Engineering exception: the limits to a biopolitical notion of urban space

For the Italian philosopher Georgio Agamben, the political is reduced to the constitution of a sovereign power capable of securing the passage from a 'territorial space' to a 'population space': the transition that takes a natural life into a civic realm. However, Agamben signals that this political process is always unstable and incomplete: the meaning of life never ceases to be challenged and reviewed. As a result, the consistency of modern cities is defined by the proliferation of spaces of exception, where power confronts unprotected and bare-bodies, inscribing excluded social circles within the bounded totality of urban realm. For Agamben, the production of modern space is organized around the exceptions inscribed by a sovereign power that can no longer align forms of life and juridical rules in a determinate space. In this presentation I would like to explore the limits of Agamben's notion of urban space. I will describe how by reducing the moment of crafting the polis to a juridical relation, the essential political passage from zoe to bios treats space as a subordinate and pre-given entity. I will argue that the inscription of a political realm, implies not only a problematization over the value of life, but also about the modes of assembling and producing space itself. Exception needs to be engineered: how and which materials can be joined and gathered is also part of the political. The notions of materiality and assemblage will be used to illustrate this point.