CHASING THE SEINE
Geopoetics of Urban Rivers
Chicago to Seine, Calumet to Marne—and Beyond
June 12–13, 2025
“Paris is Centralization itself,” reads the reputed imperial dictum driving George Eugène Haussmann’s rationalization of the metropolis’s circulatory system; yet flood and drought, the migration of aquatic species and unchecked circulation of toxins remind us that the waters conditioning Parisian urbanism will not submit to centralization. While both Paris and Chicago as an aspiring “Paris on the Prairie” were modeled according to assumptions about the power of design to domesticate “landscape,” contemporary cities demand to be sensed in fluid terms as digestive systems and hybrid ecologies transgressing territorial boundary lines.
This symposium aims to connect humanists and artists with scientists, designers, urban planners, and geographers between Paris and Chicago (and beyond) in order to remap contemporary cities through the waterways that exceed the bounds of fetishized terrestrial zones—viewing urban experience through the lens of water that links urban centers to their peripheries and hinterlands. It posits that the perspective of the humanities and arts is crucial to maintaining a vision of the city as a pooling of planetary crises apprehensible at sporadic sites of rupture or deluge. It responds to Daniel Maximin’s call for the undoing of geopolitics through geopoetics—reimagining global community while eschewing the fantasies of stability at the heart of classical Western geography and geopolitics.
Our keynote evenings will open up a dialogue surrounding the parallel expanses of water and power; they will frame a binational symposium addressing challenges facing urban watersheds across the globe in a time of climate change, persistent colonization, and the diminishing effectiveness of regulatory apparatuses—when urban riversheds, long treated as waste sinks and logistics systems, are being sporadically reclaimed for wildlife and recreation, but also wielded as scenographic instruments of gentrification and control of political narratives. The conversation between da Cunha, Barles, and Coccia will challenge the production of the “river” as a contained ideological instrument and the extractivist and colonial perspective that has governed the manipulation of water in the modern age; the reading by Lisa Robertson will excavate the histories of production and obsolescence of the “river” as a site of gendered labor.
Chasing the Seine and the Permeable City: Sabine Barles and Dilip da Cunha in Dialogue with Emanuele Coccia
Opening Keynote Conversation
Thursday June 12, 5:00pm
Great Room, The University of Chicago John W. Boyer Center in Paris (41 rue des Grands Moulins)
Reception to Follow
Free and Open to the Public
Where is the Seine?
Dilip da Cunha (Columbia University)
There is not one, but three Seines—a terrestrial Seine, hydrologic Seine and oceanic Seine. Consequently, there is not one, but three Parises—an urban Paris, a fairweather Paris and an emergent Paris. Each furthers an imagination with significant consequences for the language of place and habitation, particularly in the face of climate change and a colonization that refuses to go away.
Dilip da Cunha is an architect and planner based in Philadelphia and Bangalore, and Adjunct Professor at the Columbia GSAPP. He is author with Anuradha Mathur of Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape (2001); Deccan Traverses: The Making of Bangalore’s Terrain (2006); Soak: Mumbai in an Estuary (2009); and editor of Design in the Terrain of Water (2014). His most recent book, The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent, was published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2019. The book has received the 2020 ASLA Honor award and the J.B. Jackson Book Prize. In 2017, Mathur and Da Cunha initiated a design platform called Ocean of Wetness directed to imaging and imagining habitation in ubiquitous wetness rather than on a land-water surface. In 2017, da Cunha was a joint recipient of a Pew Fellowship Grant, and in 2020 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
The Seine and Paris: A Hybrid History, Late 17th–21st Century
Sabine Barles (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)
The links between Paris and the Seine have long been mentioned by historians, to the point that one could say that Paris owes part of its prosperity to the Seine. Furthermore, Paris transformed the Seine, its tributaries and its watershed upstream and downstream, making the watershed an urban one even far from the city. This shaped a particular waterscape made of infrastructures, reservoirs, but also art pieces owned, managed and/or devoted to the French capital, showing that a city is much more than an urban area, and that remote urban impacts are sometimes far more important than local ones.
Sabine Barles is professor of urbanism at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and researcher at UMR Géographie-cités. Trained as a civil engineer, she holds a Master’s degree in history of technology and a PhD in urban planning. Her work focuses on the materiality of human societies: she is interested in urban environmental history and history of urban technology (18th-21st century), in urban metabolism and territorial ecology. She also developed with an interdisciplinary group of colleagues some prospective socio-ecological scenarios (2050) for the Seine river basin.
in dialogue with Emanuele Coccia (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales)
Emanuele Coccia is the author of The Life of Plants (2018), Metamorphosis (2021) and Philosophy of the Home (2024). He recently published a photo-theory book with Dutch photographer Viviane Sassen (Modern Alchemy 2022), a philosophical epistolary on light with photographer Paolo Roversi (Lettres sur la lumières, 2024) and a book on the relationship between fashion and philosophy with Valentino’s creative director Alessandro Michele (The Life of forms. Philosophy or Re-enchantment, 2024). He recently co-curated an exhibition on fashion (The Many Lives of a Garment with Olivier Saillard at the ITS Arcademy in Trieste) and one on art and ecology (Dancing with All, with Yuko Hasegawa at the Museum for 21st Century in Kanazawa). In 2024 he was the recipient of the Mondriaan Prize.
