Papers by Lindsay Bremner
Urban Geography, 2026
This paper offers a relational strategy for approaching the urban as elemental, focusing on the a... more This paper offers a relational strategy for approaching the urban as elemental, focusing on the airs of Chennai in South India. It contributes to the field of elemental urbanism, which is concerned with how earthly forces pervade and come to matter in and shape contemporary cities. It approaches these questions through a performative, Baradian methodology, whose analytical starting point is the author's immersion in Chennai's airs, from which what unfolds is then traced. After reviewing recent literature on the elemental and the atmospheric, the paper is divided into four sections that correspond with the aerial phenomena the author encountered in Chennai-breezes, cyclones, waves, and particulates. The paper incorporates two modes of writing-one embodied and intimate, the other historical and analytical. They link the personal to the political and are meant to be read diffractively through one another, to engender new insights and understandings of the relations between the two. The paper concludes by revisiting Barad's methodology, drawing out its ethical implications and suggesting an avenue for future elemental urban research.
Contested Good City Stories from a North Chennai Littoral
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. , 2025
This article investigates the wilful destruction of Ennore Creek, a littoral wetland system in no... more This article investigates the wilful destruction of Ennore Creek, a littoral wetland system in north Chennai, Tamil Nadu, by a series of shifting statist good city imaginaries expressed in plans, research reports, environmental impact assessments, government orders and court judgements. We show that these media built a powerful scaffold of legally sanctioned and
scientifically backed good city narratives that reformulated the creek as a sacrificial zone for sustainable development, economic growth and logistical urbanism. Framed through the analytic of the littoral, we interrogate these developmentalist narratives and the technologies they used to contain or dispossess the fluid materiality of the creek. We then develop the idea of amphibious activism to describe the actions of backwater fishers to care for and resist the further degradation of their life world. We suggest that their activism expresses what Michel Foucault
called a practice of liberty. It could not free them from the sets of relations in which they were embedded, but it enabled them to imagine and enact another way of life within them.
Anthropoecnes: Human, Inhuman, Posthuman , 2024
In this experimental visual essay, we follow an imaginary lump of coal across space and time from... more In this experimental visual essay, we follow an imaginary lump of coal across space and time from its Gondwanan beginnings, through its extraction from the Talcher Coalfields in Odisha in India, combustion in a thermal power plant in Ennore in Tamil Nadu, and into the future through its multitude of postcombustion afterlives. We do so through the figure of ‘anthropocene desire lines’, which draws on Karen Coelho’s idea of ‘water lines’ (Coelho 2022) and Gabrielle Hecht’s idea of ‘residual governance’ (Hecht 2023), to track how flows of earthly matter that begin in subterranean strata, and, mobilized by ideas of power, growth and national pride, result in indifference towards the molecular colonization of bodies, soils, waters and airs they produce (Mendes 2017). The essay compresses the deep, everyday and future times of coal and its geologic, territorial, microscopic and planetary scales into a single textual/visual narrative. In this way, it draws out simultaneities across time and interconnections across space, as a way of developing a relational Anthropocene imaginary.
Cultural Geographies, 2023
This paper is a reflective discussion of the research method developed by a small research team o... more This paper is a reflective discussion of the research method developed by a small research team over a 5-year period as it intra-acted with the south Asian monsoon in three south/southeast Asian cities. It reflects on how the team’s practice was transformed from being research on or about the monsoon as a discrete unit of analysis, to research in the monsoon and with its agential materiality. The paper first outlines the theoretical resources from cultural geography, anthropology, feminist theory, posthuman theory, and science and technology studies that the project drew from. After this theoretical section, the paper then discusses the practical implications of the method and the two emergent strands of research (‘weather matters’ and ‘construction matters’) that were followed in Chennai, Dhaka, and Yangon. The final section of the paper reflects on the extension of the method into the formatting of a book and an online exhibition. The paper concludes by arguing that what the method offers to cultural, weather-based research in monsoonal and other climes, is a situated, non-formulaic method that recognizes the affordances of the Earth’s agency, of matter and of other-than-human lives for generating knowledge of and ways of being in changing weather-worlds.
Architectural Design: Special issue Green New Deal Landscapes, 2022
In this paper, I investigate the historic, colonial, financial and contemporary dynamic between t... more In this paper, I investigate the historic, colonial, financial and contemporary dynamic between the Global North and the Global South, framed by the monsoon and climate justice.
Cities, 2000
After the discovery of the Witwatersrand gold reef in 1886, the city of Johannesburg became, with... more After the discovery of the Witwatersrand gold reef in 1886, the city of Johannesburg became, within a very short period of time, the financial and commercial hub of sub-Saharan Africa. It maintained this position throughout the earlier half of the twentieth century in the face of increasing opposition to the apartheid political system. By the late 1980s, however, this had
Jade urbanism
e-flux architecture, 2021
GeoHumanities, 2020
This paper is a thought experiment to attune to the geo-physical and geo-political materialities ... more This paper is a thought experiment to attune to the geo-physical and geo-political materialities of sediment, a terra-aqueous substance produced when the earth's continental surfaces intra-act with the atmosphere and are chemically transformed by it. The paper is framed by questions of how to engage more closely with the dynamics of earth systems and of how social and political agency emerges alongside earth forces. Sediment is important to such questions because it is the mechanism by which the earth recycles itself and is thick with the climatological and geological histories that have conditioned the possibility of life on the planet. While acknowledging the import of Deleuze and Guattari's metaphysics to such questions, the paper takes a material approach to them. It is based on field work in Bangladesh, but also traverses a range of scientific, historical and theoretical literature. It is arranged in four sections that loosely correspond to the sedimentary cycle. It follows sediment from chemical processes on rock surfaces in the Himalayas, to its lively travels in monsoonal rivers across flood plains to its eventual deposition and subterranean diagenesis. In each section, the paper discusses the material processes at work, their socio-political enmeshments and the theoretical implications of these intra-actions. The paper concludes that sediment serves as a reminder not only of close entanglements of geo-physical and geo-political becomings, but also of the profound indifference of earth systems to human affairs, and asks what this might mean for the re-imagination of politics.
Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2019
This paper approaches the floods of 2015 in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, as the consequence of pol... more This paper approaches the floods of 2015 in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, as the consequence of policies, plans and procedures that, over many years, had erased monsoon water and wetness from the city and its imaginary. In order to do this, it examines a number of plans that authorized spatial development in Chennai from the early 20th century onwards. It approaches them as urban cosmograms, in which heterogeneous entities were accommodated, congealed, concealed or expelled in the description of the urban territory and the composition of the urban world. The paper undertakes this analysis in order to deepen understanding of the relations between spatial planning, capitalist urbanization and the more-than-human vitalities of the monsoon. It approaches the flood waters that rose and fell in 2015 as a cosmopolitical situation and cause for thinking, which, putting people in the presence of the monsoon and its potency in new ways, forced them to confront the precariousness of their coexistence with it and experiment with ways to re-compose the urban monsoonal world differently. This discussion draws from Stenger's notion of cosmopolitics as a mode of collective practice that proceeds in the company of those who would otherwise be likely to be disqualified as having idiotically nothing to propose, including the more-than-human. The paper makes some critical observations about these experiments and concludes by speculating on whether planning itself might be envisaged as a more inclusive, cosmopolitical project.
Political Geography, 2019
This paper adopts a geosocial approach to sociopolitical research by thinking with sediment as a ... more This paper adopts a geosocial approach to sociopolitical research by thinking with sediment as a forceful mode of terraqueous mobility driven by interactions between dynamic earth systems inflected by social processes. It demonstrates that sediment is an active and vital state of matter, with the potential to erupt into and disrupt human politics. Unpacking sediment as a form of movement challenges assumptions of the earth as a stable platform on which socio-political processes play out. The paper develops its argument through analyses of the Rohingya refugee camps in southeast Bangladesh and a char (sediment) island in the Meghna Estuary to which Bangladesh proposes to relocate the refugees. In the first situation, the sedimentary logics of anticline geology, deforestation and monsoon rains push back against political agendas directed towards constraining refugee movement. In the second, fluvial and oceanic sedimentary dynamics and the post-Holocene volatility of the monsoon throw into doubt the engineering solution proposed by Bangladesh to the political problems the refugee presence poses. Through these examples, the paper adds to literature on how states of matter inflect, exceed, undercut or in other ways interfere with matters of state through their unique, dynamic environmental properties.
Migrant, 2017
Interview with Damaso Randulfe
In my recent work on the Maldives (Bremner, 2016), I drew on Philip Hayward’s notion of the aquap... more In my recent work on the Maldives (Bremner, 2016), I drew on Philip Hayward’s notion of the aquapelago (Hayward 2012a, 2012b) to theorize the Maldives and to develop a new metageographical concept for architecture in today’s globalized world. In this short contribution to Shima Debates, I will highlight my observations on the the Maldives and the concept of the aquapelago occasioned by this work.
This paper examines two sites in the Bay of Bengal as evidence of new economic and political logi... more This paper examines two sites in the Bay of Bengal as evidence of new economic and political logics that are restructuring relations between land and sea. It is extracted from my longer paper 'Folded Ocean', but includes original graphic material not previously published.
This article takes up the charge of thinking architecture with one of the Indian Ocean’s central ... more This article takes up the charge of thinking architecture with one of the Indian Ocean’s central coral atoll formations, the Maldives archipelago. It is undertaken as a critique of the concept of the archipelago as deployed in architecture since the 1970’s. Architects have used the archipelago as a metaphoric metageographical concept based on a land/sea binary, to conceive of architecture as autonomous from its environments. This permits the discipline exemption from its contexts and frames its engagement with the diverse mobilities of contemporary globalization. To counter this, the article draws from a broad body of literature familiar to readers of GeoHumanities, namely island studies, urban island studies, political ecology and thinking with water to undertake a reading of the Maldives as an oceanic aquapelago, as an alternative metageographical concept for architecture in today’s globalized world.
Journal of the Indian Ocean Region, Dec 6, 2014
This paper gives an account of the disappearance of Malaysian Airways Flight MH370 into the south... more This paper gives an account of the disappearance of Malaysian Airways Flight MH370 into the southern Indian Ocean in March 2014 and analyses the rare glimpses into
remote ocean space this incident opened up. It follows the tenuous clues as to where the aeroplane might have come to rest after it disappeared from radar screens – seven
satellite pings, hundreds of pieces of floating debris and six underwater sonic recordings – as ways of entering into and thinking about ocean space. The paper pays attention to and analyses this space on three registers – first, as a fluid, more-than human materiality with particular properties and agencies; second, as a synthetic situation, a composite of informational bits and pieces scopically articulated and
augmented; and third, as geopolitics, delineated by the protocols of international search and rescue. On all three registers – as matter, as data and as law – the ocean is shown to be ontologically fluid, a world defined by movement, flow and flux, posing intractable difficulties for human interactions with it.
Journal of the Indian Ocean Region, 2013
This paper presents experimental research on the Indian Ocean being undertaken within the context... more This paper presents experimental research on the Indian Ocean being undertaken within the context of what has been termed architecture's contemporary geographic turn.
Social Dynamics, Sep 20, 2013
Major accounts of globalisation from a built environment perspective bring global cities and cele... more Major accounts of globalisation from a built environment perspective bring global cities and celebrity architects into focus. In this paper, I resist this and give an account of globalisation from the perspective of one of its minor architectures. A minor architecture is not a minor architectural language, but rather one that a minority constructs within a major language, encoding it differently and subverting its prevailing myths. The paper investigates this proposition by focusing on Lamu, the historic Islamic seaport and World Heritage Site on the northern coast of Kenya where a skirmish between local, national and global interests is currently underway over the construction of a new deep-water port. The port is a building site, not only of one of globalisation's major architectures a port, free economic zone and transportation corridor, but also of one of its minor ones, taking shape through the strategies Lamu's organisations are deploying to object it. Through the analysis of Lamu in the longue duréeits coastal geomorphology and historic spatial protocols, I read these strategies as contemporary deployments of those long put to work at Lamu, through which land-and sea-based logics have been entangled.
Urban Forum 24(4), Dec 2013
The discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886 that gave rise to the exploitation of the worl... more The discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886 that gave rise to the exploitation of the world’s largest gold reserves inaugurated new associations of air and earth, science and politics, humans and nonhumans. Very rapidly, these were organised into two apparently distinct realms—an aboveground world of capital, commerce, culture and politics and a belowground world of labour, minerals, rocks and science. Yet the two realms were deeply interconnected, and the threshold between them was always, literally and figuratively, in danger of collapsing. In this paper, I explore the use of legislation and cartography to stabilise this section and keep the two realms apart, and the aesthetic practices that portrayed their interrelatedness. I then chronicle the incursion of acid mine water, a geological by-product of mining operations, from the mining voids into the above-ground world of human affairs. This not only made the invisible processes of its commodification visible but also became a proposition around which new forms of political life have been assembled.
Third Text, Vol 27, no. 1: 44-53, Jan 2013
This article tells a story of the entanglement of human and non-human actors in contemporary prac... more This article tells a story of the entanglement of human and non-human actors in contemporary practices in Bangladesh. It claims the agency of nature in shaping geopolitical forces, which in turn encroach on nature itself. It adopts an ecological perspective, viewing ecology as a pluralistic practice that permeates the earth's minorities and socialities with catalytic energy. It attempts to decentre a humanist narrative in favour of earthobjects as a way to engage a politics of entanglement with things. 1 Tracing this history will present the conditions under which current anti-capitalist struggles in the environmental regime in Bangladesh occur.
Environment and Planning A 45: 1260-1261, Jun 2013
The growth of the taxi industry in South Africa since the 1980s has been viewed as one of the cou... more The growth of the taxi industry in South Africa since the 1980s has been viewed as one of the country's great socioeconomic success stories by advocates of the free market (Magamola, 1990), while others have exposed it as a mafia-styled operation characterized by feuding, turf wars, illegal business dealings, and labour exploitation (Khosa, 1992). Whichever view one holds, the industry has incontestably brought about new claims on urban space, new platforms for experimentation with governmentality and urban design, and new relations between the body and the city (Bremner, 2012). Unique to taxi operations is a system of hand signals whereby commuters signal their desired destination to taxi drivers. This aligns gestures, bodies, infrastructure, and the city in new ways.
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Papers by Lindsay Bremner
scientifically backed good city narratives that reformulated the creek as a sacrificial zone for sustainable development, economic growth and logistical urbanism. Framed through the analytic of the littoral, we interrogate these developmentalist narratives and the technologies they used to contain or dispossess the fluid materiality of the creek. We then develop the idea of amphibious activism to describe the actions of backwater fishers to care for and resist the further degradation of their life world. We suggest that their activism expresses what Michel Foucault
called a practice of liberty. It could not free them from the sets of relations in which they were embedded, but it enabled them to imagine and enact another way of life within them.
remote ocean space this incident opened up. It follows the tenuous clues as to where the aeroplane might have come to rest after it disappeared from radar screens – seven
satellite pings, hundreds of pieces of floating debris and six underwater sonic recordings – as ways of entering into and thinking about ocean space. The paper pays attention to and analyses this space on three registers – first, as a fluid, more-than human materiality with particular properties and agencies; second, as a synthetic situation, a composite of informational bits and pieces scopically articulated and
augmented; and third, as geopolitics, delineated by the protocols of international search and rescue. On all three registers – as matter, as data and as law – the ocean is shown to be ontologically fluid, a world defined by movement, flow and flux, posing intractable difficulties for human interactions with it.