While urban environments are commonly characterised and studied as nodes in international networks of migration, economics, cultures, and policies, they are also sites for everyday embodied experience through which cultures and identities are performed and produced in dynamic ways. As such, they cannot be understood as fixed entities but as ever-unfolding spatial processes. This paper examines the role that embodied experience plays in this process, taking as its locus the question: How are cities and city-bodies co-produced and performed by pedestrians?. Following the work of Elizabeth Grosz (1992) and Manuel DeLanda (2016), I argue that cities are assemblages of intersecting topographies, climates, cartographies, architectures, and bodies. These bodies both make and are made by urbanity, just as urbanity makes and is made by these bodies. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Lisbon, Portugal, I explore how a “Lisbon-body” is produced in the interaction between space and embodied walking practice in geographically and culturally-specific ways. Furthermore, I argue that the flows and frictions that result from moving through Lisbon complicate binary frameworks that are often used to study cities: global and local, past and present, human and non-human (and more). In doing so, I argue that cities are not just physical points of interconnection, but as an object of study, urban assemblages require research approaches and methodologies that challenge the boundaries of academic disciplinarity itself.
Lucy Petchel (Sat,) studied this question.