The writers studied up to now have all been suspicious of the idea that technology will bring salvation to our current spatial crises. They concur, too, when they champion an existential relation with place and space in order to mitigate the damages of unfettered capitalism and modernism. Bruno Latour follows their path. Trained both as a philosopher and an anthropologist, he emphatically declares that all over the world technological developments have altered our grasp of space and time as well as that of the nature and quality of subjectivity. They have repercussions on city- and world-spaces. However, Latour criticizes those who declare that machines dominate us from the top down. He rejects the fiction of a society living in the yoke of a highly circumscribed power elite. He asks how it is possible to live in a world whose demographic density has increased enormously and where space is lacking. How, under these conditions, can humans make the world habitable? It is imperative, he writes, to bring to the fore some of the ways humans can collaborate and create a common space in a rapidly transforming urban mosaic.

A type of machine is operative as a metaphor for every age: the windmill and catapult were the crowning mechanical perfection of the Middle Ages; the cannon, harquebus and ocean-going vessel in the Renaissance; the pullies operating dams, dykes, and sluices of canals in the classical age; the guillotine and chronometer in the Enlightenment; the steam engine in the nineteenth century. Our age is represented by computers, especially the figure of networks through which humans have chosen to represent themselves. With this metaphor, divisions between inside and outside are collapsed; the center is replaced by a large number of temporary knots and fragile threads along which humans and things ceaselessly circulate.