"How heavy is a city? To ask this today means to intercept the emerging figure of the technosphere and its staggering planetary magnitude. The contemporary city scatters in all directions. It is a vast and growing system propelled by the combustive dynamics of fossil fuels. It is an offshoot of the biosphere, made up of all its 8.2 x 10⁹ human constituents, and all that keeps us alive, including domesticated animals and plants, fisheries, plantations, farmland, infrastructure, institutions, energy supplies, global transportation systems, and nature reserves. It is a city enmeshed within a multiplicity of other species’ cities.

To ask how heavy a city is, is also to sketch a coalition between different knowledges, bringing together thinkers, activists, poets, artists, historians, Earth scientists, philosophers, architects, and cyberneticians. This book is an insight into the multiple convergences necessary to think with others and renew the most beautiful word for cohabitation: city.”

John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog / Territorial Agency