Geopoetics of Urban Rivers:
Chicago to Seine, Calumet to Marne—and Beyond
OCTOBER 2024-JUNE 2025
a binational symposium conceived by Jennifer Scappettone, generated with collaborators Sabina Shaikh and Olivier Brossard, and cosponsored by the International Institute of Research in Paris, the Franke Institute for the Humanities, CEGU, the Department of English, the CNRS Humanities Plus lab, and the Université Gustave Eiffel. Partnerships with the Friends of the Chicago River, Urban Rivers, University of Illinois at Chicago’s Freshwater Lab, the Shedd Aquarium, and PIREN-SEINE
PROJECT PAGE IN DEVELOPMENT at the university of chicago committee on environment, geography and urbanization (CEGU)
Seine EDITION, 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 connects 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 territorial zones—viewing urban experience through the lens of water that yokes metropolitan centers ineluctably to their eclipsed 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 dialogues 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 tools of 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 from her novel Riverwork will bring to light obscured histories of the industrial production and obsolescence of the “river” as a site of gendered labor.
Opening Keynote Conversation
Sabine Barles and Dilip da Cunha in dialogue with Emanuele Coccia: Chasing the Seine and the Permeable City
Thursday, June 12, 2025
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
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.
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.
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.
FRIday, June 13, 2025
5:00pm
CLOSING KEYNOTE
Riverwork: A Detour on the Bièvre
Lisa Robertson (Poet and Essayist)
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
Poet/essayist Lisa Robertson will be framing and reading from Riverwork, a novel-in-progress whose site is the ancient Bièvre river in Paris. Long the urban locale of textile industries, tanning, laundry and paper mills, flowing from the south towards the Jardins des Plantes to empty into the Seine, diverted in stages through the 19th century to be finally completely covered over in 1912, the year it also lost its name and its designation as a river, the Biévre in this narrative is tracked by means of its literary and documentary traces, through the work of Rousseau, the Goncourt brothers, Hugo, Rabelais and Delvau.
Canadian poet, essayist and novelist Lisa Robertson lives in France. She has been a visiting poet and professor at Princeton University, University of Cambridge, American University of Paris, U Chicago, U East Anglia, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, and California College of the Arts. In 2017 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Letters by Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and in 2018, she received the C. D. Wright Award in Poetry from the FCA in New York. She has published 9 books of poetry, most recently Boat (2022), 2 books of essays (Nilling (2012), and Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (2003)), and a novel, The Baudelaire Fractal (2020). Anemones: A Simone Weil Project (If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam, 2021), her annotated translation of Weil’s 1942 essay on the troubadour poets and the Cathar heresy, is a component of wide rime, an ongoing study of medieval troubadour culture and poetics. Currently she is composing a second novel, Riverwork, based on research on the Bièvre river in Paris.
CHICAGO EDITION, October 17–18, 2024
Rivers and Power: A Conversation on the Imaginaries, Materiality, and Culture of Urban Waters
Dilip da Cunha (Columbia University)
Rachel Havrelock (University of Illinois Chicago)
Becky Lyons (Friends of the Chicago River), Welcome Remarks
Jennifer Scappettone (The University of Chicago), Introduction
Aaron Jakes (The University of Chicago), Moderator
Thursday, October 17, 2024, 6:00pm
Franke Institute for the Humanities, 1100 E. 57th St.
The relationship of water to power has taken shape across plural scales of space and time, governing how cities and their extensions as “landscape” have been designed, constructed, represented, and operated over the millennia. These keynotes will open up a dialogue surrounding the dynamic of water and power; they will serve to open a binational symposium addressing challenges facing urban watersheds across the globe in a time of climate change 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 as scenographic instruments of gentrification and narrative control. The conversation between da Cunha and Havrelock will foreground the role of wetness as a vital agent within urbanized territory, challenging the production of the “river” as an ideological instrument, and the extractivist and colonial perspective that has governed the manipulation of water in the modern age.
This event will provide the philosophical and thematic grounding for “floating” practice-based workshops to be held the next day on the Chicago River.
Rachel Havrelock is the author of numerous articles and several texts including the River Jordan: The Mythology of a Dividing Line (2011), which explores how the complex religious and mythological representations of the river have shaped the conflict in the Middle East. Rachel is Professor of English and founder of the Freshwater Lab at UIC. The Lab raises awareness about the Great Lakes through environmental humanities, lived experiences and engagement and has produced two digital storytelling platforms: Freshwater Stories, which focuses on Lake Michigan and the pressing water issues of the twenty-first century and The Backward River, which chronicles how the Chicago River came to flow backward and facilitate the offshoring of waste and transport of petroleum products.
Aaron G. Jakes is an assistant professor in the Department of History and the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization at the University of Chicago. His work deals broadly with the histories of the modern Middle East and South Asia, the historical geography of capitalism, global environmental history, and histories of colonialism and imperialism. His first book, Egypt’s Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism was published by Stanford University Press in 2020 and received honorable mention for the Middle East Studies Association’s Roger Owen Book Prize.His latest project is titled Tilted Waters: The World the Suez Canal Made. Spanning more than two centuries, from the earliest European proposals to excavate a channel through the Isthmus of Suez to the Egyptian military regime’s current efforts to remake the waterway and its environs into a major processing hub and free trade zone, the book will explore the many and shifting roles that the Suez Canal has played in the production of global inequalities.