My work on cyborg urbanization has been both an exploration of the material experience of urban space – our reliance on complex technological networks for survival – but also an engagement with metaphors in urban discourse. I think our choice of words is important: too many contemporary urban metaphors are either warmed-over nineteenth-century concepts or a pot-pourri of the latest scientific ideas used for rhetorical effect. I want to use the cyborg concept as a way of exploring not only the vulnerability of the human body but also ways of re-thinking what is meant by the public realm as a shared set of interests. I have recently extended my work on corporeal themes to light, sound, and the affective atmospheres of late modernity.
