Abstract

Concrete is an excellent material to think the place of humans in earth history. Concrete is not only the most highly produced and consumed building material in human history but a significant contributor to global carbon emissions, a contribution practically unknown to most city dwellers. Like the phenomenon of time, to which we are accustomed and depend but hardly understand, concrete is a familiar stranger of modern life in the Anthropocene. A number of similar oxymoronic terms define its place in human geology. Concrete has been regarded by the industry as an artificial stone, patented in Victorian times, and a solid fluid, responsible for the quick dissemination of a 'durable' infrastructure on which modern life could ‘finally' distance itself from nature. Grounded on ethnographic work with workers, geologists and engineers in limestone (cement’s main ingredient) and cement (concrete’s glue) production labs, the article reflects on the unstable crafting of modern hopes through concrete. I argue that in the standardization of concrete forms, from the mining of its constituents to its use in construction, homogenous quantities of substance are produced, often at the costs of erasing heterogeneous qualities in earth history and manual labour.