2013 URBAN GEOGRAPHY PLENARY LECTURE Situating the Anthropocene: planetary urbanization and the anthropological machine Sue Ruddick* Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto, 100 St George Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5S 3G3 (Received 13 May 2015; accepted 8 July 2015) The anthropological machine is the discursive framework, the dispositif that grounds “Western man” in a sense of civility, secured through a violent division within and between the human and nonhuman: not the after-effect of the civilizing act but its very foundation. This paper explores Agamben’ s machine at multiple sites: in its expression in everyday lives of urban citizens, and its legitimation of capitalist urbanization on broader spatial and temporal scales, its “worlding” through planetary urbanization and normal- ization of climate change. Complicit in capitalist urbanization and climate change, the anthropological machine has acted as a “switch point” since the 1600s. It now frames an emergent response: triage as the inevitable sacrifice of some peoples and parts of the planet to preserve others. If the urban is to become the site of mondialization, confronting the apparent inevitability of triage we must think beyond the either-or of a people or a planet. Thought in relation to the urban, the anthropological machine offers a meeting ground between urban political economy and assemblage urbanism. It enables us to situate the Anthropocene and differentiate the urban. But it also exposes a deep divide between scholars reframing the human beyond “Western man”: between those for whom the more-than-human expresses the dreams of a biophilic city and those for whom the less-than-human is increasingly its living nightmare. Keywords: anthropological machine; climate change; planetary urbanization; assemblage urbanism; dispositif; Anthropocene Prologue: Zoltan and the coyote In my hometown of Toronto, Canada, in the space of one week in March 2013, local citizens witnessed two events. The first event, a meeting in my neighborhood of the Beach, was sparked by the recent predation by a coyote, dubbed “Neville” by local residents, that denned in the ravine off Neville Park. Neville’ s victims included Zoe, a six-year-old chihuahua, in 2009; Cujo, a small Maltese, in 2013; and possibly several cats that were reported missing over the past few years. Following the unprovoked police shooting of a coyote at the neighboring Cherry Beach and anxious to preserve the life of Neville, Beach residents met to discuss strategies for coexistence, including keeping small, delicious pets and children indoors and off the menu. The second event that same week, which received much less attention in the press, was the police shooting, at a Burger King near Keele Street and Wilson Avenue, of a 23-year-old young man, Zoltan Hyacinth, who died on 17 March 2013. The details of the shooting, while important, are less remarkable here than the fact that Zoltan’ s mother *Email: Ruddick@geog.utoronto.ca Urban Geography , 2015 Vol. 36, No. 8, 1113–1130, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2015.1071993 © 2015 Taylor & Francis