This book takes it as a given that the city is made of multiple
partially localized assemblages built of heterogeneous networks,
spaces, and practices. The past century of urban studies has
focused on various aspects-space, culture, politics, economy-but
these too often address each domain and the city itself as a
bounded and cohesive entity. The multiple and overlapping
enactments that constitute urban life require a commensurate method
of analysis that encompasses the human and non-human aspects of
cities-from nature to socio-technical networks, to hybrid
collectivities, physical artefacts and historical legacies, and the
virtual or imagined city.
This book proposes-and its various chapters offer
demonstrations-importing into urban studies a body of theories,
concepts, and perspectives developed in the field of science and
technology studies (STS) and, more specifically, Actor-Network
Theory (ANT). The essays examine artefacts, technical systems,
architectures, place and eventful spaces, the persistence of
history, imaginary and virtual elements of city life, and the
politics and ethical challenges of a mode of analysis that
incorporates multiple actors as hybrid chains of causation. The
chapters are attentive to the multiple scales of both the object of
analysis and the analysis itself. The aim is more ambitious than
the mere transfer of a fashionable template. The authors embrace
ANT critically, as much as a metaphor as a method of analysis,
deploying it to think with, to ask new questions, to find the
language to achieve more compelling descriptions of city life and
of urban transformations. By greatly extending the chain or network
of causation, proliferating heterogeneous agents, non-human as well
as human, without limit as to their enrolment in urban assemblages,
Actor-Network Theory offers a way of addressing the particular
complexity and openness characteristic of cities.
By enabling an escape from the reification of the city so common
in social theory, ANT's notion of hybrid assemblages offers richer
framing of the reality of the city-of urban experience-that is
responsive to contingency and complexity. Therefore Urban
Assemblages is a pertinent book for students, practitioners and
scholars as it aims to shift the parameters of urban studies and
contribute a meaningful argument for the urban arena which will
dominate the coming decades in government policies.
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