, the distributions and densities of the popula-
tion, the transport systems, as well as the public/private relation – are all
produced by the social, economic and political designs for the city. In
this view, urban design objectives such as connectivity, permeability and
accessibility are not just spatial objectives – they are social objectives also.

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 334  Handbook of urban geography

In this sense, they have to be read together. Her point is that a narrow
definition of urban design as physical is inadequate. Rather, it should
include policy and legal design also, as well as other forms of design –
social, economic and organizational – which impact on city life. This thus
represents another route into thinking through the material and social
connection and interrelatedness in the city.
In 2014, Amin usefully took stock of the current state of social science
thinking with his notion of ‘lively infrastructure’ (Amin, 2014). The key
aspects of this are the thinking together of the social and the material/
technological, where these are imagined as ‘hybrids of human and non-
human association, with infrastructure conceptualized as a sociotechnical
assemblage, and urban social life as never reducible to the purely human
alone’ (Amin, 2014, p. 138). In such accounts, sociality in the city can
only be conceived of in relation to the liveliness of sociotechnical systems.
Amin categorizes the breadth of new thinking in three ways: that which
approaches the city as a ‘provisioning machine’ – the sociotechnicalities
involved in the distribution of services and resources; that which focuses
on the symbolic power, affective and aesthetic qualities of the urban
infrastructure; and thirdly, that which shows how visible and invisible,
grand and everyday, infrastructures are implicated in individual and social
experiences of the city shaping identities.
There are so many different studies that have deployed different ver-
sions of these accounts in empirical case studies, to positive and intriguing
effect, which cannot be covered here. Amin (2014), for example, takes his
ideas on lively infrastructure to compare land occupations favela in Belo
Horizonte in Brazil where he suggests that in the first case, the visibility of
infrastructure was important in the construction of sociality and political
claims, and in the latter case, where the invisibility of provisioning from
the trunk road infrastructure made possible the opportunities for residents
to exercise their citizenship. Simpson (2013), in an entirely different kind
of place and study, deploys his ecological approach through looking
at embodied experiences in practice, specifically street performance in
the city of Bath. His point is that performing bodies co-emerge with the
affective atmospheres of a specific ecology – and are themselves made up
of multiple ‘organisms-in-their environments’ (Simpson, 2013, p. 186).
Molotch and Noren (2010) explore public toilets/restrooms in New York,
exploring how their design makes for certain forms of sociality and organ-
izes bodies in particular ways. Thus, the person in the wheel chair and the
young mother with a pushchair are constituted as subjects in common
with similar concerns facing similar forms of exclusion in restricted spaces.
These are but to mention three of the many case studies informed by these
approaches.

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 Sociality, materiality and the city  ­335

21.4  MAKING PUBLICS

Sociality in the city happens and is performed in a multiplicity of sites,

some of which could be designated public, some private and some in
between or liminal, since private/public boundaries are blurry and hard to
define. In the discussion which follows I refer to some of my own attempts
to research the co-constitution of sociality and materiality in the arena of
public space. In recent years, much of the writing on public space, social
life and the making of publics has paid some attention to how the design
and shape of cities affected social life as we saw earlier, but mostly took the
material world as largely inert. The city and its public spaces were extolled
for their potentialities for its ‘openness to unassimilated otherness’ and
the co-mingling and encounter of strangers (Young, 1990, p. 2), for richer
types of relationships amongst strangers (Sennett, 1990) and for providing
possibilities for informal, mundane and everyday encounters between
strangers for ‘rubbing along’ (Watson, 2006, p. 2). In much of this discus-
sion of the public realm and public space, the city is dematerialized, it has
no physical substance or solidity.
In the last decade, my research into public space has itself taken a more
material turn. In 2010 a group of us at the Open University, Amsterdam
University and New York University were involved in framing a project
on mundane objects in public space which saw them as actively engaged
with making the social (Carter et al., 2011). The method of the project
took as its starting point the conception of city objects as materializations
of the actions of humans (designers, stakeholders, engineers, street clean-
ers, citizens) and non-humans (rules, laws, standards, prescriptions, plans)
that are both present and absent. Thus, city objects – bollards, benches,
bins, alarms – were understood as minor actants in the city yet microcosms
that contain the whole city and are witnesses to the forces, wills, relations,
subjectivities and power that make it up. The idea behind the project was
to work through controversies and events – such as the moments of their
making or remaking – we can identify and make visible those relations and
forms of sociality that are materialized in and through city objects. We
saw this as a way of understanding how objects are methods themselves
for governing and ordering the city, as technologies for the strategic order-
ing of cities. But rather than a functionalist interpretation of the object, it
aimed to open up questions of the relations, effects, indeterminacies and
politics of object interventions. To take one example, in an exploration of
the manuals and the websites for the product, street furniture comes alive
as an object enrolling human subjects into particular modes of action and
interaction through its very design. Davis (1990) famously showed how

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 336  Handbook of urban geography

the street benches in Los Angeles were designed to deter the homeless from
sleeping on them.
More recently I have turned to the matter of water to explore its role
as a vibrant actor in making urban cultures and assembling multiple
publics (Watson, 2019). In another study of a material public space – the
laundry (Watson, 2015) – I explored how shifting laundry practices
and technologies associated with this mundane object have over time
summoned different spaces, socialities and socio-spatial assemblages in
the city, enrolling different actors and multiple publics and constituting
different associations, networks and relations in its wake as it travels
from the home and back again. Focusing on the ‘thingness’ of washing,
laundries and laundry spaces, I concluded by suggesting that doing the
laundry has shaped and reshaped public/private boundaries shifting from
privatized work in the home to the social spaces of the early wash houses,
public laundries of the philanthropic and social housing estates, or later,
of the launderette. As a private object made public through commercial
laundry practices it became visible in the city in a different way, first in
the commercial laundries scattered across the cities, and in its circulation
in laundry vans on a daily basis, and later as a commonplace site in the
launderettes of city high streets and in local neighbourhoods. As washing
machines and tumble driers became more affordable, laundry practices
once again departed the public sphere, reprivatized in the home, with the
‘public laundry’ of the service sectors, and the laundry of the minority
upper classes, remaining the only dirty washing to move through the city
to the remaining commercial laundries on the fringes of cities out of sight.
This mundane object thus has had a mobile and shifting history enacting
multiple socio-spatial, and gendered, relations and assemblages in the city,
which have largely gone unnoticed in accounts of everyday urban life.
On another terrain, that of everyday religious practices in the city, I
have been interested in exploring the materialities of religious attach-
ments (Dodsworth et al., 2013). In a study of attachments to religious
sites in East London, our concern was to explore the mobilities and
interconnections which are central to the formation of religious life and
its architectures in cities. Religious practice and participation in religious
communities have long been important for new migrants to the city as they
seek spaces of belonging in a sometimes strange and alien world. Different
groups of people, and migrants with different religious affiliations, settle
and become attached to religious sites in different ways across time and
space, making up multiple publics in the city and creating new urban
materialities and cultures. Some people choose to place themselves out of
sight and away from the regulating eyes of the mainstream community,
while others, the more dominant and confident communities, build large

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 Sociality, materiality and the city  ­337

religious buildings in the heart of the city, displaying their prominence and
confidence in no uncertain way.
In our research in the East End of London, which is an area of huge
ethnic/racial and cultural diversity, we explored how religious communities
form and stabilize attachments to their worshippers in the context of the
significant demographic, economic and social flux. What we found was that
the mechanisms devised to practice faith, spread the word and form attach-
ment between worshippers and their community, extended far beyond mat-
ters of identity or even religious belief: those religious groups that were able
to assemble durable communities did so by forming an assemblage that was
at once liturgical, material, organizational, and social. At the material level,
the very construction of religious buildings generated a physical presence in
the city, which represented the community to itself and others in confident
ways, while also providing spaces of sociality and connection. Internally,
the material artefacts of the site enacted particular forms of religiosity and
sociocultural practices that generated and assembled often marginalized
groups into their spaces. Across a range of religious sites – Christian,
Jewish and Muslim – embodied and material practices were thus revealed
as crucial to religious attachments and socialities in the city.

21.5 CONCLUSION

This chapter has considered how sociality and materiality in the city are co-
constituted and mutually entangled in the city, which is itself a complex site
of interconnections and embodied entanglements. Cities are material/social
spaces which are formed and unformed in different configurations over time,
constituted by sociomaterial and technological connections and networks,
and entangled spaces of bodies, affects, things, urban infrastructures, pleas-
ures, aesthetics, which are formed within fluid temporalities, spaces of flows
and interconnections. Socialities, I have suggested, are performed, enacted
and constituted in the spaces, sites, infrastructures and built environments
of the city, while they themselves are also constitutive of the very city itself.
As the chapter has illustrated, sociality and materiality in the city have
in certain ways been conceived together in many writings on the city
prior to what is often referred to as the ‘material turn’. We have seen,
in the second section, that there was a diversity of ways of figuring and
imagining the material/social together which variously take account of
human and non-human association where sociality is seen as never distinct
from vibrant sociotechnical systems and assemblages. These new ways
of thinking sociality/materiality have produced a plethora of intriguing
studies, which shift, for example, the making and unmaking of publics and

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 338  Handbook of urban geography

differences and understandings of social worlds from earlier frameworks

which tended to disregard non-human actors in the city. Though these new
directions in urban theory have proved highly productive for rethinking
the city, I have argued that there is a danger, nevertheless, that the ‘social’
becomes flattened, and differences submerged, in a landscape sometimes
devoid of any attention to power. I have concluded the chapter with some
illustrations of how the material turn in urban geography and sociology
have impacted my own thinking and research.

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