Locating Matter - 1 - For Material Powers: Essays Beyond Cultural Materialism, eds. Tony Bennett and Patrick Joyce Draft version: please do not cite without author’s permission Locating Matter: The Place of Materiality in Urban History Chris Otter, Ohio State University Of all the fields of historical study, urban history perhaps has the most reassuringly tangible, material focus. However the urban is understood, its physicality – in the form of buildings, streets, and pipes – is seldom in doubt. Yet cities have always been much more than dense collections of technologies and networks. They are sites of the symbolic, the poetic and the imaginary. The same urban modernity that produced electricity networks and municipal sewage systems produced The Interpretation of Dreams and Ulysses. Cities have also been the physical locus where abstract entities like social structure and capital have been most manifest. In cities, the material and the immaterial appear simultaneously opposed and intertwined. Throughout much of the twentieth century, a range of scholars tended to privilege the immaterial dimensions of the city over the material ones. Urban sociologists, for example, often followed Robert Park’s dictum that the city was ‘a state of mind’ (cited in Donald 1999: 8), and addressed social formations rather than physical ones. Even Marxist approaches to the city tended to study abstract forces of capital rather than the physical texture of urban space. The cultural turn merely amplified this trend towards immateriality. The material world featured in such analyses, to be sure, but it was relegated to a limited series of roles which left materiality as such largely unexamined. At present, this trend is beginning to be reversed. New and reworked theoretical tools, drawn from phenomenology, science studies, poststructuralism, post-Marxist materialism and environmental studies, have allowed scholars to approach urban materiality in ways which transcend the rather exhausted dichotomies of social-technical and cultural-natural.