Enlivened City: Inclusive Design, Biopolitics, and the Philosophy of Liveability

Shortly after the United States announced its withdrawal from the Paris climate accords, mayors of global cities committed to addressing climate change via urban-scale projects aimed at promoting liveable, sustainable, and healthy communities. While such projects are taken for granted as serving the common good, this paper addresses the ideological dimensions of planning liveable cities with health promotion in mind. Liveability, I argue, is a normative ideology wherein liveliness and activation perform aff ective roles, associating urban design methods with feel-good imagined futures while rendering built structures as polemics against disabled and racialized populations. Using Nashville, Tennessee, a mid-sized US city, as a case study, the paper parses the progressive vision of the liveable city from the ideologies, political economies, and development practices that simultaneously activate some lives while excluding others.