Bruno Latour

Actor-network theory, which Latour developed with Michel Callon and John Law, proposes something that sounds odd at first and then becomes hard to argue with: in any situation both people and things act, and separating one from the other makes what is happening impossible to understand. A speed bump changes drivers' behaviour more effectively than an awareness campaign. The speed bump, therefore, acts.

Applied to the city, this forces the list of protagonists to widen. A neighbourhood is explained not only by its residents and its council but by the layout of the sewers, the height limit, the transport fare system, the maintenance contracts and the forms. Latour also insisted that these networks must be followed and described one by one, without resorting to general explanations like «capitalism» or «society», which for him are the result to be explained and not the explanation.

Born in Beaune in 1947 and dead in 2022, Latour taught at the École des Mines and at Sciences Po in Paris, and came to philosophy from anthropology: Laboratory Life (1979) is an ethnography of a Californian laboratory carried out with the methods you would use to study a tribe. We Have Never Been Modern (1991) is his best-known theoretical work.

Paris: Invisible City (1998), with the photographer Emilie Hermant, is his most directly urban book: a tour of what holds the city up and is never seen, from the water control room to the institute that fixes the standard measures. In his last years he devoted Facing Gaia and Down to Earth (2017) to the ecological crisis, arguing that the problem is political before it is technical, because it forces a decision about which territory you want to live in.