RIVERWORK, WITH LISA ROBERTSON
Geopoetics of Urban Rivers
Chicago to Seine, Calumet to Marne—and Beyond
June 12–13, 2025
“Paris is Centralization itself,” reads the reputed imperial dictum driving George Eugène Haussmann’s rationalization of the metropolis’s circulatory system; yet flood and drought, the migration of aquatic species and unchecked circulation of toxins remind us that the waters conditioning Parisian urbanism will not submit to centralization. While both Paris and Chicago as an aspiring “Paris on the Prairie” were modeled according to assumptions about the power of design to domesticate “landscape,” contemporary cities demand to be sensed in fluid terms as digestive systems and hybrid ecologies transgressing territorial boundary lines.
This symposium aims to connect humanists and artists with scientists, designers, urban planners, and geographers between Paris and Chicago (and beyond) in order to remap contemporary cities through the waterways that exceed the bounds of fetishized terrestrial zones—viewing urban experience through the lens of water that links urban centers to their peripheries and hinterlands. It posits that the perspective of the humanities and arts is crucial to maintaining a vision of the city as a pooling of planetary crises apprehensible at sporadic sites of rupture or deluge. It responds to Daniel Maximin’s call for the undoing of geopolitics through geopoetics—reimagining global community while eschewing the fantasies of stability at the heart of classical Western geography and geopolitics.
Our keynote evenings will open up a dialogue surrounding the parallel expanses of water and power; they will frame a binational symposium addressing challenges facing urban watersheds across the globe in a time of climate change, persistent colonization, and the diminishing effectiveness of regulatory apparatuses—when urban riversheds, long treated as waste sinks and logistics systems, are being sporadically reclaimed for wildlife and recreation, but also wielded as scenographic instruments of gentrification and control of political narratives. The conversation between da Cunha, Barles, and Coccia will challenge the production of the “river” as a contained ideological instrument and the extractivist and colonial perspective that has governed the manipulation of water in the modern age; the reading by Lisa Robertson will excavate the histories of production and obsolescence of the “river” as a site of gendered labor.
Riverwork: A Detour on the Bièvre
Friday, June 13, 5:00pm
Great Room, The University of Chicago John W. Boyer Center in Paris (41 rue des Grands Moulins)
Reception to Follow
Free and Open to the Public
Lisa Robertson (Poet and Essayist)
Poet/essayist Lisa Robertson will be framing and reading from Riverwork, a novel-in-progress whose site is the ancient Bièvre river in Paris. Long the urban locale of textile industries, tanning, laundry and paper mills, flowing from the south towards the Jardins des Plantes to empty into the Seine, diverted in stages through the 19th century to be finally completely covered over in 1912, the year it also lost its name and its designation as a river, the Biévre in this narrative is tracked by means of its literary and documentary traces, through the work of Rousseau, the Goncourt brothers, Hugo, Rabelais and Delvau.
