The Habitat III Conference's New Urban Agenda hails a "paradigm shift" for pursuing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, the new call for "safe, resilient, sustainable and inclusive cities" remains path dependent on old methodological tools (e.g. indicators), techno-managerial solutions (e.g. smart cities), and institutional frameworks of an ecological modernization paradigm that did not work. Pursuing a new urban paradigm within this old framework can only act as immunology: it vaccinates citizens and environments so that they can take larger doses of inequality and degradation in the future; it mediates the effects of global socio-environmental inequality, but does little towards alleviating it. Indeed, an increasing number of communities across the world now decline these immunological offers. Instead, they rupture path dependency and establish effective alternative methods for accessing housing, healthcare, sanitation, etc. I argue that real smart solutions and real social innovation are to be found not in consensus-building exercises, but in these dissensus practices that act as living indicators of what/where urgently needs to be addressed.

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This article studies the western bourgeois home, and argues that its social construction as a familiar, autonomous, safe, private haven is predicated not only upon the exclusion of undesired social elements (anomie, homelessness, social conflict, etc.) but also upon the exclusion of undesired natural elements (cold, dirt, pollution, sewage, etc.). Using the domestication of water in the western world as a vehicle, the article analyses the historical‐geographical process through which nature became scripted as ‘the other’ to the bourgeois home, and explains the contribution of this separation to the conceptual construction of the home as a distinct and autonomous ‘space envelope’, supposedly untouched by socio‐natural processes. This analysis identifies an inherent contradiction: despite the intense efforts at ‘othering’ and excluding nature from the premises of the home, the function and familiarity of this space is increasingly dependent upon the production of nature. Although the complex set of socio‐natural networks, pipes and cables that carry clean, produced, commodified nature inside and pump bad, metabolized nature outside the bourgeois home remain visually excluded, it is this same excluded socio‐nature that constitutes the material basis upon which the familiarity of the home is constructed. Thus, in a simultaneous act of need and denial, the bourgeois home remains the host of the elements that it tries to exclude. This contradiction surfaces at moments of crisis (such as power cuts, burst mains and water shortage) when familiar objects acquire uncanny properties. At such moments, the continuity of the social and material processes that produce the domestic space is unexpectedly foregrounded, bringing the dweller face to face with his/her alienation, within his/her most familiar environment. Cet article montre comment la construction sociale de la maison bourgeoise occidentale, en tant que refuge privé, sécurisé, autonome et familier, s'appuie sur l'exclusion d'éléments indésirables, tant sociaux (anomie, sans‐abri, lutte sociale, etc.) que naturels (froid, saleté, pollution, effluents, etc.). Comme véhicule, ce travail utilise la domestication de l'eau dans le monde occidental, et analyse le processus historico‐géographique par lequel la nature est devenue ‘l'autre’ pour la maison bourgeoise, tout en expliquant l'apport de cette séparation dans l'élaboration conceptuelle de la maison comme ‘enveloppe spatiale’ distincte et autonome, censée être préservée des processus sociaux‐naturels. Ainsi apparaît une contradiction intrinsèque: malgré d'intenses efforts visant à‘l'altérité’ et l'exclusion de la nature dans le principe, la fonction et la familiarité de la maison dépendent de plus en plus de la production de nature. L'ensemble complexe de réseaux sociaux‐naturels, tuyaux et câbles qui amènent une nature nettoyée, fabriquée, banalisée à l'intérieur et expulsent la nature mauvaise, métabolisée à l'extérieur de la maison bourgeoise, restent éliminés visuellement. Pourtant, c'est cette même socio‐nature ex...

Technological networks (water, gas, electricity, information etc.) are constitutive parts of the urban. They are the mediators through which the perpetual process of transformation of nature into city takes place. In this article, we take water and water networks as an emblematic example to excavate the shifting meanings of urban technological networks during modernity. Indeed, as water becomes commodified and fetishized, nature itself becomes re-invented in its urban form (aesthetic, moral, cultural codings of hygiene, purity, cleanliness etc.) and severed from the grey, 'muddy', kaleidoscopic meanings and uses of water as a mere use-value. Burying the flow of water via subterranean and often distant pinpointed technological mediations (dams, purification plants, pumping stations) facilitates and contributes to masking the social relations through which the metabolic urbanization of water takes place. The veiled subterranean networking of water facilitates the severing of the intimate bond between use value, exchange value and social power. We argue that during early modernity, technologies themselves became enshrined as the sources of all the wonders of the city's water. Dams, water towers, sewage systems and the like were celebrated as glorious icons, carefully designed, ornamented and prominently located in the city, celebrating the modern promise of progress. During twentieth-century high-modernity, the symbolic and material shrines of progress started to lose their mobilizing powers and began to disappear from the cityscape. Water towers, dams and plants became mere engineering constructs, often abandoned and dilapidated, while the water flows disappeared underground and in-house. They also disappeared from the urban imagination. Urban networks became 'urban fetishes' during early modernity, 'compulsively' admired and marvelled at, materially and culturally supporting and enacting an ideology of progress. The subsequent failure of this 'ideology of progress' is paralleled by their underground disappearance during high-modernity, while the abandonment of their 'urban dowry' announced a recasting of modernity in new ways. We conclude that the dystopian underbelly of the city that at times springs up in the form of accumulated waste, dirty water, pollution, or social disintegration, produces a sharp contrast when set against the increasingly managed clarity of the urban environment. These contradictions are becoming difficult to be contained or displaced. Copyright Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2000.