Colin McFarlane

Assemblage and critical urbanism

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.

On Assemblages and Geography

In this paper we explore what assemblage thinking offers social-spatial theory by asking what questions or problems assemblage responds to or opens up. Used variously as a concept, ethos and descriptor, assemblage thinking can be placed within the context of the recent ‘relational turn’ in human geography. In this context, we argue that assemblage thinking offers four things to contemporary social-spatial theory that, when taken together, provide an alternative response to the problematic of ‘relational’ thought: an experimental realism orientated to processes of composition; a theorization of a world of relations and that which exceeds a present set of relations; a rethinking of agency in distributed terms and causality in non-linear, immanent, terms; and an orientation to the expressive capacity of assembled orders as they are stabilized and change. In conclusion, we reflect on some further questions of politics and ethics that follow from our account of the difference assemblage thinking makes to relational thought.

The City as Assemblage: Dwelling and Urban Space:

In this paper I consider what ‘assemblage’ might offer a conception of the city. Although assemblage is gaining currency in geography and beyond, there has been little effort to consider how it might be conceptualised and what its specificity might be. In offering a conceptualisation of assemblage, I bring assemblage into conversation with particular debates around dwelling and argue, first, that assemblage provides a useful basis for thinking of the city as a dwelling process and, second, that it is particularly useful for conceiving the spatiality of the city as processual, relational, mobile, and unequal. Despite their distinct intellectual histories, I suggest there is a productive debate to be had by bringing assemblage and dwelling into dialogue. I examine some of the ways in which assemblage and dwelling might interact and reflect on particular moments of fieldwork conducted in São Paulo and Mumbai and on diverse examples ranging from ‘slum’ housing to urban policy and mobility.

Sanitation in Mumbai's informal settlements : state, 'slum' and infrastructure.

This paper examines an ongoing intervention in sanitation in informal settlements in Mumbai, India. The Slum Sanitation Programme (SSP) is premised upon ‘partnership’, ‘participation’, and ‘cost recovery’ in the delivery of large toilet blocks as a practical solution to the stark lack and inadequacy of sanitation, and offers an opportunity to interrogate a growing consensus on sanitation provision among mainstream development agencies. In the paper, I argue for a more flexible approach to policy infrastructure, technical infrastructure, and cost recovery in urban sanitation interventions. I also consider whether the SSP, as the largest city project of its nature in Indian history, marks a shift in the relationship between the state and the ‘slum’ in Mumbai. I suggest that, despite constituting a change from ad hoc sanitation provision to a more sustained and universal policy, informal settlements in the SSP remain populations outside the sphere of citizenship and notions of the clean, ordered modern city.

Rethinking Informality: Politics, Crisis, and the City

If informality has been conventionally understood as a territorial formation or as a labour categorisation, this paper offers an alternative conceptualisation that conceives informality and formality as forms of practice. The paper examines how different relations of informal and formal practice enable urban planning, development and politics, and explores the changing relationship between informality and formality over time. To illustrate the political potential of conceiving informality and formality as practices, it highlights the fall-out from a particular urban crisis: the 2005 Mumbai monsoon floods. In the final section, the paper offers three conceptual frames for charting the changing relations of informal and formal practices: speculation, composition, and bricolage.

Knowledge, learning and development: a post-rationalist approach

The relations between knowledge, learning and development are of growing importance in development, but despite the growth of interest in this area since the mid-1990s, key issues have yet to be explored. This review argues the need to attend to how knowledge and learning are conceived in development and how they are produced through organizations. Drawing on mainstream development literature, the review argues that there is a pervasive rationalist conception of knowledge and knowledge transfer as objective and universal, which has political implications. By contrast, the review argues for a post-rationalist approach that conceives development knowledge and learning as partial, social, produced through practices, and both spatially and materially relational.

Crossing borders: development, learning and the North – South divide

Abstract While the validity of categories like ‘First’ and ‘Third’ World or ‘North’ and ‘South’ has been increasingly questioned, there have been few attempts to consider how learning between North and South might be conceived. Drawing on a range of perspectives from development and postcolonial scholarship, this paper argues for the creative possibility of learning between different contexts. This involves a conceptualisation of learning that is at once ethical and indirect: ethical because it transcends a liberal integration of subaltern knowledge, and indirect because it transcends a rationalist tendency to limit learning to direct knowledge transfer between places perceived as ‘similar’. This challenge requires a consistent interrogation of the epistemic and institutional basis and implications of the North – South divide, and an insistence on developing progressive conceptions of learning.

On context: Assemblage, political economy and structure

In this paper, I seek to extend the debate on assemblage and critical urbanism by both responding to Brenner et al.s critique of my earlier paper, ‘Assemblage and Critical Urbanism’, and by attempting to prompt further questions and debate. I reflect on three issues that Brenner et al. discuss: the role of ontology in assemblage thinking; the relations between assemblage and political economy; and the approach assemblage brings to questions of the ‘context of contexts’. I conclude the paper with a note on the generative potential of assemblage thinking.

Introduction—Experiments in Comparative Urbanism

Urban studies is currently witnessing both a revival and a reorientation of comparative research (Robinson, 2005, 2006, 2011; Nijman, 2007a, 2007b; McFarlane, 2010; Ward, 2010). This is partly a result of urban researchers tracking traveling urban processes, including: the globalizing and “inter-referencing” of urban policy or models; the circulation of architectural, consultant, and developer expertise; the workings of transnational urban activism; or the shifting global resonances of urban cultures and milieux. Researchers increasingly engage across a much wider range of urban contexts in their search for understanding and theoretical inspiration (e.g., Peck and Theodore, 2010; McCann and Ward, 2011; Roy and Ong, 2011; Cochrane and Ward, 2012). But this resurgence of interest in comparativism is also a response to the changing landscape of global urbanisation per se, as urbanization trends in cities that might have previously been sidelined in much urban thinking now place them at the heart of the propagation of 21stcentury urbanisms (Roy, 2005; Parnell et al., 2009; Watson, 2009). Thinking and theorizing cities over the next decades will, we believe, challenge scholars to develop new and sophisticated comparative imaginations. The development of new methods and approaches to comparison is therefore essential to support different ways of working across diverse urban experiences. In this spirit, this special issue draws together a selection of “experiments” in comparative urbanism. We call these “experiments” because both methodologically and substantively this group of writers—and others besides—have found that they have had to move beyond the orthodoxies of urban comparative research. Although they certainly find much inspiration in the rigorous traditions of comparative urban studies (e.g., see Kantor and Savitch, 2005; Denters and Mossberger, 2006), scholars needing to think across wealthier and poorer cities, or hoping to build understandings starting from the scholarship of different regions, or concerned with the prolific transnational movement of urban phenomena, quickly find they must invent new analytical strategies, taking them beyond many of the existing assumptions grounding comparative urban research.

Informal Urban Sanitation: Everyday Life, Poverty, and Comparison

The global sanitation crisis is rapidly urbanizing, but how is sanitation produced and sustained in informal settlements? Although there are data available on aggregate statistics, relatively little is known about how sanitation is created, maintained, threatened, and contested within informal settlements. Drawing on an ethnography of two very different informal settlements in Mumbai, this study identifies key ways in which informal sanitation is produced, rendered vulnerable, and politicized. In particular, four informal urban sanitation processes are examined: patronage, self-managed processes, solidarity and exclusion, and open defecation. The article also considers the implications for a research agenda around informal urban sanitation, emphasizing in particular the potential of a comparative approach, and examines the possibilities for better sanitation conditions in Mumbai and beyond.