It is strange to read Bruno Latour, an aficionado of the great wines that his family cultivates in the rolling hills of southern Burgundy, noting that the world is now entirely urbanized. A constructively paranoid response to his assertion, similar to statements by Edward Soja, an urbanist who argues for planetary urbanization, is that little is left for ecology. Latour appeals to hyperbole to argue that the planet will be entirely urbanized. The virtue of this overstatement is found in the fact that the distinction between the country and the city no longer holds, and as a result its argument can be a prompt for a continued variegation of space, which might constitute the basis for an informed sense of ecology that results from close study of the spatial crises that come with globalization. Latour notes that our world is understood less through the information we can gather about it than through the ongoing transformations we witness happening to it. Our perception of the distribution of sites, states and world-space exists only through recognition of rapid and ever-changing alignments, distributions, modes of formatting, and of linking and narrating.

The chapters above have sought to gain a sense of the alignments and their shifts. The method has entailed assembling, reassembling, comparing and contrasting nine French theorists–a mix of philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, historians and public intellectuals–whose reflections on space bear on ecology in the sense of habitability. All of them lead us to a threshold where our own spatial condition can be reconsidered. What dynamisms can we take from their theories to assist us today in thinking what future spaces are possible? And what, we are tempted to ask, is the future of space in general? In the post-war period and especially after 1968, the theorists examined here felt that the world into which they were born was far from the one they had come to know and that, they felt, they would later experience in the course of their lives.