In this episode of URBAN NATURE, Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick Stuart Elden and Gabriel Kozlowski talk about the intersections between people, place, and power, in relation to concepts such as territory, understood as a political technology, and terrain, as the physical materiality of territory. The discussion touches on Lefebvre’s formulations on the rural, Foucault’s notion of milieu, and ideas around a Politics of the Earth.
“It’s very easy to think that in the past the world was organized in a similar way it is today, except that the borders were different places and that there were different regimes within them.” – Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Theory and Geography at University of Warwick
“Terrain has got something that’s interesting even though it’s got a problematic history, but it was something to try and grasp a problem. I think Foucault was probably also trying to grasp the same kind of problem with his use of the notion of milieu.” – Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Theory and Geography at University of Warwick
“On 1974 [Lefebvre] writes up the theory, but he’s done all this work beforehand on the rural, on the urban, and on various different places that enables him to write that theoretical study. So we thought that the rural work would be a kind of corrective to the way he got read as just the urban guy, or the production of space.” – Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Theory and Geography at University of Warwick