Urban Cosmopolitics

Agencements, assemblies, atmospheres

Anders Blok, Ignacio Farias

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317604983
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences physiques
• Subtopic: Géographie

Invoking the notion of 'cosmopolitics' from Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers, this volume shows how and why cities constitute privileged sites for studying the search for and composition of common worlds of cohabitation. A cosmopolitical approach to the city focuses on the multiple assemblages of human and nonhuman actors that constitute urban common worlds, and on the conflicts and compromises that arise among different ways of assembling the city. It brings into view how urban worlds are always in the process of being subtly transformed, destabilized, decentred, questioned, criticized, or even destroyed. As such, it opens up novel questions as to the gradual and contested composition of urban life, thereby forcing us to pay more explicit attention to the politics of urban assemblages.

Focusing on changing sanitation infrastructures and practices, emerging forms of urban activism, processes of economic restructuring, transformations of the built environment, changing politics of expert-based urban planning, as well as novel practices for navigating the urban everyday, the contributions gathered in this volume explore different conceptual and empirical configurations of urban cosmopolitics: agencements, assemblies, atmospheres. Taken together, the volume thus aims at introducing and specifying a novel research program for rethinking urban studies and politics, in ways that remain sensitive to the multiple agencies, materialities, concerns and publics that constitute any urban situation.

1
Introducing urban cosmopolitics

Multiplicity and the search for a common world

Ignacio Farías and Anders Blok

Things move fast in urban studies. Whereas just a few years ago the idea of thinking of the city through actor-network theory (ANT) as a multiplicity of urban assemblages involved a controversial and somewhat eccentric theoretical move (Amin and Thrift 2002, Farías and Bender 2009), today ANT seems to have become part of a widely shared (if not necessarily widely embraced) language to rethink the city and the urban. Notably, notions of urban assemblages and assemblage urbanism have emerged as promising new additions to the analysis and politics of cities, spurring a proliferation of theoretical and empirical engagements across science and technology studies (STS), political science, human geography, cultural anthropology and urban studies (see, e.g., Farías 2011, McFarlane 2011a, McCann, Roy and Ward 2013, Jayne and Ferenčuhová 2013, Harris 2013, Kanai and Kutz 2013, Ureta 2014, Färber 2014, Shaw 2014, Pow 2014, Blok 2014).

In this, assemblage urbanism thus joins a wider stream of recent urban theory developments (Roy and Ong 2011, McFarlane 2011b), together amounting to a polemical argument against political economy-centric readings of urbanization that reduce the urban to the workings of underlying political-economic structures. Evoking core ANT tenets, this has involved, first, stressing the existence of a recalcitrant and lively more-than-human urban ecology that cannot be read only in terms of participation in overarching capitalist metabolisms. Rather, technologies, materials and various life-forms are read here as concrete and irreducible agents involved in urban life (Hinchliffe et al. 2005, Whatmore 2002). Second, it has required the development of a non-scalar language to grasp new urban topologies involving multiple relations, flows and atmospheres that tie together actors, institutions, sites and processes in new translocal and distributed constellations of cities in the making (Latham and McCormack 2009).

More ambitiously, this ANT of the urban has set itself the task of theoretically undoing still pervading substantivist understanding of cities as either singular, bounded and hierarchized entities in global network spaces (e.g. Sassen 1991), or as fragmented, broken or even disappearing spaces scattered in socio-material dis/continuums (e.g. Marcuse 1989, Soja 2000). Learning from the study of many other messy object-spaces (Law 2002), the key premise has been that cities do not amount to objects existing ‘out there’, but that they are made and unmade at particular sites of practice, brought into being via concrete relations, materials, knowledges and engagements. In consequence, the central proposition of assemblage urbanism is to reimagine the city as a multiple object-space (Amin and Graham 1997, Latour and Hermant 1998, Farías 2009, on multiplicity see also Mol 2002). Urban studies here no longer deals with ‘the city’ as a bounded object, but rather with a multiplicity of changing, co-existing and mutually interfering urban assemblages. This is not an epistemological claim, in the sense that different actors have different views and understandings of the city as a singular object, but an ontological claim, which suggests that any city exists in multiple, overlapping ways.

In a sense, however, the redescription of the city as a multiplicity of assemblages only sets the ontological ground for elaborating a new set of conceptualizations. Hence, to fully realize its promise, assemblage urbanism still needs to provide a more ‘affirmative’ description of the urban; a description that focuses on the specific problems, empirical configurations and analytical challenges that the multiplicity inherent to cities poses to urban theory. In other words, we need to move from the question of how ANT changes urban studies (Farías and Bender 2009) to the question of how the situated study of urban life, publics and politics challenges ANT and assemblage thinking to move in new directions (Blok 2012, Farías 2011). As we have both argued, based on our respective empirical work, urban assemblages offer a powerful and generative ontological position that effectively leads to new problematizations of the urban and which in turn have necessitated the elaboration of new conceptual repertoires (Blok 2013, Farías 2014). Such is our starting point and collective ambition for the present volume.

In order to respond to this challenge, we start from the hypothesis that cities constitute privileged sites for studying the search for and composition of common worlds – or, in other words, what Bruno Latour (2004b), following Isabelle Stengers (2005a), calls ‘cosmopolitics’. A cosmopolitical approach to the city focuses on the multiple forces and assemblages that constitute urban common worlds, and on the conflicts and compromises that arise among different ways of composing their forms and limits. It brings into view how urban worlds are always in the process of being subtly transformed, destabilized, decentred, questioned, criticized or even destroyed. As such, it opens up novel questions as to the gradual and contested composition of urban life, thereby forcing us to pay more explicit attention to the politics of urban assemblages (Farías 2011).

As is the case with urban assemblages, the concept of urban cosmopolitics is not simply descriptive. Its function is not merely to attest that a given urban process is (or indeed is not) cosmopolitical, but rather to lead our attention to the core cosmopolitical problem of how a multiplicity of assemblages come to be articulated and co-ordinated in and across specific urban sites (see, for example, Ureta 2014). In other words, the concept invites us to deploy assemblages in order to (re-)theorize the urban condition, rather than to stick with theorizing urban assemblages as such. In short, taking cosmopolitics as our departure point, this book aims to tackle what is perhaps the major challenge for an ANT of the urban: how to explore and invent new concepts that allow us to grasp the problem of articulating and reassembling urban co-existence.

Accordingly, our exploration will join those of the after- or post-ANT research collective (Gad and Jensen 2010), which has helped expand and propose new conceptual repertoires as it has travelled and encountered new objects and fields of inquiry (for example, Callon 1998 on markets, Mol 2002 on medicine, Marres 2012 on politics, Latour 2004a on ecology, Hennion 2015 on culture). ANT does not provide a general theory of the social that could be applied to different cases and fields. It rather resembles an experimental concept-machine finely attuned to the specificity of the objects and cases it is exposed to (see Mol 2010). As editors and contributors to this volume, our collective experiment consists of exposing this concept-machine to the urban, to cities, giving it time and closely documenting the reactions. By doing this, it appears that we do not just recast cities as multiplicities differently enacted in various urban assemblages, but get also a glimpse of urban common worlds that are constantly articulated, sought for, composed and recomposed.

Setting The Scene: After The Assemblage Urbanism Debate

If we were to single out an event that operated as a point of origin for the theoretical exploration leading to this volume, this was probably the extremely productive debate about the analytical and critical potentials and limitations of so-called ‘assemblage urbanism’ that took place in 2011 in the pages of the journal CITY.¹ The debate was initiated by Colin McFarlane’s (2011a) paradoxically provocative thesis (given its conciliatory character) that taking an assemblage perspective on the urban was not necessarily incompatible with more traditional critical urban studies, pointing even to synergies between assemblage and dialectical thinking as developed by Herbert Marcuse. This suggestion opened the way for an extensive response by Neil Brenner and colleagues (2011), who argued that an assemblage perspective is fundamentally incompatible with critical urban theory, as it would be based on a naive realism, a positivist epistemology and an affirmative political position. A detailed response to these somewhat peculiar critiques has already been given (Farías 2011) and we do not need to repeat it here. Instead we would like to highlight two points that this debate made evident and that set the scene for our collective enterprise in this volume.

First, it became clear that most urban scholars that have incorporated theoretical insights of ANT, feminist techno-science and, more recently, Deleuzian assemblage thinking use these theories as conceptual add-ons for underlying political economy frameworks. One example is the work around late twentieth- century infrastructural transformations and especially about the splintering of urbanity through vertical segmentation of public utilities and the creation of premium spaces and infrastructural bypasses (Graham and Marvin 2001). Even though this line of work engages with concepts of assemblage and actor-networks to specify the relational character of infrastructures and thus the impossibility of thinking of infrastructures as separated from the wider urban condition, it still recourses to neoliberal privatization processes as the underlying explanatory framework (Coutard and Guy 2007, Coutard 2008). The same analytical effect occurs with key contributions to urban political ecology which build on Haraway’s cyborgs and Latour’s hybrids in order to demonstrate that the urban cannot be separated from the biophysical, and that the city is a key place for the reconfiguration of socio-natures (Heynen et al. 2006). Here again, for all its analytical sophistication and experimentation, dynamics of capitalist accumulation and class politics still operate as the ultimate explanatory framework underlying more or less detailed analyses of urban socio-natural assemblages (Braun 2008, Holifield 2009). To give a third example, in their recent work on policy assemblages, Eugene McCann and Kevin Ward emphasize the extent to which urban policies are made of heterogeneous elements circulating in trans-local networks. McCann states explicitly that ‘[w]e tended toward Neo-Marxian political economy, but through our use of “assemblage” we also take seriously many poststructuralist insights’ (McCann 2011: 145).

In all of these cases, what we find is a genuine and indeed constitutive interest in analytically engaging with the politics of these various infrastructural, metabolic and policy assemblages, in terms of how they structure and impact the urban in unequal ways. However, in each case, the search for that politics leads analysts outside the city. Politics, it seems, cannot be grounded in the complicated articulations of urban assemblages as such, but must ultimately be located in the larger and even planetary dynamics of capitalism. Thus, paradoxically, in such approaches urbanity or cityness (Simone 2010) would not in itself pose a fundamental political problematique, but one that only becomes political through the historical transformation of capitalism into a heavily spatialized, scalar and urbanized process. On this point, our notion of urban cosmopolitics indeed marks a contrary position, in that it aims at exploring conceptual vocabularies to grasp the politics of urban assemblages in their own right.

Second, the debate on assemblage urbanism on the pages of CITY was not just one between descriptive and ontological uses of the notion of assemblage (although this was certainly also a key conceptual stake). Just as importantly, this debate addressed the performative and critical capacities of the urban assemblages concept. This is of course a central concern in urban studies. After all, this is one of the few fields that since the late 1960s has been shaped by the realization – entirely congenial, we note, to ANT and wider science and technology studies (STS) insights – that knowledge production is never a purely descriptive or analytical practice, but has performative effects, that is, the capacity to transform the objects and subjects it refers to. This has rendered the enterprise of inquiry and thinking cities and urbanization into a politico-critical enterprise.

In the debate, we encounter at least two explicit articulations of this critical enterprise. The more traditional one imagines the task of urban studies along the lines of the critique of ideology (Brenner 2009). The starting point is an understanding of urban politics as resulting from struggles among well-defined social groups and classes over the appropriation of urban resources and surplus value. In this context, the task of the critical scholar involves deciphering the hidden structural dynamics of urbanization, unveiling the ideologies of the ruling class, and enlightening the deprived and dispossessed about the structural forces lurking behind their apparent concerns. This is perhaps where the strongest contrast to assemblage thinking emerges: in an ontology of urban assemblages, all of these concepts – of structural determination, dominant ideologies and well-defined hierarchies – are reworked within a relational understanding of spatial formations as effects that must be constantly defended, held together, maintained and repaired (Farías 2011). Hence, the critical enterprise morphs as well.

Working broadly in this direction, a second elaboration is provided by McFarlane, who points to the ‘disjunctures between the actual and the possible’ (2011a: 210) to ground the critical potential of assemblage thinking and its capacity to constitute a ‘political subjectivity oriented towards the actualization of ideals and the realisation of potential’ (ibid.: 205). Potentiality is indeed crucial in McFarlane’s critical rendering of assemblages, as it points to the excessive forces that overflow actual arrangements, thus opening up a space for imagining and practicing urban life differently. The critical potential of assemblages thus requires a commitment to making, to imagining and to assembling alternatives that might reshape the urban commons. Interestingly, in both renderings of urban studies as a critical enterprise, the politics of the urban is shaped primarily by what is not explicit, but by what is absent from an actual situation (the underlying, the possible); something that a critical researcher should be able to recognize and work towards its visibilization.

While sympathetic to McFarlane’s politics of the possible, as a starting point for the present volume we nonetheless consider that reimagining the city as a multiplicity of urban assemblages implies a somewhat different (cosmo-)political challenge. This challenge is shaped not by that which is absent, but rather by situations of radical co-presence; situations in which the actual is not given and striated, but multiple and uncertain, and where what unfolds is a conflictual politics of actual urban things. In order to address and specify this politics of urban assemblages, it seems crucial for us to trace and follow the redistribution of the political initiated by the after- and post-ANT research collective. To this effect, three closely related and complementary concepts need first to be introduced: object-centred politics, ontological politics and – as our provisional destination – cosmopolitics. It is time to ask: what is urban cosmopolitics, after all?

Redistributing The Political in Urban Assemblages

First, let us consider object-centred politics – or what Latour (2005) has also dubbed Dingpolitik (to distinguish it from the more widely known Realpolitik). What is at stake here, in brief, is a double displacement of two well-known yet opposing conceptions of the political, as either involving absolute knowledge claims about otherwise hidden aspects of the world, or as pursuing existential struggles between social groups with opposing interests. In writing about Bruno Latour’s political thinking, Graham Harman (2014) dubs these two views Truth Politics and Power Politics, respectively. In place of these two (false) alternatives, however, Latour proposes a third conception of the political as turning around ‘questions, issues, stakes, things – in the sense of res publica, the public thing – whose surprising consequences leave those who would rather hear nothing abou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Introducing urban cosmopolitics: Multiplicity and the search for a common world
• PART 1 Agencements
• PART 2 Assemblies
• PART 3 Atmospheres
• PART 4 Afterword
• Index