For a long time, cities were conceived by authorities, urban planners, architects and scientists through the organicist metaphor of a living body. Inherited from nineteenth-century natural sciences, this framework deeply shaped urban policies by representing cities as metabolisms whose infrastructures functioned as vital organs. Today, this conceptualisation has been partly renewed through contemporary policies centred on the living and on urban nature. Yet the organic vision is not the only more-than-human approach to the city. It has long coexisted with other imaginaries, notably that of the mineral city or the city of stone (Richard Sennett). In this paper, I examine the stakes of metropolitan mineralisation as a counterpoint to dominant reflections on migration, mobility and floating populations, drawing on research in topography, mineralogy, geology and urban palaeontology. Architectural, engineering and geological reflections on the city’s foundations seek to stabilise the urban core by promoting an image of solidity and permanence, even though urban space remains fundamentally fluid and unfinished. This tension is expressed through metaphors of insularity—such as Manhattan imagined as a “granite island.” At the same time, the depth of the subsoil functions both as a marker of antiquity and as a vertical response to urban densification. Throughout the analysis, particular attention is given to New York and to the assertion of lithic power (Tim Edensor, Matthew Gandy), which frames urban expansion as the conquest and mastery of land.

Professor Stéphane van Damme is author of a dozen monographs, his research contributes to the renewal of the history of science and knowledge and focuses on modern science and European culture from the 16th to the 19th century, examining the founding fathers (Bacon, Descartes, Linnaeus), scientific disciplines (philosophy, botany, chemistry, archaeology), and scientific institutions and capitals. His latest book, published in 2023 and entitled Les Voyageurs du doute (Travellers of Doubt), focused on the critical epistemology of distant knowledge among libertine scholars in the 17th and 18th centuries.