The Anthropocene as Age

Reintroduced in a short article entitled ‘Geology of Mankind’ (Nature 2002), the term ‘Anthropocene’ is much debated, far from unanimous among geologists and stratigraphers. It is a vertigo-inducing term, equating terrestrial metamorphoses with a new geological era shaped by humans. The dazzling future, the impossibility of a holistic perspective, the unthinkability of historical time: in the face of catastrophe, reason is mobilized to understand the inconceivable, but also to map out escape routes, raising other vertiginous questions about the effects of the modes of action envisaged. Does an anthropocentric vision of the Earth not run the risk of repeating the biases of the ‘masters and possessors’ of nature, if it does not go beyond the rationalities of action that contributed to its making?

To discuss the concept and framework of the Anthropocene, this paper considers the city as an inhabited environment whose complexity lies in the depth of its strata and the condensing of its memories so that ‘the space contains compressed time’ (Bachelard 1957). Since its birth as a discipline of spatial ecology, urbanism has borne witness to the historical aporia of (con)figuring the large city, which is shaped by global issues of interdependence, crisis, conquest and exteriority. While they attest to a change of scale, urban ‘objects’ are established on a spatial ‘ground’ that is not a blank page. They inherit a past as much as they disrupt a given situation. They consolidate the heterogeneity of space, the diversity of uses, the interweaving of political and vernacular structures. In looking at the age of Anthropocene through the materiality of urban space, it is possible to detect the intertwining of desynchronized temporalities, of projects escaping the intentions of their initiators through a whole series of effects and unintended consequences, due to the entanglement of human and non-human causalities.