Assemblage urbanism and the challenges of critical urban theory (original) (raw)
Related papers
A new concept is animating debates on the urban question: planetary urbanization. What was only a few years ago no more than a preliminary hypothesis, significantly inspired by Henri ) conception of a worldwide 'urban revolution,' has now become a vibrant theoretical approach that is being applied across divergent terrains of urban research around the world. It is also provoking some intense, sometimes polemical debates on the appropriate conceptualization, methodology, site, scale and focal point for urban research today..
Public Culture
The concept of the city as a territorial and political form has long anchored social thought. By the twentieth century, the city figured prominently as a laboratory for testing modern techniques of governance. In the twenty-first century this discourse incarnates anew in visions of future mega-and smart cities. Then, as now, cities-as signs of the modern-are the elephants in a room full of adjacent concepts such as the state, the market, citizenship, collectivity, property, and care. This issue picks up a thread from the 1996 special issue and 1998 book of prizewinning essays on Cities and Citizenship (edited by James Holston and Arjun Appadurai). The contributors focused on the role of cities in the making of modern subjects by attending to associations between urbanism and modernity and thus with imperialism, colonialism, and extraction. Now, we reconfigure that line of inquiry to consider Urbanism beyond the City while bearing projections of the future in mind. The United Nations projects that by 2050, two-thirds of the global population will live in cities or other urban centers. But this new density will be greatest in a small number of countries, none which are in the Global North (United Nations 2018). Yet even as cities take unprecedented forms without discernible limits, spatial theorizing continues to invest in a particular concept of the city and to expand that concept's reach into other areas of study, planning, and investment (Amin 2013). Spatial professions capitalize on the city's capacity for generating complex intersections of social, economic, and political forces. Theorists attribute a capacity to distinguish among divergent possibilities mingling unpredictably to the urban apparatus (Martin 2017). Even critical methods remain attached to the idea that cities-whether as infrastructures, instruments, or morphologies-anchor a very particular sense of social life. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1994: 4) noted, philosophy coincides with the "contribution of cities: the formation of societies of friends or equals but also the promotion of relationships of rivalry between and within them." We position the concept of the city by treating it as a "friend" accompanying us through the journey presented in this special issue.
Urban Geography I: Locating Urban Theory in the "Urban Age"
In the midst of what has been termed the "urban age," two divergent approaches to understanding life in cities have emerged. In this first of three urban geography Progress Reports, I engage these two strands of urban theory, identifying key differences in their intellectual, political and geographical genealogies, and consider their political and epistemological implications. Borrowing from Chakrabarty's concept of History 1 and History 2, I name these approaches "Urbanization 1" and "Urbanization 2." Urbanization 1 is exemplified by the planetary urbanization thesis that posits the complete urbanization of society, whereas Urbanization 2 is characterized by a more diverse set of interventions, united by a political and epistemological strategy of refusing Eurocentrism and "provincializing" urban theory.
City, 2011
This paper engages the debate between assemblage thinking as an emerging body of critical urban theory and the desire to contain it within a framework of urban political economy. I take critical urban theory to mean the broad intellectual engagement with the ways in which cities and urban spaces are implicated in practices of power. Assemblage thinking moves outside a strict political economy framework and embodies different ontologies of power and place, yet this is not a shift away from criticality. Such thinking connects disparate threads of current urban theory as it opens new modes of multi-scalar and multidisciplinary research geared to urban design and planning practices and therefore to potentials for urban transformation. To contain emerging assemblage theory under political economy is to neuter it and potentially produce conservative forms of practice. The framework of urban political economy brings enormous explanatory power to our understanding of cities and will develop most effectively if it does not consume its offspring. Assembling Theories This paper is a response McFarlane's proposal of assemblage thinking as critical urban theory and the counter from Brenner, Madden and Wachsmuth. McFarlane (2011) sets out three primary contributions of assemblage theory to critical urban theory. In sum he suggests that it reconfigures the methods and scales at which we conduct empirical research on the city to incorporate thick description and the microscale; it extends the notion of agency to built form and materiality; and it reinvigorates the urban imaginary, connecting critique into potential action. The response by Brenner et al. (2011) seeks to value such an approach for its new insights and methods, incorporating these within a political economy framework while rejecting any alternate ontology. Deleuze once described his critiques of earlier philosophers (Spinoza, Bergson, Hume, Foucault) as a form of 'intellectual buggery'-approaching them from behind to produce intellectual offspring they had never intended (Massumi 1992: 2). With that warning I want to discuss one of the more interesting and cited theoretical papers of the past few years: 'Theorizing Sociospatial Relations' where Jessop, Brenner and Jones (2008) identify four key approaches to urban thinking-scale, territory, place and networkand argue for their integration into what they name the STPN framework. These are presented as overlapping and interconnecting bodies of theory that can benefit from the synergistic effects of an integrative framework. This is a fascinating prospect so far as it goes but it does not go much beyond a collection of pre-formed parts and some suggestive connections.
Current debates in urban theory: a critical assessment
Urban studies today is marked by many active debates. In an earlier paper, we addressed some of these debates by proposing a foundational concept of urbanization and urban form as a way of identifying a common language for urban research. In the present paper we provide a brief recapitulation of that framework. We then use this preliminary material as background to a critique of three currently influential versions of urban analysis, namely, postcolonial urban theory, assemblage theoretic approaches, and planetary urbanism. We evaluate each of these versions in turn and find them seriously wanting as statements about urban realities. We criticize (a) postcolonial urban theory for its particularism and its insistence on the provincialization of knowledge, (b) assemblage theoretic approaches for their indeterminacy and eclecticism, and (c) planetary urbanism for its radical devaluation of the forces of agglomeration and nodality in urban-economic geography.
Urbanity is an elusive concept. This paper clarifies its conceptual value from an actor-centred perspective. The paper has been published in 2013 in the Book "Living the City", edited by Brigit Obrist, Elísio Macame and Veit Arlt.
Introduction: Why Untamed Urbanisms?
2015
Cities can be understood as the product of multiple taming practices and strategies, ranging from the techno-infrastructural domestication of nature to secure key resources, to the sociopolitical disciplining of the relational and organizational structures and behaviours that shape everyday life in cities. But cities are also profoundly untameable because they are a complex and often unintelligible web of institutional and everyday practices that produce them in fundamentally political ways, whether intentionally or unintentionally. The notion of 'untamed urbanisms' is a subtle theme that pervades many recent contributions to urban theory. It resonates with Harvey's (2012) reading of the untameability of capitalist urbanization; Brenner, Marcuse and Mayer's (2011) call to recentre critical urban theory on the production of cities for people, not for profit; Brenner's most recent Lefebvrian reading of the uneven implosions and explosions of planetary urbanization (2013); Edensor and Jayne's invitation to challenge the universal application of theories of Western cities to a world of cities (2012); Robinson's call to examine the heterogeneity of practices that make cities and urban life (2006); McFarlane's exploration of urban learning as a political and practical, yet neglected, domain and how different environments facilitate or inhibit learning (2011); and Tonkiss, who argues that the social life of cities is shaped by 'actors [who] engage creatively in the logistics and politics of urban life in ways that go beyond the masterplan, the design commission and the competition entry, and which confuse any easy distinction between the expert and the ordinary, the technical and the amateur, the formal and the informal' (2013: 10). Building upon the aforementioned work and other recent trends in the urban studies literature (