Modernity has often imagined knowledge as something that becomes legitimate when it is abstracted from situated experience, purified into formal logic, encoded into algorithms or delegated to expert systems. Yet the body repeatedly returns as the place where power becomes material: the disabled body excluded from inaccessible space, the racialised body exposed to pollution, the feminised body made responsible for care, the informal worker’s body absorbed into capitalist reproduction, the Indigenous body whose ecological knowledge is dismissed, and the urban citizen whose participation is invoked but rarely empowered. In this sense, the problem is not simply that institutions lack information, but that dominant systems decide in advance which bodies are credible and which forms of knowledge count. Smart-city governance, algorithmic decision-making and autonomous mobility often promise neutrality, efficiency and optimisation, but these promises conceal the political choices through which some lives are protected while others are rendered peripheral. The “smart citizen” becomes useful as an abstract figure, while real residents are excluded from the infrastructures that govern them. Similarly, urban infrastructure no longer operates only through pipes, roads and cables; it now reaches into air, care, ecological relations, digital systems and even cognition, modulating the conditions through which bodies breathe, move, feel, work and survive. Against this technocratic imaginary, care emerges as a radical political concept. Care is not sentimentality or private morality; it is the practical labour of sustaining interdependent life. Disability justice care webs, democratic theories of care, feminist accounts of social reproduction and local environmental struggles all show that bodies are never autonomous units but relational beings dependent on infrastructures, communities and ecological systems. Capitalism, however, exploits this dependency by making reproductive labour invisible, externalising care costs, and converting vulnerability into a source of profit. The same logic appears in urban metabolism: cities consume energy, water, labour and land while hiding the unequal burdens imposed on distant workers, marginalised neighbourhoods and non-human environments. To challenge this order requires an expanded politics of knowledge. Local residents mapping pollution, Indigenous communities preserving traditional ecological knowledge, disabled people designing collective access, and informal workers sustaining global production all demonstrate that embodied knowledge is not inferior to expertise; it is often the condition for understanding what expert systems cannot see. Even speculative accounts of oil, dust and geological agency remind us that power does not move only through human intention but through material forces that shape history. A just urban future therefore cannot be built through abstraction alone. It requires a politics that recognises bodies as sites of knowledge, care as infrastructure, and power as something embedded in the everyday organisation of mobility, labour, ecology and survival.
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