(Non)Urban Humans: Questions for a Research Agenda (the Work the Urban Could Do)

This interventions essay deploys the notion of the (non)urban human to address the conundrums associated with identifying spaces, operations and entities outside of urbanization's planetary encompassment. In the piece, the objective of which is to call for a programme of prospective research collaborations, it seeks to explore domains of intersection among that which appears ‘left out’ of urbanization's purported advantages, that whose time has yet to come, and forms of the human that exceed the possibilities of self-reflexive consciousness and free will. The essay draws upon the temporalities, rhythms, spatial arrangements and sensoria generated through histories of blackness and ‘natural worlds’ and their interactions, to posit extensionality—a dispersal of bodies and their capacities into more reciprocal and mutual enactments with the earthly surrounds—as a generative by-product of extended urbanization.