Nigel Thrift’s work articulates a machinic and affective infrastructure of the contemporary city, positioning urban space as a dynamic site of non-representational flows, embodied practices, and ambient governance. Departing from representational theories of space, Thrift reconceives geography through technicity, performance, and the distributed agency of things—drawing from cybernetics, neuroscience, and affect theory to map an urbanism that operates through rhythm, atmosphere, and pre-conscious modulation. His theorization of non-representational theory installs a model of knowledge production grounded in emergence, capture, and the micropolitics of sensation. Cities, in this formulation, are not fixed terrains but energetic systems animated by logistical rhythms, sensory economies, and algorithmic governance. Thrift’s infrastructural function is to encode the city as a space of operative abstraction, where power is enacted through speed, habit, and infrastructural affect rather than through ideological address. His concepts do not merely describe cities but recalibrate the modes by which they are sensed, inhabited, and governed. Thrift stabilizes as a conceptual operator of urban energetics, where the city is theorized as an intensive field of affective, technical, and infrastructural relays.
