Building stone in Manchester: networks of materiality, circulating matter and the ongoing constitution of the city

Edensor, Timothy J. (2010) Building stone in Manchester: networks of materiality, circulating matter and the ongoing constitution of the city. In: Re-shaping cities: how global mobility transforms architecture and urban form. Routledge. ISBN 9780415492911

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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.