David Wachsmuth

Assemblage urbanism and the challenges of critical urban theory

Against the background of contemporary worldwide transformations of urbanizing spaces, this paper evaluates recent efforts to mobilize the concept of ‘assemblage’ as the foundation for contemporary critical urban theory, with particular attention to a recent paper by McFarlane (2011a) in this journal. We argue that there is no single ‘assemblage urbanism’, and therefore no coherence to arguing for or against the concept in general. Instead, we distinguish between three articulations between urban political economy and assemblage thought. While empirical and methodological applications of assemblage analysis have generated productive insights in various strands of urban studies by building on political economy, we suggest that the ontological application favored by McFarlane and several other assemblage urbanists contains significant drawbacks. In explicitly rejecting concepts of structure in favor of a ‘naïve objectivism’, it deprives itself of a key explanatory tool for understanding the sociospatial ‘context of contexts’ in which urban spaces and locally embedded social forces are positioned. Relatedly, such approaches do not adequately grasp the ways in which contemporary urbanization continues to be shaped and contested through the contradictory, hierarchical social relations and institutional forms of capitalism. Finally, the normative foundations of such approaches are based upon a decontextualized standpoint rather than an immanent, reflexive critique of actually existing social relations and institutional arrangements. These considerations suggest that assemblage‐based approaches can most effectively contribute to critical urban theory when they are linked to theories, concepts, methods and research agendas derived from a reinvigorated geopolitical economy.

Urbanizing Urban Political Ecology: A Critique of Methodological Cityism

Urban political ecology (UPE), an offshoot of political ecology that emerged in the late 1990s, has had two major impacts on critical urban studies: it has introduced critical political ecology to urban settings, and it has provided a framework for retheorizing the city as a product of metabolic processes of socionatural transformation. However, there was another goal in early UPE programmatic statements that has largely fallen by the wayside: to mobilize a Lefebvrian theoretical framework to trouble traditional distinctions between urban/rural and society/nature by exploring urbanization as a global process. Instead of following this potentially fruitful path, UPE has become bogged down in ‘methodological cityism’––an overwhelming analytical and empirical focus on the traditional city to the exclusion of other aspects of contemporary urbanization processes. Thus UPEs Lefebvrian promise, of a research program that could work across traditional disciplinary divisions and provide insights into a new era of planetary urbanization, has remained unfulfilled. In this article we trace UPEs history to show how it arrived at its present predicament, and offer some thoughts on a research agenda for a political ecology not of the city but of urbanization.

City as ideology: : reconciling the explosion of the city form with the tenacity of the city concept

This paper is a theoretical reexamination of the traditional concept of the city in the context of urbanization processes that exceed it. Recent decades have seen a proliferation of new variations on the city concept, as well as calls to discard it altogether. I argue that both options are inadequate. The city has generally been understood as a category of analysis—a moment in urbanization processes—but might now be better understood as a category of practice: an ideological representation of urbanization processes. I substantiate this claim through an examination of three tropes of the traditional city which in material terms have been superseded in recent decades in the Global North but retain their force as ideological representations of contemporary urban spatial practice: the opposition between city and country, the city as a self-contained system, and the city as an ideal type.

Three Ecologies: Urban Metabolism and the Society-Nature Opposition

This article is an intellectual history of two enduring binaries—society-nature and city-countryside—and their co-identification, told through evolving uses of the concept of “urban metabolism.” After recounting the emergence of the modern society-nature opposition in the separation of town and country under early industrial capitalism, I interpret “three ecologies”—successive periods of urban metabolism research spanning three disciplines within the social sciences. The first is the human ecology of the Chicago School, which treated the city as an ecosystem in analogy to external, natural ecosystems. The second is industrial ecology: materials-flow analyses of cities that conceptualize external nature as the source of urban metabolisms raw materials and the destination for its social wastes. The third is urban political ecology, a reconceptualization of the city as a product of diverse socio-natural flows. By analyzing these three traditions in succession, I demonstrate both the efficacy and the limits to Catton and Dunlaps distinction between a “human exemptionalist paradigm” and a “new ecological paradigm” in sociology.

Between abstraction and complexity

Theoretical, conceptual and methodological choices must be framed in relation to concrete explanatory and interpretive dilemmas, not ontological foundations. In engaging with the limits and possibilities of recent assemblage-based work in urban studies, our concern has been to help forge new analytical tools for deciphering emerging patterns of planetary urbanization, which have unsettled the coherence and viability of earlier intellectual frameworks. As urbanization is changing, so too must urban theory change, and it must do so in ways that provide critical purchase on emergent sociospatial divisions, conflicts, struggles and transformations at all spatial scales and across divergent places and territories. To this end, responding to several strands of the debate on assemblage urbanism that has unfolded in previous issues of City, here we clarify our meta-theoretical stance, address several methodological questions and reiterate our arguments regarding the importance of a reinvigorated geopolitical economy of planetary urbanization. We insist on the importance of abstraction as a necessary methodological moment in any reflexive approach to urban knowledge formation.

Reflections on Occupy Wall Street, the state and space

O n Saturday, 15 October 2011, thousands of protesters streamed into Times Square from all directions. A large march arrived from Washington Square, where the first NYC Student Assembly, which we helped plan, had attracted students from nearly a dozen states. Cops closed off 46th Street with metal barricades. Once the street was closed off, the space filled in with protesters. In short time, riot cops, mounted cops and motorcycle cops arrived. Moreover, they had little room to maneuver because of the barriers the other cops had placed in the street. We witnessed the approach of a second band of motorcycle cops, who sped through the crowd toward the increasingly restive marchers blockaded on the east side of 7th Ave. The motorcyclists couldn’t see where they were going, and as the crowd parted the lead motorcycle cop coming east on 46th plowed into a barrier that his colleagues had placed there moments before to restrain the crowd (Figure 1). The barrier exploded into pieces of scrap metal and the motorcycle cop nearly went down. The example is almost preposterously concrete, but this sort of thing has been happening a lot since Occupy Wall Street (OWS) began in September 2011: the state running into barriers it has itself created. Not the least of which is the peculiar legal status of Zuccotti Park. For a long time, activists have decried the proliferation of public– private spaces in New York City. Zuccotti Park is a paradigmatic example. Its history begins with US Steel. This industrial giant, central to the ascendance of Fordism, by 1968 was becoming central to leading sectoral shifts away from heavy industry, toward finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE). Thus, over the next five years it built a steel-clad skyscraper in New York City, nearly 400 miles away from its home in Pittsburgh. This behemoth, now ‘One Liberty Plaza’, would benefit from a zoning variance that allowed the building to exceed local height restrictions in exchange for the construction of a publicly accessible park—a public good outsourced to the private sector—in the adjacent lot. Liberty Plaza Park. The Financial District has few open spaces. Still, Liberty Plaza was not beloved. Ringed by tall buildings, it receives little sunlight and can be windy. After the occupation commenced, most people (including us) who had passed through the park—its primary use, given its felicitous location halfway between transit hubs and Wall Street—would say, ‘I never knew it had a name.’ Nor did many, other than nearby street vendors and those lacking shelter, realize that there were no restrictions on its overnight use—unlike, say, the park a few blocks south at the tip of Manhattan Island. About that name: Liberty Plaza Park. It would be expected that the name had been conferred upon the park after the destruction of the twin towers, which rose catty-corner to it and were opened in the same year as One Liberty Plaza. In fact, after the park was damaged on 9/11 and disused in the years hence, it was renovated and renamed Zuccotti Park. It was apparently time to CCIT662371 Techset Composition Ltd, Salisbury, U.K. 3/8/2012

Transnational gentrification: Globalisation and neighbourhood change in Panama’s Casco Antiguo

Drawing upon the case of Panama’s Casco Antiguo, this paper establishes the theoretical concept of ‘transnational gentrification’: a process of neighbourhood change both enabled by and formative of a spatially embedded transnational ‘gentry’ whose locational mobility creates new possibilities for profitable housing reinvestment in geographically disparate markets where such possibilities would not have otherwise existed. Globalisation does not just create a common political-economic structure driving urban change or a common ideology for a gentrifying cohort. In this case, it creates historically and geographically specific connections between places, which themselves can become pathways along which gentrification processes propagate, connecting local capital to international consumer demand. The case of the Casco Antiguo offers a provocative inversion of a standard critical narrative of globalisation, whereby capital is freed from national constraints and able to roam globally while people largely remain place-bound. In the Casco Antiguo, residents are transnational and property developers are local.

Book review: Thick Space: Approaches to Metropolitanism

attempt at bridging the practice–theory gap. It covers some complex themes that get to the heart of democratic governance and planning and on the whole these are dealt with clearly and effectively for all readers. Possibly as a result of aiming at a wide audience, a repetition particularly of the theoretical fundamentals of the author’s argument becomes apparent as the book progresses. This issue aside, a series of figures graphically convey key themes, such as the continuums of democratic dilemmas. These help the reader visualise the dilemmas, questions and arguments that are developed. A final case summary and ‘knowing and steering’ checklist add to a relatively accessible and practical treatment of a complex theoretical subject matter. This supports one of the book’s aims in allowing readers to carry out examinations and comparisons, within their own contexts, but focused on core theoretical questions. Readers will gain from an important and still timely contribution to the debate on the place and purpose of planning and how it might be able to contribute to achieving more just and sustainable societies.