In this chapter I examine how materials constitute cities, and how these forms of

matter are continuously assembled and reassembled in changing configurations.

Recent work on mobilities has undermined commonsense notions that places are

discrete, self-contained entities. Instead, such work foregrounds how the city, as

a species of place, is always in a process of becoming, re-emerging as the ele-

ments which constitute it – including knowledge, people, non-humans and mate-

rialities – circulate from and through the city, sometimes settling and sometimes

moving outward. The relationalities between these elements, and their relation-

ships with the city, mean that they are also continually produced anew. Precisely

by investigating ideas which foreground relationality and circulation, we are able

to ‘disturb bipolar logics of . . . the mobile and the immobile, and suggest the co-

constitution of embodiments, landscapes, and systems of local and global mobil-

ity’ (Sheller and Urry, 2006: 216). Here, I will exemplify this continuing spatial and

material reproduction by exploring the continuing use of building stone in central

Manchester. I will highlight some relationalities between the city and sites of

supply, and show how these connections continually augment and complicate

urban material composition and distribution. I will, first, provide a basis for the

discussion by outlining recent ideas about networks and materiality, and

the impermanent qualities of (building) matter, before more closely investigating

the always changing distribution of building stone in Manchester.