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Whereas recent framings of planetary urbanization stress the planet-scaled impacts of contemporary urban processes, we might also conceive of cities as being constitutively 'planetary' from their very outset. This article looks at two ways in which the earliest urban centres or 'civilizations' on the floodplains of the Fertile Crescent harnessed the deep, geological forces of the Earth. The first is the tapping and channelling of sedimentary processes, central to what Wittfogel referred to as hydraulic civilizations (1963). The second is the use of high-heat technologies to smelt and forge metals, which can be construed as a capture of igneous processes. What both sets of practices have in common is that they involve skilled intervention in fluid-solid phase transitions between solid rock and flowing particulate matter. Viewing cities as constitutively geological or planetary in this way can help us reimagine the challenges posed to urban spaces by looming transformations in Earth systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In our discussions around the theme of solid fluids, we often resort to everyday words, many of them of ancient derivation and rich in association. We have decided to make a list of some of the words that come up most often – barring those that already figure as the principal characters of individual contributions – and to distribute among ourselves the task of writing a sort of mini-biography for each. The resulting lexicon with 19 entries, ranging from 'cloud' and 'concrete' to 'wave' and 'wood', serves as a conclusion to the collection as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Genetic engineering is the latest expression of the desire to control environment, but Ulrich Beck would see this as the culmination of human arrogance and Jean Baudrillard would treat these efforts as a compulsive desire to overachieve. Panic ecology can be described as nature being forced to the edge of a nervous breakthrough, and social theory has not yet developed to the point where it can account for the destruction, much less the resurrection, of nature.

The theories about the dynamical characteristics of the solar system, galaxy and universe, develops the ideas of an ex-orbitant globality that treats the earth as a system in active and ongoing interchange with its cosmic environment. The openness to the cosmos to further other-than-human influences has repercussions for the way it is responded to environmental change injecting an element of abyssal undecidability into all deliberations.

Colonization that is a convergence of environmental and cosmopolitan sensibilities is discussed. Environmental cosmopolitan that tends to re-enact the conventional binary of passive nature and dynamic culture is also described.

Modern western political thought revolves around globality, focusing on the partitioning and the connecting up of the earth’s surface. But climate change and the Anthropocene thesis raise pressing questions about human interchange with the geological and temporal depths of the earth. Drawing on contemporary earth science and the geophilosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, this article explores how geological strata are emerging as provocations for political issue formation. The first section reviews the emergence – and eventual turn away from – concern with ‘revolutions of the earth’ during the 18th- and 19th-century discovery of ‘geohistory’. The second section looks at the subterranean world both as an object of ‘downward’ looking territorial imperatives and as the ultimate power source of all socio-political life. The third section weighs up the prospects of ‘earth system governance’. The paper concludes with some general thoughts about the possibilities of ‘negotiating strata’ in more generative and judicious ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]