Uprooting critical urbanism

City, 2011

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.

City, 2011

In this short response I would like to address some of the criticisms made by Neil Brenner, David Madden and David Wachsmuth (2011) to the programme of urban studies presented in the volume Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies (Farías and Bender, 2009). I will do this by addressing some crucial differences between this approach and the project of critical urban studies, which, as Brenner et al. noted, is not thoroughly discussed in the aforementioned volume. I think there are four fundamental matters to be discussed: the style of cognitive engagement (inquiries or critique), the definitions of the object of study (cities or capitalism), the underlying conceptions of the social (assemblages or structures) and the envisaged political projects (democratization or revolution). Obviously these pairs of concepts don't represent clear-cut distinctions. They do, however, signalize differences of emphasis making up the politics of urban assemblages.

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.

2020

Urban Studies, 2008

A basic frame of reference for reconsideration of the urban question is presented, with an emphasis on the city as a collectivity whose character is derived from a spatially organised system of increasing returns effects and social needs. The logic of the city as a locus of accumulation and social reproduction in the modern economy is then discussed. Here, special attention is paid to the dynamics of intraurban production space and social space, and to the complex interrelations between the two. The concomitant shape and form of urban public policy are subject to investigation. Three major dilemmas and their underlying etiology are subject to scrutiny. These are: the fragility of localised competitive advantage in a globalising world; the widening social divide with its many-sided negative consequences on urban life; and, the growing mismatch between the internal geography of the city and the institutions of urban governance. The paper concludes with a comment on the implications of the new cognitive-cultural economy for understanding urban dynamics and problems.

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.

This paper offers a discussion of what assemblage thinking might offer critical urbanism. It seeks to connect with and build upon recent debates in City (2009) on critical urbanism by outlining three sets of contributions that assemblage offers for thinking politically and normatively of the city. First, assemblage thinking entails a descriptive orientation to the city as produced through relations of history and potential (or the actual and the possible), particularly in relation to the assembling of the urban commons and in the potential of ‘generative critique’. Second, assemblage as a concept functions to disrupt how we conceive agency and critique due to its focus on sociomaterial interaction and distribution. Third, assemblage, as collage, composition and gathering provides an imaginary of the cosmopolitan city, as the closest approximation in the social sciences to the assemblage idea. The paper is not an attempt to offer assemblage thinking as opposed, intellectually or politically, to the long and diverse traditions of critical urbanism, but is instead an examination of some of the connections and differences between assemblage thinking and strands of critical urbanism.

This paper introduces the main ideas of an integrated approach intended to address three vital yet relatively little explored dimensions in the social and material shaping of cities. First, it looks into ‘cities as systems of encounters’ in time and space – or how we find ourselves co-present with those like us or those different from us in public and private places. Second, it introduces a view to ‘cities as systems of communication’ – or how cities become contexts that help us to produce linguistic exchanges and create massive action systems from seemingly trivial situations. Third, it looks into ‘cities as systems of material interaction’ – or why we shape and fold space into urban space in order to express interactions in complex conditions of interdependence. Finally, the paper discusses substantive and epistemological issues regarding the improbable connections between the elusiveness of actions and the perennial tangibility of their spatialities. Journal Area Development and Policy Volume 2, 2017 - Issue 2 http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/3KwbXwtjAQV5qEcPxbS5/full