This event is part of Cartography on the Frontline, a programme of events exploring the links between map making and war making, organised by the Livingmaps Network in partnership with Pushkin House.

In the same way that the figure of Vitruvian Man still governs the structure of built space, so the Roman military encampment is still implied in the social structures of the modern city. How does this affect how we inhabit the urban environment and what does it imply for how we imagine city dwellers?

Drawing on posthuman theory, Debra Benita Shaw will interrogate the way that architecture polices bodies and propose techniques for thinking – and living – space differently. Phil Cohen, as discussant, will try to draw out the implications of this analysis for understanding how urban cartographies, especially those used by planners in the attempt to design out crime and social violence, relate to the militarisation of space.

---

Debra Benita Shaw is a Reader in Cultural Theory at the University of East London. She is the author of Women, Science and Fiction (2000), Women, Science and Fiction Revisited (2023), Technoculture: The Key Concepts (2009) and Posthuman Urbanism (2018). She has published extensively in the politics of technology and space from a critical posthumanist perspective and is also known as a literary critic specialising in science fiction.