Maria Kaika

Born in Athens, trained as an architect at the National Technical University of her city and awarded a doctorate at Oxford, Kaika is professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Amsterdam after teaching at Oxford and Manchester. City of Flows (2005) followed the water of Athens from the Marathon dam to the 1989 drought to show that the modern city was built by promising to tame nature and hiding it in pipes, dams and treatment plants seen only when they fail.

With Erik Swyngedouw and Nik Heynen she edited In the Nature of Cities (2006), the founding volume of urban political ecology, and her work on the modern home as a space that expels the natural and the uncanny has influenced cultural geography. Her later studies of Athens in the 2010 crisis showed how austerity reorganised the city.

Her 2017 article, Don't call me resilient again!, is one of the most cited critiques of the New Urban Agenda and of resilience as consensus: asking vulnerable communities to absorb crises they did not cause replaces the question of causes with a management of effects. She proposes instead technologies and architectures of dissensus that make conflict visible. She has chaired the urban planning committee of the Association of European Schools of Planning.

Another strand of her work studies iconic buildings. In her articles on the corporate towers of the City of London, Kaika described how singular skyscrapers worked for decades as shrines of economic power, and how from the 2000s they turned into serial objects, repeated with minimal variation from city to city, expressing their investors rather than any community. Signature architecture, on that reading, is more a symptom of the financialisation of land than a cultural achievement.