Plastic Urbanism: Exploring Catherine Malabou’s Concept of Plasticity and Its Urban Implications

This article aims to theorize ‘plastic urbanism’ by investigating two bodies of work. The first is to analyze Malabou’s theories of plasticity by reviewing her central books and articles. She differentiates plasticity from flexibility, in a way to consider the former as an irreversible –and often destructive– force that constitutes the essence of the world and becomes a threshold enabling to perform the critique of capitalism and also anarchically think and act. Meanwhile, the second is to take plasticity as an impetus in exploring the relationship between the Anthropocene and urban theory. Plastic is often considered an environmentally problematic material threatening sustainable urban lives. It also represents a morally charged symptom that needs to be administratively solved. I argue that such approaches neglect the affective and perceptive complexities of plastic, as its materiality, transformability, and explosiveness lie beyond anyone’s control and expectations. In elaborating on these complexities, I will focus on reading three select texts against the grain: Malabou’s article on the Anthropocene, Ranjan Ghosh’s plastic speculation, and Kim Kullman’s extension of plasticity into urban theory. By putting these analyses together, I explore how plasticity can open up new ways of thinking about the intricate relationships between plastic and the contemporary form of life, brain and environment, spectacle and affect, and the city’s materiality and its agential and affective (dis)abilities. Explicating plasticity encourages us to rethink what urbanism can and cannot do, thereby addressing its operative and inoperative dimensions in contradistinction to the overemphasis of rationality, relationality, communicability, and solidarity.