Liveability and urban architectures: mol(ecul)ar biopower and the becoming-lively of sustainable communities

Contemporary analyses of biopolitics and the governance of ‘life-itself’ have concentrated on molecular processes in domains such as medicine and neuroscience. In this paper, I turn an analytical lens on urban architectures, with a focus upon a particular programme of large-scale house-building in the UK: the Sustainable Communities agenda. I argue first that Sustainable Communities constitute a resonant but qualitatively different attempt to plan for and govern life-itself, particularly encapsulated by the term ‘liveability’. Significantly, according to policy and technical documentation, Sustainable Communities appear to address the future at both molar and molecular levels, and through a focus on obduracy in ordinary, banal, everyday spaces (rather than in exceptional or border architectures). My analysis is, however, interwoven with attention to the ‘becoming-lively’ of urban architectures. Drawing on a large, ethnographic research project, the paper offers three navigational aids to understanding how professionalised deployments of ‘liveability’ become co-opted into, resisted by, or creatively reinterpreted through, practices of inhabitation by residents of Sustainable Communities.