Re-assembling Actor-Network Theory and urban history

Area Development and Policy, 2019

As a critique of 'Euro-American realism', this paper draws on science-technology studies (STS) and actor-network theory (ANT) and its understanding of the social as multiple orderings of heterogeneous things that are not given but are enacted in daily practices. The STS-ANT perspective enables an exploration to be made of the multiple spaces of a place in action, deepening understandings of the notions of the quality of a place, ambience, network space, fluid space and urbanity-disurbanity. This approach is explored in relation to the material reality of Pires de Almeida Street, located in Laranjeiras neighbourhood in the South Zone of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, examining for this zone associations of, and tensions between, humans and non-humans and their ways of 'being present'.

This Chapter aims to identify the reach and limits of concepts developed within actor-network theory (ANT) for understanding contemporary transformations in urban planning and development. It focuses on the analysis of urban government at a distance through the role of three important mediators: models, images and discourses. I argue that ANT's focus on intermediaries and translation procedures in the construction of translocal planning assemblages is heuristically powerful. However, to better understand the relatedness of urban policies, urban and planning studies need to look beyond these classic ANT tools. In particular, we need a broader reception of ANT as well as the resources of other approaches to capture the role of global urban policymaking, computer-generated images and post-coloniality.

The idea of a city has changed over the course of human evolution and in modern times finding a definition as to what is exactly meant by a city has become a really difficult task. A city is signified not only by the structural differences it resembles something which is not accepted as a city for not having a physical built environment surrounded by concrete buildings and stagnation of office spaces, instead a city signifies a social reality and the interactions thereof, by which people come to differentiate a city from something which is not. This paper looks at the different definitions and ideologies brought forward by an urban sociologist in analysing the city while looking at the ecological, cultural and new urban sociological ideologies in defying and identifying the concept of a city.

Geoforum, 2017

Due to growing social and physical transformations, contemporary cities reveal the profound necessity of proper scientific approaches that are adjusted to conditions of global complexity and dynamic patterns of development. Predominance of an overall market economy, sporadic deregulations of administrative powers and a lack of local investment or resources, dominate urban reality. Incongruous urban decision-making procedures result in contextually inappropriate and incoherent urban management. We will explore these operational elements in Savamala neighbourhood in Belgrade. The actor-network theory (ANT) is applied to analyse the hyper dynamic circumstances of transition in Serbia. An unclear regulatory framework, powerful financial means for investment and limited institutional influence of citizen participation, deploy unstable urban development modalities at the neighbourhood level. ANT offers an insight into how urban norms, projections and structures unfold and how associations and translations of urban elements develop. Plausible yet complex collisions in Savamala constitute a challenge for ANT in mapping urban development processes and visualizing actors and networks through diagrams. Based on the presented results, the illustrative perspective of ANT minimalizes both the importance and the influence of the permanence of urban structures across time and space. Instead, ANT deals with a city as a contingent, fragmentary and heterogeneous, yet persistent product of actors, their roles, associations, agencies and networks. Possible adaptations of ANT should respond to the needs of non-scientific actors and practitioners for an interpretive tool that addresses undercover processes and mechanisms or provides explanations, recommendations or operational diagnoses on how to absorb urban development dynamics.

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.

Progress in Human Geography, 2003

… Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2011

Handbook of Urban Politics and Policy

Critical urban studies are very difficult to define, even if we restrict our understanding solely to English-speaking debates. It goes without saying that if we include in the conversation other intellectual worlds, the complexity of the field increases significantly. This is due to the diversity of understandings of what criticism should be. As a starting point, we can define criticism as the expression of a reflexive operation about urban reality. Any reflection also requires a (temporary) withdrawal from the relentless rhythm of everyday life. It requires a certain "distance"; even to momentarily extract oneself from the viscosity of the "real" and the material. But this cognitive (reflexive) operation is more convincing when it is also based on a sensitivity towards this "reality," i.e. on the capacity that our body has to feel, to perceive, to listen to the world. Criticism is thus not only an abstraction of reality, but also a sensitive gesture contributing to produce this reality. In short, in this chapter I argue that criticism can also be an immersive experience. But this is not the most common understanding of critical urban studies. Until the 1980s, critical social sciences have been marked by two opposite forms of thought: structural determinism influenced by Marx on the Left, and radical individualism influenced by Hayek on the Right. Both streams of thought sought to challenge and revolutionize mainstream social sciences that were developing in the twentieth century in order to consolidate the Keynesian and corporatist nation-state. They challenged the mainstream, but they remained based on scientific abstraction. As the hegemony of such modernist frame of thought and sociopolitical form of organization began to erode at the end of the 1960s with the rise of new social movements, colonial struggles, and profound global economic transformations, new critical voices made their way into social sciences under the label of postructuralism (including feminism, critical race studies, postcolonialism). After a review of the original strands of critical urban studies, this chapter delves into some of the contributions of feminist, Science and Technology Studies (STS), and decolonial and postcolonial approaches to urban studies. These perspectives push social scientists to explore the city differently. It involves theorizing objects that are often ignored in research on urban politics such as affective rationalities, ontological assumptions, or intimate interactions.

2019

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.