GEOGRAPHIES OF CONCRETE

2020-09-01 · by · in research · 2 Comments

Below is a collection of essays and articles written by social science and humanities scholars about one of the most widely found materials on earth: cement/concrete. This list has been compiled with the assistance of countless colleagues and peers at conferences and workshops over the last few years. I hope it will be useful for scholars of urban political ecology, materiality, and STS.

Menon, S. (2023). Class, Caste, Gender, and the Materiality of Cement Houses in India. Antipode, 55(2), 574–598. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12898

Elinoff, E. and Rubaii, K. (Eds.) (2025). The Social Properties of Concrete. San Francisco, CA: Punctum Books. 10.53288/0405.1.23
Choplin, A. (2023). Concrete City: Material Flows and Urbanization in West Africa (1st edition). John Wiley & Sons Inc.
Woodworth-chu-011. (n.d.). Roadsides. Retrieved July 29, 2025, from https://roadsides.net/woodworth-chu-011/
Rubaii, K. (2022). “Concrete Soldiers”: T-walls and Coercive Landscaping in Iraq. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 54(2), 357–362. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743822000435

Gambetta, C. (2012). Material Movement: Cement and the Globalization of Material Technologies. Political Economy, 02.

Martinez, D. (2020). The Concrete Jungle: A History of Global Urbanism. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 40(1), 73–79.
Harvey, D. (2017). Abstract from the Concrete. Sternberg Press.

Woodworth, M. and Chu, C. (2023). Call for Papers-Collection no. 011: Concrete. Roadsides

Parnell, Stephen. 2015. “The meanings of concrete: Introduction.” The Journal of Architecture 20 (3): 371-75.

Gandy, Matthew. 2003. Concrete and clay: reworking nature in New York City. Boston: MIT Press.

Campanella, T. J. (2011). The Concrete Dragon (Reprint edition). Princeton Architectural Press.
D′Avella, N. (2019). Concrete Dreams: Practice, Value, and Built Environments in Post-Crisis Buenos Aires. Duke University Press.
Grant, A. (2022). The Concrete Plateau: Urban Tibetans and the Chinese Civilizing Machine. Cornell University Press.
Schwenkel, Christina. “Spectacular infrastructure and its breakdown in socialist Vietnam.”
American Ethnologist, 42 (3): 520-34.
Schwenkel, Christina. 2020. Building socialism: The afterlife of East German architecture in urban Vietnam. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Melhuish, Clare. 2005. “Towards a phenomenology of the concrete megastructure: Space and perception at the Brunswick Centre, London.” Journal of Material Culture 10 (1): 5-29.
Pétursdóttir, Þóra. “Concrete matters: Ruins of modernity and the things called heritage.” Journal of Social Archaeology 13 (1): 31-53.

Arboleda, Pablo. 2017. “‘Ruins of modernity’: The critical implications of unfinished public works in Italy.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 41 (5): 804-20.

González-Ruibal, Alfredo. 2017. “Ruins of the South.” In: Contemporary Archaeology and the City: Creativity, Ruination, and Political Action, edited by Laura McAtackney and Krystal Ryzewski, 149-70. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bennett, Mia M. 2021. “The Making of Post‐Post‐Soviet Ruins: Infrastructure Development and Disintegration in Contemporary Russia.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 45 (2): 332-47.

Littlejohn, Andrew. 2021. “Ruins for the future: Critical allegory and disaster governance in post‐tsunami Japan.” American Ethnologist 48 (1): 7-21.

Degani, Michael. 2020. “Air in Unexpected Places: Metabolism, Design, and the Making of an ‘African’ Aircrete.” The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 38 (2): 125-45.

Harb, S. (2022). Exhausted Circulation: The Limits to Cement Transportation and Urban Metabolism in the West Bank. Journal of Palestine Studies, 51(4), 45–67. https://doi.org/10.1080/0377919X.2022.2133969

Fry, M. (2013). Cement, carbon dioxide, and the ‘necessity’ narrative: A case study of Mexico. Geoforum, 49, 127–138. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.06.003
Choplin, A. (2020). Cementing Africa: Cement flows and city-making along the West African corridor (Accra, Lomé, Cotonou, Lagos). Urban Studies, 57(9), 1977–1993.
Choplin, A. (2023). Building concrete futures: Materiality and urban lives in West Africa. Africa, 93(1), 20–39. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001972023000104
Abourahme, N. (2014). Assembling and Spilling-Over: Towards an ‘Ethnography of Cement’ in a Palestinian Refugee Camp. International Journal of Urban and Regional Planning. DOI:10.1111/1468-2427.12155

Harvey, P. (2019). Lithic Vitality: Human Entanglement with Nonorganic Matter, In Harvey, P., Krohn-Hansen, C. & Nustad, K. G. (Eds.) Anthropos and the Material. Durham: Duke University Press.

Allen, F. (2015). Introduction: Concrete, Parallax, 21:3, 237-240, DOI:10.1080/13534645.2015.1058889

Ben Zeeve, N. (2019). Building to Survive: The Politics of Cement in Mandate Palestine. Jerusalem Quarterly: Autumn 2019.

Bhanu. (1995). Liberalisation and Performance of Cement Industry. Economic and Political Weekly,30(34), M111-M116. Retrieved September 1, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/4403130

Archambault, J.S. (2018), ‘One beer, one block’: concrete aspiration and the stuff of transformation in a Mozambican suburb. J R Anthropol Inst, 24: 692-708. doi:10.1111/1467-9655.12912

Archambault, J. S. (2020). Concrete violence, indifference and future-making in Mozambique. Critique of Anthropology, 0308275X20941573. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X20941573

Cameron, J. (2009) ‘Development is a bag of cement’: the infrapolitics of participatory budgeting in the Andes, Development in Practice, 19:6, 692-701, DOI: 10.1080/09614520903026835

Eli Elinoff (2017) Concrete and corruption, City, 21:5, 587-596, DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2017.1374778

Figal, Gerald. 2019. “Life with Tetrapods: The Nature of Concrete in Okinawa.” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review (e-journal) 30: 150–170. https://crosscurrents.berkeley.edu/e-journal/issue-30/figal.

Forty, A. (2012) Concrete and culture: a material history. Reaktion Books, London

Harkness, Cristián Simonetti & Judith Winter (2015) Liquid Rock: Gathering, Flattening, Curing, Parallax, 21:3, 309-326, DOI: 10.1080/13534645.2015.1058885

Harvey, Penny. 2015. “Materials.” Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights, September 24. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/materials

Harvey, Penny. 2018. “Infrastructures in and out of Time: The Promise of Roads in Contemporary Peru.”In:
The promise of infrastructure, edited by Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel, 80-101.Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Harvey, P., Knox, H. 2010. Abstraction, Materiality and the ‘Science of the Concrete’ in Engineering Practice. In Bennett, T. and Joyce, P. (eds.) Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn. Routledge.

Harvey, P. 2010. Cementing Relations: The Materiality of Roads and Public Spaces in Provincial Peru. Social Analysis: The International Journal of Anthropology.

McDuie-Ra, Duncan; Mona Chettri, Concreting the frontier: Modernity and its entanglements in Sikkim, India, Political Geography, Volume 76, 2020, 102089, ISSN 0962-6298, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2019.102089.

McDuie-ra. 2018. Concrete and Culture in Northeast India. http://raiot.in/concrete-and-culture-in-northeast-india/

Nitzan-Shiftan, A. 2009. On Concrete and Stone: Shifts and Conflicts in Israeli Architecture. Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review. Volume XXI: Number I.

Rubaii, K. 2016. Concrete and Livability in Occupied Palestine. AES Engagements Blog Series in Settler Colonialism. https://aesengagement.wordpress.com/2016/09/20/concrete-and-livability-in-occupied-palestine/

Simonetti, C. 2017. Limestone. In Harkness, R. (eds.). Knowing from the inside: An unfinished compendium of materials. University of Aberdeen.

Simonetti, C., Ingold, T. (2018). Ice and Concrete: Solid Fluids of Environmental Change. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology. 5.1 (2018) 19–31.

Stolz, Rosalie (2019) Making Aspirations Concrete? ʻGood Houses’ and Mockery in Upland Laos, Ethnos, DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2019.1696864

Tappin, S. (2002). The Early Use of Reinforced Concrete in India. Construction History, 18, 79-98. Retrieved September 1, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/41613846

Zeiderman, Austin (2019) Concrete peace: building security through infrastructure in Colombia. Anthropological Quarterly. ISSN 0003-5491

Forte, Giuseppina. “Concrete Embeds: Assembling Modern Modernity in the Periphery of Mexico City.” Book chapter, in Mexico City: Materiality, Performance, and Power. Crysler, Greig and Maria Comerio Carranco (eds.), Metropolitan Autonomous University Press (forthcoming, 2020)

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2 comments

  1. samir harb's avatar
    samir harb · · Reply→

    Please add this article:
    Harb, S., 2022. Exhausted Circulation: The Limits to Cement Transportation and Urban Metabolism in the West Bank. Journal of Palestine Studies, [online] 51(4), pp.45–67. https://doi.org/10.1080/0377919X.2022.2133969.

    Liked by 1 person

  2. Siddharth Menon's avatar
    Siddharth Menon · · Reply→

    Thanks for putting this important work on my radar, Samir!

    Like

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