Events

CHAIRPERSON

Asst Prof Dorothy Tang, Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore

PROGRAMME

ABSTRACT

This event brings together scholars to discuss The Social Properties of Concrete, a new edited volume by Eli Elinoff and Kali Rubaii that explores the deeply human character and the wide-ranging implications of concrete through essays by anthropologists, geographers, archaeologists, historians, artists, architects, urban planners, and science and technology scholars.

Concrete is a ubiquitous part of our world. It composes our dwellings and shapes our infrastructures. It unites and divides urban space and is used to wage both war and peace. Concrete is simultaneously an indicator of freedom and development and is an essential part of the carceral apparatus. The Social Properties of Concrete begins from the premise that concrete is as richly social as it is densely material. Just as concrete’s materiality permeates our everyday life, our political projects, social practices, religious concepts, environmental transformations, and ethical questions suffuse concrete structures.

Like concrete itself, The Social Properties of Concrete is an aggregate: it draws together essays by social scientists, historians, architects, artists, and urban planners who each blend social theory, material science, and empirical analysis to explore the ways in which social life is embedded within concrete and to inquire about how concrete shapes social life. Across forty globally situated chapters, these essays open new conversations around our relationships with anthropogenic stone and serve as a teachable introduction to the social and political lives of materials. By taking this approach, this volume develops a conceptual language and methodological approach that should inform new understandings of material politics and our built environment.

The social properties of concrete are neither metaphors nor are they simple reflections of the social. Instead, they are modes of materially enacting social, economic, and political life itself.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Eli Elinoff is a political and environmental anthropologist with research projects centered in Thailand and Southeast Asia. His research explores questions about citizenship, space, urbanization, aesthetics, infrastructures, architecture, the built environment, and environmental change. His book, Citizen Designs: City-Making and Democracy in Northeastern Thailand (University of Hawaii Press, 2021), describes how residents in the northeastern Thai city of Khon Kaen’s railway squatter communities used Thailand’s experiment in participatory urban planning as a means of reimagining their citizenship, remaking their communities, and acting upon their aspirations for political equality and the good life. Articles based on this research have been published in Anthropological Theory, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Contemporary Southeast Asia, and South East Asia Research. His second ethnographic project investigates political ecologies of concrete in Bangkok. Taking place in the wake of Thailand’s 2011 floods, the research engages with landscape architects, city officials, material engineers, activists, citizens, and artists to explore the ways in which concrete has transformed Southeast Asia’s ecologies both within concentrated urban spaces and beyond. Based on this research, he has published articles in CITY, International Development and Planning Review, and Cultural Anthropology Online.

Joshua Comaroff is a designer and cultural geographer. He studied literature and creative writing at Amherst College, before completing the M.Arch and MLA degrees at Harvard Graduate School of Design (the former with distinction). He also received a PhD in geography from the University of California Los Angeles in 2009. He has published writing about architecture, urbanism, religion, and politics, with an Asian focus. In particular, his research focuses upon the effect of material and immaterial practices in the experience of the city, and the affective potentials of architecture. He is the author of Spectropolis: Ghostly Capital and Ecologies of Disturbance in Singapore (coming fall 2025, University of Minnesota Press) and, with Associate Professor Ong Ker-Shing, co-author of Horror in Architecture (University of Minnesota Press, 2023). He is the co-founder of Lekker Architects, an award-winning practice focused on design innovation and qualitative research methods. The work of the practice has earned a President’s Design Award Design of the Year in 2023 for Hack Care: Tips and Tricks for a Dementia-Friendly Home and again in 2016 for Caterpillar’s Cove Childcare and Development Centre. He was also awarded the Wheelwright Fellowship in 2005-2006.

Saptarshi Sanyal is an architectural historian exploring spaces and buildings as processes rather than just objects in historical narratives. His research questions ideas of modernity, traversing postcolonial studies, construction history, production studies, and the framing of architectural authorship. His current book project adopts a connected histories approach to uncover novel spatial imaginaries and experimentations within architecture during South Asia’s colonial rule in the twentieth century. It foregrounds how interpersonal empathies and contacts, exchanges of personnel, knowledge and materials across cultures and geographies translated into and transformed modes of producing buildings and inhabiting space. Prior to his role as Assistant Professor (History, Theory, Criticism) at the Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore, he was a faculty member at the School of Planning and Architecture New Delhi. His PhD at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London was awarded a UK government Commonwealth Scholarship, and his thesis won an honourable mention at the University of California, Berkeley’s South Asia Art and Architecture Dissertation Prize (2023). His research has appeared in Architecture Research Quarterly and Architecture Beyond Europe journals, and proceedings of the International Congress on Construction History and Structural Analysis of Historical Constructions conferences, among others.

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this hybrid talk has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to ziqi@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the event.