ABSTRACT
In Chapter 2, the city was exemplified as the metabolic and social transformation of nature through human labor, a "hybrid" of the natural and the cultural, the environmental and the social. Entering the city posits the city as flow, flux, and movement, and suggests social, material, and symbolic transformations and permutations. Yes, the city is a material entity, a "thing", but this thing exists in a perpetual state of transformation and change; it is a perpetual passing through deterritorialized materials. Harvey, Sennet, Castells, and Merrifield,2 to name but a few, have depicted the city as a circulatory conduit, a flux that is always material (in all possible senses, including symbolic and discursive flows), but never fixed. Deleuze and Guattari capture this dialectic of process and thing in their definition of the city:
The town is the correlate of the road. The town exists only as a function of circulation and of circuits; it is a singular point on the circuits which create it and which it creates. It is defined by entries
and exits: something must enter and exit from it. It imposes a frequency. It effects a polarization of matter, inert, living or human; it causes the phylum, the flow, to pass through specific places, along horizontal lines. It is a phenomenon of transconsistency, a network, because it is fundamentally in contact with other towns. It represents a threshold of deterritorialization because whatever the material involved, it must be deterritorialized enough to enter the network, to submit to polarization, to follow the circuit of urban and road recoding. The maximum deterritorialization appears in the tendency ... to separate from the backcountry, from the countryside.3
