ABSTRACT
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.
