Of course, the connection of breath to questions of platform urbanism is indirect. I’ve argued elsewhere that the object of platform urbanism is the urbanisation of the body. What I mean by this is really only an extension of a logic that cohered in the nineteenth century and generalised spatial technologies and techniques to organise bodies in space – a logic that is, in part, the product of a larger, contemporaneous reconceptualisation of the human body that coincided with a new understanding of space from within the emerging centres of global power. The name of this political technology is urbanisation (or urbanisación, as it was first articulated).[1] What platform urbanism technologies offer is a kind of improvement of this, providing a host of far more intimate, invisible means by which to constantly access the body as an expansive site of extraction – a vessel which immediately converts its physical, psychic, biological and environmental relations to space and time into capital – and to entangle it as a subject of coercion and control.

But this is only a part of the story. Just as platform urbanism isn’t the product of Silicon Valley, urbanisation isn’t, of course, the product of nineteenth century modernism. It emerged over centuries prior to this, and its roots are far more grounded in archives and epistemologies of the body, as well as the reverberations between territorial technologies and those of colonial spaces, than in some industrial, modernising, western European spirit.[2]

I’d like to explain this by way of a personal aside: I’ve always been slightly allergic to some of the methodological rigour of architectural history. I feel it can be a crutch that precludes so many questions about the world that can be asked of architecture other than those we all too often find ourselves posing – questions which only now are suddenly deemed acceptable, even urgent. One of the risks we run when we restrict histories of space to periods, regions, figures or cultural markers (e.g. ‘modernism’) is that we sacrifice analyses of structures of power in the process. And, indeed, architectural history has never been a site from which trenchant studies of power have reliably emerged. When our focus is on the homogeneity and alignment of the material contained in certain historical archives – even (and perhaps especially) when we look to their fringes – we obscure reading how power is often constituted across the heterogeneity of these archives.

Such is the case with urbanisation. As I’ve written, architectural history has consistently made illegible something like urbanisation, as a spatio-political technology, precisely in the way it frames its analysis of the city: at best, it makes claims about the status of architecture, landscape and infrastructure, as products of an external power structure. This is because its allegiance is to other categories imposed onto, and thus constitutive of, archives of architectural history which have always rendered power as an externality to the aesthetic, technical production of space.

Working with and across the heterogeneity of archives, it becomes easier to detach the appearance of urbanisation in nineteenth century cities from the sway of ‘modernism’ and to instead read it as, to borrow Césaire’s notion, the ‘boomerang effect’ of colonial spatial technologies back into the metropoles.[3] Here, a certain nexus between the spatial ordering of infrastructure and domesticity and a reanimated form of administrative governance becomes legible as a form of power in itself, and the biopolitics of managing population that urban space enables found its first expression in the colonial spaces of plantations.[4] This is particularly clear in the writings of urbanists whose practices heralded a familiar civilising promise, this time as a liberal counterforce to the ‘barbaric’ excesses of the absolutist state, whose vestigial condition already assured the success of this new spatio-political technology. In the writings of Cerdá, for example, a scientific universalism, as well as the cold, administrative rationality found in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century colonial settlements, together inspire the unbounded imperialism he advocates for the urban, its terms replaying those of improvement and cultivation that authorised colonisation 1.0.

And perhaps most ironically, it was colonial settlements, reinterpreted through nineteenth century hygienic knowledge, that served as templates by which to reorganise European city spaces in order to avert the spread of airborne disease that the very same settlements had helped to unleash upon colonised indigenous people centuries prior. Here, the immunisation of breath for certain bodies is predicated on the technologies responsible for the historical poisoning of breath of countless other bodies: breath becomes a silent reminder of the biological dimensions of colonial violence and the genocidal histories it obscures.

Where breath becomes invisibilised for many, it conceals a site of violence that continues to occupy the breath of others. Breath maps out a topography of colonial power that has come to reveal itself in the rupture of our present. In a way, it isn’t surprising to trace the colonial history of breath – it is, after all, our most direct connection to and experience of a common we rarely recognise. Our breath is a component of a reciprocal circulation that makes us inseparable from the lifeworlds of the earth, which is precisely why we must attend to the ways in which breath may be enclosed, withdrawn and, who knows, even accumulated.