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Assemblage and critical urbanismColin McFarlaneVersion of record first published: 01 Jun 2011.

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CITY, VOL. 15, NO. 2, APRIL 2011

ISSN 1360-4813 print/ISSN 1470-3629 online/11/020204-21 © 2011 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/13604813.2011.568715

Assemblage and Critical Urban Praxis: Part OneAssemblage and critical urbanism

Colin McFarlaneTaylor and Francis

This paper offers a discussion of what assemblage thinking might offer critical urbanism. Itseeks to connect with and build upon recent debates in City (2009) on critical urbanism byoutlining three sets of contributions that assemblage offers for thinking politically andnormatively of the city. First, assemblage thinking entails a descriptive orientation to the cityas produced through relations of history and potential (or the actual and the possible), partic-ularly in relation to the assembling of the urban commons and in the potential of ‘generativecritique’. Second, assemblage as a concept functions to disrupt how we conceive agency andcritique due to its focus on sociomaterial interaction and distribution. Third, assemblage, ascollage, composition and gathering provides an imaginary of the cosmopolitan city, as theclosest approximation in the social sciences to the assemblage idea. The paper is not anattempt to offer assemblage thinking as opposed, intellectually or politically, to the long anddiverse traditions of critical urbanism, but is instead an examination of some of the connec-tions and differences between assemblage thinking and strands of critical urbanism.

Key words: assemblage, critical urbanism, potential, commons, materiality, cosmopolitanism

Introduction

t seems at first sight an odd task, to askwhat a particular idea that is itself notvery well elaborated in the social

sciences, might offer critical urbanism.Nonetheless, I want to outline a conceptionof assemblage and consider how it mightconnect, differ and add to critical urbanism.In the face of the growing popularity ofassemblage in urban research, it is timely toconsider what, if anything, the notionmight add to existing debates andapproaches to critique. In doing so, thepaper seeks to contribute to recent debatesthat have taken place in City (2009) on what

critical urban theory is and what it mightdo (see Vol. 13, Nos. 2–3, 2009)—not tooppose that debate, but to ask how assem-blage thinking might resonate with and addto how we think and conduct critical urban-ism. I do not see assemblage as an outrightcontrast to the complex and varied historyof debates on critical urbanism, includingurban political economy, capital accumula-tion, inequality, and so on. Moreover, inconsidering what assemblage might offer, Iam not seeking to oppose a broadly realistpolitical economy tradition of criticalurbanism with a broadly poststructuralistapproach to critique. It is too easy to set upthese sorts of wide distinctions and the net

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effect is often to create or entrench (oftenartificial) divisions, and ultimately to limitrather than deepen our capacities to thinkthrough questions such as those aroundcritique. There are not two broad camps atstake here; there are several traditions andmodes of thought being put to work.

There is nothing necessarily critical aboutnotions of assemblage anymore than there isanything necessarily critical about notionslike capital, labour, space or urbanism, butthere is a potentially useful conversation tohave when assemblage is brought to bear oncritique. That said, in the Deleuzian traditionof assemblage thinking — which is just onehistory of assemblage thinking amongstseveral (for a range of examples see theforthcoming edited collection by Andersonand McFarlane, 2011) — as Nicholas Tampio(2009) has argued, the notion of assemblagewas always political, for instance, inDeleuze’s hope that the left might organiseitself in assemblages, or ‘constellations ofsingularities’, of cautious, experimental egali-tarianism. The concept of ‘left assemblages’ isa political subjectivity oriented towards theactualisation of ideals and the realisation ofpotential:

‘A left assemblage can take the form of a political party, a non-governmental organization, an anti-war rally, a school environmental club, a punk rock collective, a campaign to legalize gay marriage, or any loose and provisional material and expressive body that works for freedom and equality. Deleuze envisioned the left as a network of intersecting and conflicting assemblages—a garden rather than a tree … Deleuze constructed the concept of assemblages precisely to show how the left could nurture diversity and disagreement.’ (Tampio, 2009, pp. 385, 395)

In what follows I will attempt to thinkthrough what might usefully emerge frombringing assemblage into the disparate debatearound critical urbanism, that is, for thinkingand acting towards a more socially just andecologically sound urbanism. I start with a

brief overview of the growing use of assem-blage in urban research. From there, Iconsider three sets of questions, forms ofanalysis and orientation that assemblagebrings to critical urbanism: a descriptivefocus—where explanation emerges throughthick description—on inequality as producedthrough relations of history and potential, orthe actual and the possible; a rethinking ofagency, particularly in relation to distributionand critique due to assemblage’s focus onsociomaterial interaction; and a particularcritical imaginary, through the register ofurban cosmopolitan composition. In the nextsection, I reflect upon two examples from thatvery rich collection of papers in City which Ithink give a useful sense of some of the crucialtraditions upon which critical urban theory isbuilt, and which serve as important referencepoints for opening out to what assemblagemight offer critical urbanism.

Critical urbanism and assemblage thinking

The first example is Neil Brenner’s interven-tion (2009, p. 199), which argues that centralto the whole project of critical urban thoughthas been unmasking the ‘myths, reificationsand antimonies that pervade bourgeois formsof knowledge’ about capitalism. This entailsexposing existing forms of urban knowledgeas elitist and self-perpetuating but as none-theless not inevitable, and offering alternativeformations of a more socially and ecologi-cally just city. If this is an interpretation ofcritique that emerges first and foremost fromthe disparate work of the Frankfurt School—especially Benjamin, Horkheimer, Adornoand Herbert Marcuse—it is a conception ofcritique that echoes more widely in urbanthought. It is a classic formulation of criticaltheory, but what is specifically urban aboutit? In response to this, one of the most inter-esting claims by Brenner is that the pervasive-ness of urbanism—not just in terms of itsspatial extent, but urbanism as a definingfeature of the human condition—means thatcritical theory must by necessity be a critical

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urban theory. Urbanism, he suggests, can nolonger be viewed as distinct, but has become ageneralised, planetary condition in andthrough which capital, politics, everydaysocial relations and environmental politics aresimultaneously organised and fought out. Sorather than look for the specificity of theurban in critical theory, Brenner turns thequestion on its head and asks us to considerwhether it is possible to have a critical theorywhich isn’t urban.

There are, of course, other ways of pursu-ing critical urban theory—whether in theshape of the resurgence of urban Marxism inthe 1970s (e.g. Harvey, Castells, Lefebvre,Katznelson) and its impacts, or the criticalurbanism of figures as different as Benjamin,Debord or Berman. But the second example Iwant to highlight is the lively and importanttradition of public urban critique. This is acurrent of critical urbanism that does not stopat the theoretical work of the FrankfurtSchool and its Marxist antecedents, but thattakes those debates to different urban publicswithin the city. One useful example here isthe intervention in Peter Marcuse (2009) inthe same collection of City as Brenner’s piece.Marcuse draws more on a ‘right to the city’discourse associated in particular with HenriLefebvre. What distinguishes Marcuse’saccount is its participatory reading of criticalurbanism. He offers a three-fold schema forcritical urbanism in this respect: expose—analysing the roots of an urban problem andmaking clear and communicating that analy-sis to those that need it and can use it;propose—working with those affected tocome up with actual proposals, programmes,targets, strategies, to achieve better forms ofurban life; and politicise—clarifying the polit-ical action implications of what was exposedand proposed, and informing action. Politi-cising includes attention to issues of organisa-tional strategy and day-to-day politics andwhere appropriate, supporting organisationdirectly with interventions in the media andraising issues with and through social move-ments, community groups, policymakers,and so on. In examining what assemblage

might offer to this disparate debate, it isworth reflecting on some of the ways inwhich assemblage has appeared in criticalurban debates.

Assemblage—whether as an idea, ananalytic, a descriptive lens or an orientation—is increasingly used in social science research,generally to connote indeterminacy, emer-gence, becoming, processuality, turbulenceand the sociomateriality of phenomena. Inshort, it is an attempt to describe relationali-ties of composition—relationalities of near/far and social/material. Rather than focusingon cities as resultant formations, assemblagethinking is interested in emergence andprocess, and in multiple temporalities andpossibilities. While we might immediatelythink of Deleuzian-inspired readings ofassemblage (e.g. De Landa, 2006; Dovey,2010), actor-network theory (ANT) takes onheterogeneous relations (Law and Hassard,1999; Latour, 2004a, 2005), and nonrepresen-tational accounts of practice, materiality andaffect (e.g. Thrift, 2007; Anderson and Harri-son, 2010), the use of the term extends wellbeyond these terrains and draws on historiesthat far exceed them. In critical urban geogra-phy debates, for example, there are twocentral ways in which assemblage is becom-ing popularised: first, as a descriptor of socio-material transformation, and second, inrelation to urban policy mobilities.

In relation to the first, critical urban geog-raphy has witnessed a surfeit of work onurban socio-natures, cyborg urbanisms orurban metabolisms (e.g. Swyngedouw, 2004,2006; Gandy, 2005; McFarlane, 2008; Faríasand Bender, 2009), which sometimes deploythe notion of assemblage, generally as adescriptor of sociomaterial transformation.Swyngedouw (2006, p. 108), for instance,writes of ‘assemblages of metabolic transfor-mation’ that take shape through the mobili-sation of nature and labour in the generalisedproduction of commodities. Gandy (2005,p. 40) describes the cyborg concept as a lensfor capturing not simply the technologicallyenhanced human, but a ‘vast assemblage ofbodily and machinic entanglements which

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interconnect with the contemporary city in amultitude of different ways’ and which isdeeply fractured by inequality and exclusion,for instance, in the experience of splinteredurban public space. Moving beyond assem-blage as a descriptor to assemblage as ananalytic, Farías (2009, p. 2), in seeking to‘test’ the contribution of ANT for rethinkingthe city, offers assemblage as a foundation forgrasping the city as a decentred object, ‘as anobject which is relentlessly being assembledat concrete sites of urban practice or, to put itdifferently, as a multiplicity of processes ofbecoming, affixing sociotechnical networks,hybrid collectives and alternative topologies’(see, for example, Graham and Marvin’sSplintering Urbanism, 2001). If this concep-tion of assemblage draws broadly uponDeleuze and Guattari’s notion of agencement(1981)—a term for the alignment of differentelements—for Farías (2009, p. 3; my empha-sis) the contribution of ANT is to offer notso much a theoretical foundation as a ‘sensi-bility towards the active role of non-humanactors in the assemblage of the world’.

Second, and quite distinctly, assemblage isused to describe the relations between travel-ling policies and their localised substantia-tions. For example, McCann and Ward (2011)use assemblage to capture the production ofurban policy as simultaneously mobile andterritorial (and see Allen and Cochrane, 2007,2010; Ong, 2007; Sassen, 2007; McGuirk andDowling, 2009). McCann and Ward (2011) usethe notion of assemblage as a rubric throughwhich to frame the travel, translation, struggleand connections that are brought together toconstitute urbanism. In both these very differ-ent usages, assemblage is deployed as adescriptive term that signals a relationalprocess of composition. This emphasis on rela-tional composition is not, of course, restrictedto ANT or to studies of policy mobility, buthas been a concern of quite disparate tradi-tions. By way of contrasting illustration, wemight consider how E.P. Thompson’s TheMaking of the English Working Class (1963)is in large part precisely concerned withcomposition. In his account, experience—as

the product both of social being and of thecollective subject reflecting on social being—can yield a particular social consciousness. Theworking class as a movement was composedthrough a conversion of collective experienceinto a social consciousness that defined theclass itself—a collective identity emergingfrom shared experiences, mediated throughvalue-systems, traditions, ideas and institu-tional forms. As he famously wrote in the pref-ace: ‘The working class did not rise like the sunat an appointed time. It was present at its ownmaking’ (Thompson, 1963, p. 9). Or to take amore urban example, we might consider howManuel Castells’ The City and the Grassroots(1983) attempted—with mixed success—tounderstand how social movements generatedparticular urban meanings through alliances ofmultiple different groups, and in the processof composition became aware of itself as amovement (rather than a class, for example)(e.g. see Mayer, 2006).

There is, then, no singular history ofassemblage to be told, particularly whenwe contextualise assemblage thinking asexpressed through grammars of gathering,networking and composition more broadly(Anderson and McFarlane, 2011). Nor isthere any consensus amongst urban research-ers about how assemblage might specificallybe used, and I do not believe there necessarilyshould be. As Edward Said (1984, p. 237)memorably argued, theory changes both as ittravels and in according to context, andrather than legislate for what a theory ormode of thinking should look like, or insiston a kind of slavish reproduction of theory, itis rather ‘part of the critic’s responsibility …to judge misreadings (as they occur) as partof a historical transfer of ideas from onesetting to another’. As a general workingdefinition I use the broadly Deleuzianconception of assemblage as ‘a multiplicityconstituted by heterogeneous terms andwhich establishes liaisons, relations betweenthem’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 2007, p. 52). ForDeleuze, the only unity of assemblage is thatof ‘co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a“sympathy”. It is never filiations which are

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important but alliances, alloys; these are notsuccessions, lines of descent, but contagions,epidemics, the wind’ (ibid.). This means thaturban actors, forms or processes are definedless by a pre-given property and more by theassemblages they enter and reconstitute. Theindividual elements define the assemblage bytheir co-functioning, and can be stabilised(territorialised or reterritorialised) or destabi-lised (deterritorialised) through this mutualimbrication. But this is not to say that anassemblage is a direct result of the propertiesof its component parts. It is the interactionsbetween human and nonhuman componentsthat form the assemblage—interaction asmutually constitutive symbiosis rather thanjust parts that are related—and these interac-tions cannot be reduced to individual proper-ties alone. As a form of spatial relationality,assemblage thinking is attentive to both theindividual elements and the agency of theinteractive whole, where the agency of bothcan change over time and through interac-tions. The changing nature of assemblagesthrough interactions is one of the ways inwhich, as Manuel De Landa (2006, pp. 10–11)has argued, assemblages operate as wholescharacterised by ‘relations of exteriority’.The other sense in which assemblages arecharacterised by relations of exteriority isthat component parts may be detached andplugged into a different assemblage in whichits interactions are different.

Assemblage is both a particular object inthe world (e.g. a policy assemblage) and anorientation to the world that focuses on theinteractive co-constitution of human andnonhuman agents through relations of exteri-ority and unequal capacities. As objects,urban assemblages are structured, hierarcha-lised and narrativised through profoundlyunequal relations of power, resource andknowledge. Rather than a kind of oppositionto structural hierarchy, the spatialities andtemporalities of urban assemblages—forinstance, in relation to urban policy or urbaninfrastructure—can, of course, be captured,structured and storied more effectively andwith greater influence by particular actors or

processes than by others. As the variedhistory of critical theory has taught us, wecannot think critically without exposing thepower relations through which urban formsand processes like gentrification or privatisa-tion are made—or attempted to be made—‘normalised’, ‘inevitable’ and ‘universal’.

There are three contributions that emergefrom assemblage that I want to developthroughout the paper: first, a descriptiveorientation to the city as produced throughrelations of history and potential (or theactual and the possible); second, as a conceptthat disrupts how we conceive agency andtherefore critique; and third, as critical imagi-nary of the city with specific political implica-tions. In these three sightlines, assemblagefeatures as an orientation, a concept, an imag-inary and a process. These three points areconnected by a mutual focus on process,materiality and potential alterity, and posi-tioning them alongside one another revealsthe broad scope of assemblage thinking. It is,of course, not uncommon or necessarily aproblem for ideas to be put to work in thesemultiple ways (think, for instance, of hownotions as diverse as the ‘everyday’, ‘power’,‘network’, ‘scale’, ‘cosmopolitan’ or the‘urban’, have been variously put to work asapproaches, objects or processes in the world,or names for social relations). Assemblagefunctions in this paper as a heuristic, a dispo-sition, a form of thinking from which theoryand critique might depart. If we want toconsider what assemblage might offer urbancritique, then it makes sense — to begin withat least — to consider assemblage expansively,in its different uses as a concept, process,orientation and imaginary.

The actual and the possible

The first area in which assemblage offers aspecific contribution to critical urbanism isin its descriptive orientation to urbaninequalities as produced through relations ofhistory and potential. This relation is a toolfor disclosing the multiple temporalities

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through which urban inequalities emergeand might be challenged and reformed. AsTania Murray Li (2007) has argued, assem-blage thinking is concerned with how differ-ent spatio-temporal processes are historicallydrawn together at a particular conjunctureand often made stable through the work ofparticular powerful actors, but can then bemade to disperse or realign through contes-tation, shifting power relations or newcontexts. Assemblage places emphasis on thedepth and potentiality of urban sites,processes and actors in terms of their histo-ries, the labour required to produce themand their inevitable capacity to exceed thesum of their connections (McFarlane, 2011).By ‘depth’, I am referring to the crucial roleof multiple and overlapping histories inproducing habits of practice, ways of goingon, and trajectories of policy and economythat shape urban inequality—that is, onthe historical labour and power of urbanformation.

By ‘potentiality’, I am referring both to theintensity and excessiveness of the moment—the capacity of events to disrupt patterns,generate new encounters with people andobjects, and invent new connections and waysof inhabiting everyday urban life—and to thepotential of urban histories and everyday lifeto be imagined and put to work differently,whether in the form of blueprints, models,dreams or hope for a better city, or in thecapacity of random connections to generatethe possibility of new ideas, encounters andcollectives. We often see this generativepotentiality in the work of urban social move-ments, for instance (Featherstone, 2008;Nicholls, 2008; McFarlane, 2009). As Tampio(2009, p. 394) has put it, assemblage is attunednot just to practices of formation, but to theactualisation of the new:

‘The brilliance of the concept of assemblages is that it describes an entity that has both consistency and fuzzy borders … [it] has some coherence in what it says and what it does, but it continually dissolves and morphs into something new.’

In this sense, assemblage as a constellation ofsingularities (Tampio, 2009) insists upon thecity as multiple. Assemblage, as Farías (2009,p. 15) argues, is ‘a double emphasis: on thematerial, actual and assembled, but also on theemergent, the processual and the multiple’.

In its focus on process and emergence, theassemblage approach is not to describe aspatial category, output or resultant forma-tion, but a process of doing, practice andevents produced through different temporali-sations and contingencies (Li, 2007). This hasimplications for critique. One example here isMcGuirk and Dowling’s argument (2009)that the analytic of assemblage offers onepossible route for conceiving neoliberalismnot as a universal and coherent project, oreven as a generalised hegemonic process char-acterised by local contingencies, but as a loosecollection of urban logics and processes thatmay or may not structure urban change indifferent places. They seek to conceive urbanchange through the lens of ‘situated assem-blages’ of different logics, actors, histories,projects and practices that serve not to reifyneoliberalism as hegemonic and ascendant,but as one set of possibilities among many.This is an inherently empirical focus, a call toexamine practices ‘on the ground’ in a waythat remains ‘open to the practical co-exist-ence of multiple political projects, modes ofgovernance, practices and outcomes gener-ated by and enacted through’ specific urbanstrategies (McGuirk and Dowling, 2009,p. 177). This is not to underplay the role ofneoliberalism, but to focus on the key driversof inequality on the ground, of which neolib-eralism may only be one.

The contribution of assemblage to critiquehere lies not simply in stressing that the city isreconstructed through processes that exceedneoliberalism, but to ‘weaken the defininggrip of urban neoliberalism on our theoreticalimaginations and on the range of analyticalpossibility’ (McGuirk and Dowling, 2009,p. 184). As Dovey (2010, p. 16; and see DeLanda, 2006) has argued, assemblage thinkingis an explicit attempt to avoid reductionismand essentialism ‘through a concentration on

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the historic and contingent processes thatproduce assemblages’. Echoing McGuirk andDowling’s position, Ong (2007, p. 5) arguesthat assemblage offers an orientation toneoliberal logic as a ‘migratory technology ofgoverning’ that is formed only through inter-action with situated circumstances, practicesand political rationalities, that is, throughthe ‘asymmetrical unfolding of emergingmilieus’. If the message here is to attempt toexpose, through thick historical description,how urban inequality arises, rather thanattribute power to particular pre-establishedtrajectories, one challenge posed by assem-blage to critical urbanism is to trace the oper-ation of an exclusionary and punitive form ofurban neoliberalism that clearly is increas-ingly entrenching inequality in cities acrossthe globe, while being primarily attentive tothe processes that drive capitalist accumula-tion and inequality in and through specificurban sites. This involves identifying rela-tions of actual–possible through attention tohow different ‘on the ground’ forms of powerare historically produced and exercised.Urban assemblages are structured throughvarious forms of power relation and resourceand information control (see, e.g. JohnAllen’s work (2003, 2004) on multiple formsof power and their diverse geographies). Intracing the multiple geographies of power,the spaces of critical intervention multiply inthe context of the ‘asymmetrical unfolding ofemergent milieu’ (Ong, 2007, p. 5).

In emphasising potential through itsorientation to assembly, reassembly andconstitution, assemblage focuses on thedisjunctures between the actual and thepossible, between how urban inequality isproduced and lived and how relations mightbe assembled otherwise. In this, of course,assemblage thinking connects with some ofthe broad contours of what Frankfurt Schoolcritical theory sought to achieve (Brenner,2009, pp. 203–204)—an emphasis on howurban inequality is produced throughhistory by capitalism and on how urbanismmight be more justly reconfigured throughpolitical economic shifts, social movements,

and the construction of new norms in urbanform and living. The relation of history–potential is rooted in the traditions of criticaltheory, given that critical theory of differenthues—for example, from Adorno andHorkheimer (1979) to Marcuse (1972) andLefebvre (1971)—has always sought to iden-tify the constraints and restrictions capital-ism and culture have historically created,while developing possibilities for collectiverecognition and refusal. Here, assemblagesupports this line of critical thinking bydrawing particular emphasis to thickdescription of how urban inequalities areproduced through different temporalities(e.g. the temporalities of policy, capital accu-mulation and of everyday cultural practice),and how at each space-time they may—under conditions of often radically unequalpower relations—be assembled differently.This echoes the description of critical urbanapproaches provided by Brenner et al. (2009,p. 179) as concerned with analysing ‘thesystemic, yet historically specific, intersec-tions between capitalism and urbanizationprocesses’ and to ‘demarcate and to politicizethe strategically essential possibilities formore progressive, socially just, emancipatorand sustainable formations of urban life’.The imperative of potentiality, for instance,was central to the work of the Situationistsin the late 1960s and early 1970s, where thecity, as a possible space of collective recogni-tion and reciprocity, became the locus ofradical potential (see McDonough’s 2009edited collection of Situationist urban writ-ing). The Situationists’ cultural experimenta-tion with dérive, or of the architecture of‘unitary urbanism’ that explicitly sought tochallenge alienating norms of modernisturbanism, were inventive attempts at appro-priation of urban space for the desires andneeds of the alienated and oppressed(McDonough, 2009).

The dialectical approach developed byHerbert Marcuse (e.g. 1968) echoes theemphasis assemblage brings to the play of theactual and the possible, that is, between urbanlife as it is experienced and life as it could be.

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Indeed, there is a broad synergy herebetween assemblage and dialectical thinkingas a key strategy in the pursuit of criticaltheory and urbanism. If dialectical material-ism is an effort to identify the means throughwhich society is produced and transformed,for instance in the mutual implication ofcapital, labour, use-value and consumption,assemblage is similarly concerned with howcollectives are produced, not as an aggregate,but as a process that takes its emergent forceprecisely from its processual interaction. AsDavid Harvey (1989, p. 11) has argued,dialectical thinking as a mode of argument‘allows us to follow how antagonisms getresolved under capitalism and how eachcontradiction gets internalised afresh in newrealms’ (and see Doel, 2006). Harvey (2009,p. 244) has elsewhere drawn an explicitconnection between dialectical thinking andassemblage, arguing that dialectics can beseen as a form of thinking through ‘coevolv-ing ecological moments within what Lefebvrewould call an “ensemble” or Deleuze an“assemblage” of interactive processes’. ForHarvey, assemblage resonates with Marx’s‘method of moments’—where ‘moment’equates to a particular coming together ofmultiple agents—an interplay of socio-ecological processes of place-formation. Thedialectical approach developed by Harveyrequires not reducing any particular moment‘to a simple refraction of the others’. Hesuggests that ‘there is no automatic responsethat sets a predictable (let alone deterministic)pattern of interaction between the moments… the evolution is contingent and not deter-mined in advance’ (ibid., pp. 243, 244).

But we should be careful here not to leapfrom these ostensible similarities to thencollapsing assemblage and dialectics—orindeed assemblage thinking and the strains ofcritical theory highlighted above—into oneanother. Dialectics seeks to uncover shiftingrelations in the opposing forces and contradic-tions of capitalist development, for instance,through the ever-expanding subsumption oflife by capital, or through the more hopefulpotential of workers and activists to subvert

the social totality (Negri, 2009). Here, objectsremain both within the whole, and in isolationin terms of their specificity and differenceseven while they alter through interactions. ForNegri (2009), there is little space here for poli-tics and movements that exist in relation to butwhich nonetheless move outside of capitalistdevelopment. As he has argued, ‘dialecticscannot avoid being constituted as a “represen-tation” of the whole of the process that leadsto the affirmation of truth’ (Negri, 2009, nopagination). The interaction of assemblages, incontrast, is a symbiosis defined less by conflictand contradiction and more by the lines offlight that run through them, where ‘line offlight’ names the possibility of creating some-thing new. Assemblage is a latent possibilityof new politics and movements based ondesire and becoming that can both emergethrough and exceed capitalism. The relationsof exteriority that characterise assemblagesshift attention from parts-within-wholes tothe transformative potential of multiplicityand experimentation emerging through oftenirresolvable differences. The orientation tolines of flight insists on a nonlinear reading ofthe possible, that is, it rejects the necessarycausal relationship between content andaction that Deleuze and Guattari (1986) foundso frustrating within dialectical thinking.Rather than straightforward analogy betweendialectics and assemblage, the question forcritical urbanism becomes when and how is ittheoretically and politically useful to usedialectical or assemblage modes of thought,and what the relative possibilities and limitsare as a result of that choice in relation to agiven problematic.

Moreover, in contrast to a great deal of thecritical theory highlighted above, assemblagethinking places a particular emphasis on theprocess of reassembling, that is, by emphasis-ing how urbanism might be produced other-wise, assemblage thinking asks us to considerhow an alternative world might be assem-bled. Not by implying a particular content ofalterity, whether socialist or otherwise, butthrough the concern with the making ofalterity; ‘materially, the left becomes

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concrete in assemblages’ (Tampio, 2009,p. 393). But what is it that might be assem-bled, and how does that assembling takeplace? Here, I highlight two orientations ofassemblage thinking: first, the assembly ofthe commons, and second, the assemblingpotential of ‘generative critique’, whereassemblage functions as a potentiality ofgathering for working towards a form ofcritique that is constantly generating newassociations, knowledges and alternatives.First, if assemblage is concerned with theactualisation of ideals through interactionsacross difference (Tampio, 2009), an impor-tant part of the response here must be acommitment to assembling alternatives thatare produced and held in common. There is aclose affinity between assembling a just andequal urbanism, and recent accounts ofmaking ‘the commons’ through decentredmultiple knowledges and ways of being.Politically, assemblage can be read as a formof commoning, of bringing into imagination,debate and realisation forms of thinking anddoing that are resolutely held in common. AsHardt and Negri (2009) argue, the commonsis a practice of interaction, care and cohabita-tion (and see Negri, 2006). The ‘common’ isnot the same as the public because it refers tocommon culture and knowledge, but neitherdoes it signal a body of content. Instead, it isa process of becoming, a doing that consti-tutes ‘an assemblage of affects or ways ofbeing, which is to say, forms of life—all ofwhich rests on a process of making thecommon’ (Hardt and Negri, 2009, p. 124).As Negri (2006, p. 67) earlier argued, ‘thecommon is an activity, not a result; it is anassemblage (agencement) or an open conti-nuity, not a densification of control’.

The common, then, is a kind of gatheringof multiplicities through the political work ofassembly. In Hardt and Negri’s formulation(2009), the commons resonates with theirearlier notion of the ‘multitude’ in that singu-larities are not required to shed their differ-ences in order to form the commons—a closemirroring of a Deleuzian conception ofassemblage (Tampio, 2009). The commons is

not a category of sameness, but an ‘affirma-tion of singularities’ (Hardt and Negri, 2009,p. 124; and see Ruddick, 2010, on ‘emancipa-tory assemblages’), where the very idea of thecommons is predicated on assembly andreassembly through difference. In order to betruly common, the struggle for alternativeworlds can only occur through ‘revolution-ary assemblages’ (Hardt and Negri, 2009,p. 340), that is, through the parallel coordina-tion of movements composed of a multiplic-ity of issues and concerns and not around asingular cause (e.g. that of class, race orgender). The common here is an emergentformation that can only be constructedthrough a ‘cooperative fabric that linkstogether infinite singular activities’ (Negri,2006, p. 71). One political challenge, then, isto counter the accumulation of capital withan accumulation of the commons, meaning‘not so much that we have more ideas, moreimages, more affects, and so forth, but, moreimportant, that our powers and senseincrease: our powers to think, to feel, to see,to relate to one another, to love’ (Hardt andNegri, 2009, p. 283). Here, the accumulationof the commons signals an experimentationwith cooperative spaces, processes and possi-bilities across multiple differences, andemerges both in relation to and in excess ofassemblages of enclosure (on the ambivalentrelations between enclosure and thecommons, see Jeffrey, McFarlane andVasudevan, forthcoming).

Making the commons is the process ofrealising the ‘potential’ in the history–potential relation. The potential for theassembling of the commons is especiallyrelevant to the city, which for Hardt andNegri (2009, p. 25) is ‘the space of thecommon, of people living together, sharingresources, communicating, exchanging goodsand ideas’. Hardt and Negri are particularlyconcerned with how the common features asthe basis for biopolitical production, bywhich they mean not just the naturalcommon of land, minerals, water and gas, butthe ‘artificial common’ of language, image,knowledge, affect, code, habit and practice

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(ibid.). As a space of encounter—the encoun-ter with alterity—the city produces bothpositive forms of the common—for example,local culturally plural spaces—and negativeforms of the common—for example, pollu-tion, traffic or social conflicts around issuesas diverse as the provision and use of publicservices and infrastructures, parks, librariesand community centres to noise and garbagecollection. In the face of the increasing escapefrom the city of encounter by elite groupsinto gated enclaves, the politics of assemblagethinking is to emphasise the democraticequality of assembly itself, of assemblingcommonality as an open multiplicity. But ifthe commons is a potential possibility ofassembly, we need to consider how assem-blage helps us to consider how that processof assembling might take place. Here, I turnto the idea of ‘generative critique’, that is, toassemblage’s focus on the potentiality ofgathering different knowledges, voices andconcerns.

Generative critique

Bruno Latour (2004b, p. 225) begins aprovocative paper on critique by asking:‘What has become of the critical spirit? Has itrun out of steam?’ Latour’s concern is thatacademic critique, broadly conceived, hasfailed both to keep up with changes in theworld ‘out there’, and to generate new ques-tions and debates. His concern is not just oneof engaging the present, but of critique’sorientation towards the present. For exam-ple, rather than debunking ‘matters of fact’put forward by organisations like the state orthe media, Latour encourages us to developcritical tools that speak about, care for andgenerate ‘matters of concern’. So, one impor-tant route for Latour is tracing how mattersof concern are produced and maintained.

Latour (2004b, pp. 245–246) argues thatthe notion of ‘gathering’ offers a new direc-tion for critique, where critique is not ‘aflight into the conditions of possibility of agiven matter of fact, not the addition of

something more human that the inhumanematters of fact would have missed’, but a‘multifarious inquiry’ that seeks to detect‘how many participants are gathered in athing to make it exist and to maintain itsexistence’. By ‘thing’, Latour is referring tothe ways in which ‘matters of fact’ require, inorder to exist, ‘matters of concern’, that is,they must mediate and assemble a wholevariety of different relations. In this reading,and with echoes of the discussion on thecommons, the role of the critic is to partici-pate in the gathering process, meaning that

‘the critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles. The critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naive believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather … the one for whom, if something is constructed, then it means it is fragile and thus in great need of care and caution.’ (ibid., p. 246; my emphasis)

Rather than a form of critique that wouldseek to debunk—that is, disassociate fromand subtract from ‘matters of fact’—assem-blage emerges as a form that would seek to bemore closely associated with its objects bytracing and multiplying the relations withthose objects.

Now, while I would defend the enduringimportance of debunking ‘factual’ claims—for instance, I’ve often found in my researchin Mumbai, the claim, often widely acceptedby particular publics, by the local state that itis people living in ‘slums’ that are to beblamed for shortages of water because they‘steal’ and ‘waste’ it—Latour nonethelessopens an important set of issues here in termsof how assemblage might function as poten-tiality within critical urbanism. Indeed, oneof the reasons the local state in Mumbai canmake this ‘factual’ argument about the so-called ‘pilfering’ of water by slums is becausea multiple set of ‘matters of concern’—debates on state capacity, water privatisationand cultures of corruption; questions ofrights and citizenship; histories of prejudice;questions about the conditions of water pipes

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and levels of monsoon rainfall, and so on—are variously ignored by influential forces inthe constitution of a ‘fact’. Debunking thisclaim is crucially important to be sure, buthow might we generate new associationsaround water? How might we multiply therange of opportunities and spaces in whichdisparate groups might gather in the consti-tution of a different, more just, sort of watersettlement? We might not only debunk suchurban inequalities, but rather trace, assembleand thereby generate potentially new formsof association and spaces of political elabora-tion, for example through developingcommunity activist forums that bringtogether matters of concern ignored by thestate — including the state’s complicity ininformal water economies and privatisation— to generate left assemblages that createnew relations.

This is in principle not new to criticalurbanism, which has always sought not justto expose, but to propose, and often bygenerating a whole variety of links withactivists and public groups. This, after all, iswhat Peter Marcuse’s intervention (2009)discussed earlier is about, albeit from a differ-ent direction and tradition—generating linkswith different publics in the proposing andpoliticising of alternative urbanisms. The ideaof generative critique has a history in urbandebates that has taken quite specific forms,some critical and some conservative. We canthink here of the effort by urban policymak-ers to assemble different groups, whether forreasons of consultation or, less commonly,because this gathering process might lead to adifferent kind of urbanism. From one-offtown hall meetings to sustained efforts atradical forms of participatory budgeting, theassembling of cities is often constructed as amultifarious and generative matter ofconcern. Of course, the prospects for margin-alised groups to influence the trajectories ofurban change are often very limited in prac-tice—indeed, critical urban literature hasdemonstrated how buzzwords like ‘partner-ship’, ‘participation’ and ‘empowerment’ areso often just that: buzzwords that are at best

tokenistic, and at worse a rueful extension ofstate efforts to governmentalise the marginal(e.g. Atkinson, 1999; Sintomer et al., 2008).

But we can be overly cynical here. Forexample, a key instance of the possibilities ofurban gathering are those of participatorybudgeting from Porto Alegre, where differ-ent groups come together across the city inbudget forums that function as a space forlocal demands and problems to be aired andaddressed, for information to be divulgedabout the functioning of government, and asa regular meeting place for activists, all ofwhich raise the question of what sorts ofcriteria and procedures might facilitate thegathering together of different groups andconcerns (e.g. Abers, 2000; Baiocchi, 2001;Sintomer et al., 2008). In critical urban schol-arship, the most radical antecedent andsymbol of revolutionary gathering of thepoor and marginalised remains, of course, theParis Commune, celebrated by Debord andLefebvre as a festival against alienation andoppression through which, in Lefebvre’swords, ‘a scattered and divided city became acommunity of action’ (1965, reprinted inMcDonough, 2009, p. 174). If that radicalurban tradition lives on, there are also a vari-ety of other, more everyday strategies forassembling different groups and generatingmultiple matters of concern, from focusgroups and public inquiries, to consensusconferences, and citizens’ panels and juries—none of which are themselves satisfactory forurban dialogic democracy, but which ask usto consider how variants of the forum mightoffer techniques of assembling that facilitategenerative forms of critique (see, e.g. Callonet al., 2009, on science controversies and thegenerative possibilities of uncertainty). Forurban critique and intervention, at stake hereis the question of the collective, that is, theforms of interaction, learning, discussion andaction—in short, critical praxis—that facili-tates more inclusive forms of urban produc-tion. In this sense, assemblage’s orientationto the practice of assembling—to generatingand gathering actors and knowledges in thehope of moving from an exploitative real to a

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socially just possible—is not only a particularand persistent reminder of critical urbantheory’s long commitment to struggling for abetter urban commons, but crucially a signif-icant shift in focus from the task of debunk-ing alone to one of generating and gatheringspaces of potentiality as diversified urbancommons.

Agency and critique

The second contribution that assemblagemakes to critical urbanism lies in the implica-tions of assemblage for how we conceive ofagency, and therefore critique. Agency, asFarías (2009, p. 15) argues, is an ‘emergentcapacity of assemblages … it is the action orthe force that leads to one particular enact-ment of the city’, and this force is simulta-neously social and material. In approachingagency as an emergent process that is distrib-uted across the social and the material, assem-blage thinking requires careful considerationof how different materials might matterwithin assemblages for how we conducturban critique, whether those materials beglossy policy documents, housing and infra-structure materials, placards, banners andpicket lines, new and old technologies, soft-ware codes, credit instruments, money,commodities, or of course the material condi-tions of urban poverty, dispossession andinequality. Here, the history–potential rela-tion is distributed by the assemblage ideaacross social and material, that is, potentialitycan emerge in the interactive relations ofmaterials themselves. In this sense, assem-blage closely connects with much of theimpetus of ANT, but with two distinctions.First, more than ANT, assemblage, due to itsfocus on relations of exteriority, attends tothe agency of the interactions and thecomponent parts, rather than the formeralone: the agencies of the assemblage’s humanand nonhuman parts are not exhausted by theinteractions alone. Second, assemblage ismore attuned to the possibilities of humanand nonhuman relations holding together in

uneasy interactions even where there is anabsence of coherence and rigidity in the rela-tions (Ong, 2007; Allen and Cochrane, 2010;McFarlane, 2011).

This focus on distributed agency acrosssocial and material and its implications forhow we conceive critique builds on criticaltheory’s long-standing concern with a wholerange of capitalism’s materialisations, includ-ing the commodity, the materialisation ofwealth and poverty through capital accumu-lation, neo-colonial raw material extraction,gated enclaves and neoliberalism. We mightthink, for instance, of David Harvey’s (e.g.2008) brilliant elucidations of how urbanisa-tion has played a historically crucial role inabsorbing the surplus product capitalistsperpetually produce in search of profits,from the Haussmannisation of SecondEmpire Paris’s infrastructure, to the subur-banisation of post-war USA, to the rapidurbanisation of China over the past 20 years.We can also think here of critical scholarshipon the urbanisation of socio-natures (e.g.Heynen et al., 2006). What is very different,however, is the particular emphasis assem-blage thinking brings to the agency of thematerials themselves. One example here isBennett’s argument (2010) for a ‘vital materi-alism’ that seeks to counter the privileging ofa specifically human agency or politics byemphasising the agentic contributions ofnonhuman forces in shaping the world.Bennett’s effort is to try to comprehendmateriality as both in relation to and inde-pendent of human life, that is, materiality as aprocess that sometimes encounters andsometimes exceeds the confines of human lifeand comprehension. Bennett (2010, p. 20)theorises materiality within assemblages notas a stable and isolated set of objects, but as aprocess of changing relations betweenhumans and nonhumans within assemblages,that is, ‘as much force as entity, as muchenergy as matter, as much intensity as exten-sion’. Part of this vital materialism is toexamine the shared experiences of people andmaterials, ‘to take a step towards a moreecological sensibility’ (Bennett, 2010, p. 10),

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and potentially to a different rendering ofcritique.

In my work on informal settlements inMumbai, for example, I’ve been increasinglyconcerned with the crucial role that variousmaterialities play in the constitution andexperience of inequality, and in the possibili-ties of a more equal urbanism. While themateriality of informal housing and infra-structure is well recognised as a fundamentalproblem of urban life, the material geogra-phies of informal settlements remain‘unstudied in morphological terms’ (Dovey,2010, p. 79), including the ways in whichpeople living within informal settlementslocate, build with and manipulate these mate-rialities, and how the nature, usage and expe-rience of materialities alters over time (anexception here is Dovey, 2010). The material-ities of the home—whether in the form ofhousing objects ranging from sack cloth andcorrugated iron to brick, breezeblock andhydroform, or infrastructures of drainage,sanitation, water or electricity—play acentral role in the everyday lives and hard-ships faced by the poor. Housing withininformal settlements is typically—though notexclusively—constructed individually andincrementally, using locally available materi-als, and often clustered in ways that dependon closely shared roofs, walls and infrastruc-tures. Building materials might be gatheredfrom local construction debris, riverbeds,manufacturing waste or patches of tree cover;the city is both mined and recycled. Kitchensmight be supplied with portable gas burnersand cooking items might be hung up to savespace, while a lack of windows often necessi-tates creating space for fans. During themonsoon the ground level may be flooded,especially in Mumbai’s western suburbs,meaning that people are sometimes forcedinto living in the sleeping loft area. Toiletsmay be a long walk away, be unsafe, and dueto a shortage in number give rise to intensivequeues, especially in the morning andevening. Infrastructures and the housingmaterials themselves often change, are addedto or discarded over time, revealing a

complex rhythm of assembling and reassem-bling that is central to the form and nature ofdomestic life but which has been largelyneglected in scholarly accounts. Housing is,in short, both made and edited, in contexts ofdeeply unequal resources and precariouslives.

The materials themselves are multiple andof differential lifespans, from the relativeobduracy of red brick through to the throw-away character of stop-gap materials likesackcloth or polyester to plug holes in roofsor provide matting for rain-sodden flooring.Different materials within the assemblage aremore or less stable, while some parts can havemultiple uses and spend large periods of timeunused, such as small storage tanks for timesof water shortage, sandbags stored in antici-pation of the monsoon or stored bricks forpost-monsoon housing repairs. Constructionoften extends vertically, allowing generationsof families to live together or to utilise roofspace as a rental opportunity. Employmentopportunities can demand a transformatoryeffect on housing, from small tobacco shopsopened up within the domestic space to theproduction of papads or the rolling ofincense sticks on porches. Materials alsofeature as hazards, for example, in the formof recycling plastic from discarded syringes,which can be infectious, or in damage toeyesight from needlework, or in the hazard-ous chemical treatment of hides for leatherproduction—the materiality of informallabour can provide insights into the politicaleconomy of informality. The lack of spacethat characterises most neighbourhoodsmeans that materials often spill over intopublic space, from children’s toys to rick-shaws, bicycles, cooking materials anddrying clothes. Washing laundry is oftenconducted outside the house in an alleywhere lighting and drainage conditions arebetter. This material overspill disruptsboundaries of public and private space, andfacilitates particular forms of sociability,commonality, discussion and conflict.

These material geographies are variouslyconstituted by the state (e.g. through tacit

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permission or service provision), victimisedby the state (e.g. through denial of rights orthrough demolition) and operate in relationto the state (e.g. through personal, voting andparty political links, or as a source of unregu-lated cheap labour). The variegated relationsbetween the state, economy and informalsettlements are vital to the sorts of materialconfigurations that become possible anddurable within informal settlements. Attend-ing to the role of materialities can provideinsight into how urban inequality isproduced. For instance, the savage destruc-tion of water pipes by the state in the infor-mal settlement of Rafinagar in northeastMumbai in 2010 due to so-called ‘water scar-city’ facilitated the intensification of informaleconomies whereby local state officials andprivate agents sold poor quality water fromwater tankers to often desperate residents fora higher price. The destruction and reassem-bling of materialities like infrastructure, or ofinformal housing, can provide importantknowledge of how violent processes ofenclosure, displacement, and accumulationoperate (Vasudevan, McFarlane, and Jeffrey,2008; Jeffrey, McFarlane and Vasudevan,forthcoming). A key question that emergeshere is what a focus on the materiality ofhousing reveals about poverty and inequalitywithin informal settlements, as opposed toother lenses (such as income, employment,health or education)? From the brief descrip-tion above, materials are subject to and helpto shape a variety of urban geographies forthe poor. They play a complex and changingset of roles: they hard-wire the experience ofurban poverty; constitute spaces of common-ality, interaction and conflict; are demolishedthrough the sometimes violent nature of stateintervention; can be, to different extents,manipulated and can help people to copewith or respond to crisis; are sometimes recy-clable; can sometimes be altered for income-generating purposes; and constitute a dailythreat for precarious lives. An examination ofthe ways in which materialities function asactants in urban spaces can bring a differentperspective on poverty which can then be

positioned not just alongside other measuresof poverty and inequality, such as aroundshifts in political economy or changes inincome, health and education, but as a partic-ular window into these processes.

Similarly, urban materialities can act asimportant agents in urban resistance. Forexample, Jockin Arputham, a high-profileMumbai activist who founded the MumbaiSlum Dwellers Federation, recounts howduring the 1980s a range of mundane materi-als featured as agents of urban activism:

‘We could keep organized and in touch with each other with the phones but our phone bill was very low because we discovered how we could use the public phone for free—by inserting a railway ticket into the receiver. This meant we could make all our phone calls to all the members of parliament. We also learnt how to block the phones of ministers. In the Maharashtra assembly, there were questions asked as to how 30 ministers could have their phones cut at one time. We had designed this in Janata colony, with 100 people assigned one day to go to all the minister’s houses. Blocking their phones takes just a simple wire and two stones. It made it sound as if the phone was permanently engaged. We could block all 30 ministers’ phones at the same time—simply knowing where they were and shorting out their connections.’ (Arputham, 2008, p. 333)

Here, railway tickets, wires and stones, facili-tate coordination amongst activists and thepossibilities of resistance. In distributingagency across the social and the material,assemblage thinking involves attending tohow a diverse set of materialities can playmultiple roles in the experience and possibili-ties of urban life. It raises questions about howwe see urban poverty being experienced andwhere we see urban resistance emerging andhow. Of course, different traditions of criticalurbanism have long involved description ofmaterial life—not least Engels’ account (2009[1845]) of the impoverished housing of theEnglish working classes. But assemblagethinking requires that we go beyond this toconsider the role of the materialities them-

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selves. There are two implications in particu-lar here for critical urban research: the firstaround methodology and the second aroundresponsibility.

In relation to the first, this brief survey ofsome of the materialites of informal settle-ments in Mumbai only begins to open up thequestion of what attending to material agentsmight bring to urban critique. There is amethodological challenge and accounts suchas Bennett’s vital materialism can be helpfulhere. Bennett’s methodological approach isto take seriously the cultural, linguistic andhistorical ways in which materials are under-stood, but not to reduce materiality to theselenses. For Bennett (2010, p. 17), ‘vital mate-rialists will thus try to linger in thosemoments during which they find themselvesfascinated by objects’. Here, the researcher iscaught in a tension: between the realisationthat there is much about the agency of urbanmaterials and the connections they areinvolved in that exceed our purview, and aneffort to nonetheless attempt to appreciatethe agentic force of materials in the sites weresearch. The guiding aim here is to gobeyond the self-evident claim that human lifeis composed of many material parts, towardsan appreciation of these materials as activeand to understand the changing role of mate-rials in constituting daily survival, experi-ence, inequality and possibility. One examplehere might be a micro-focused ethnographyof the ways in which urban materials func-tion not simply as objects but as processesthat are put to work in various ways. Wemight be talking here of informal settlements,or of policy documents, blueprints, models,infrastructures, and so on. One contributionassemblage thinking can make to criticalurbanism here is through ethnographies ofparticular urban materials that would revealthe changing uses and possibilities that mate-rials shape and allow, and which wouldprovide a potentially different lens for link-ing everyday life, uncertainty and largershifts in political economy.

Part of the point here is to say that assem-blage thinking is processual thinking, that is,

the agency of assemblage emerges in process,in bringing different actors together, in theirdissolution, contestation and reformulation.As feminist science studies theorist KarenBarad (2007) has argued, agency in this read-ing is less an attribute or property and more aname for the ongoing reconfiguring of theworld. For Barad (2007, p. 151), materiality isunderstood not as a fixed substance, but as a‘substance in its intra-active becoming—nota thing but a doing, a congealing of [humanand nonhuman] agency’. As Bennett (2005,p. 461) argues, assemblage asks us to considerthe agency not just of each ‘member’ or theassemblage, but of the assemblage itself—themilieu, or specific arrangement of things,through which forces and trajectories inhereand transform in a context of ‘fluid andintensive generation of potential’ (Savage,2009, p. 171). Here, assemblage can provideinsight into the ‘stuff’ of inequality, and tohow it is experienced.

In distributing agency in this way—andthis is a second implication for critical urbanresearch of attending to materiality—assem-blage troubles at where we assign responsi-bility and causality when we conductcritique. As Bennett (2005, 2010) has arguedin the context of the blackout of the NorthAmerican power grid in August 2003, theinherently distributive and multiple nature ofagency within such a sociomaterial assem-blage casts questions over where responsibil-ity, accountability and the ethico-politics ofblame lie. Bennett (2005, p. 464) frames theproblem of the distribution of agency as abinary judgement about where we strategi-cally wish to attribute blame: humans ormaterial agents (e.g. a failure in technologyvs. a failure in governance or funding). Butrather than choosing from one of two binaryoptions, it seems to me that a potentialcontribution of assemblage thinking to criti-cal urbanism here lies in the particular andoften unexpected agency of different materi-alities. We might ask, for instance, what theparticular agency of Richard Florida’s sleekPowerPoint presentations of the ‘creativecity’ is when set against existing local urban

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plans? How do plans emerge, and throughwhich sociomaterial geographies? For thecritical urbanist, a focus on agency as distrib-uted through sociomaterial assemblagesopens multiple space-times of interventionwithin assemblages, where the imperative toact critically is one—to borrow from Barad(2007, p. 296)—of ‘meeting each moment,being alive to the possibilities of becoming’,an ‘ethical call, an invitation that is writteninto the very matter of being and becoming’.In its orientation towards thick descriptionof relations of history and potential, and inits conceptual focus on distributing agencyacross social and material, assemblage think-ing diversifies the range of agents and causesof urban inequality, while potentially multi-plying the spaces of critical intervention.

Assemblage and the critical imaginary

The third and final area in which assemblagecontributes to critical urbanism lies in theimaginary of assemblage as collage, gatheringand composition. In this section, I examinethe orientation assemblage can bring tourban critique through the important issue ofurban cosmopolitan composition, where thequestion at stake is whether the imaginary ofthe assembling city might allow us to worktowards, as a political implication, a progres-sive cosmopolitan urbanism. Perhaps theclosest approximation in the social sciencesto the image of compositional mixture is thedebate on cosmopolitanism. As a name for aparticular kind of translocal relation, cosmo-politanism offers one potentially progressivesite for how we conceptualise urban assem-blage. As David Featherstone (forthcoming)argues in relation to ‘subaltern cosmopoli-tanism’, cosmopolitanism is not identitarianin the sense of ‘being together’, but in themobile relational sense of ‘becomingtogether’. Cosmopolitanism is a relation ofencountering, managing or negotiatingdifference. In this sense, cosmopolitanism inthe city might be described as a kind of‘worldliness’ that takes at least four relational

forms: a knowledge, of how difference mightbe negotiated, or of how mutuality acrossdifference might operate; a disposition, eitheras a progressive orientation to urban culturaldiversity or as a regressive exclusionarysensibility deployed in relation to othercultures; a resource, a means of coping,getting-by, surviving and managing uncer-tainty in the city; and an ideal, an openness toand celebration of urban diversity and trans-local connection and togetherness that is tobe worked towards (cf. Sandercock, 1998,2004; Harvey, 2009). An encounter betweenassemblage and cosmopolitanism asks us toconsider how urban assemblage might offeran imaginary of a progressive form ofbecoming together, that is, as both a disposi-tion and ideal.

Of course, cosmopolitanism itself is often asham, and can be a smokescreen for an elite-driven and regressive urbanism that implicitlyprivileges particular kinds of well-travelled,white, Western individuals whose politics isthat of a conservative liberal ‘tolerance’, whilemasking the forms of urban polarisation anduneven spatial development so well docu-ment in the critical urban literature. As AlainBadiou (2008) had recently argued, the samevoices who would have us believe in the mythof a globally accessible urban world for all arealso actively in the business of constructingnew walls in the proliferation of enclaves,surveillance, controls and expulsions. Forexample, the so-called ‘politics of immigra-tion’ that animates so many politicallyanaemic debates in the ‘West’, he writes, is inreality a process of exploitation and hardshipof migrant workers that reveals the sham ofglobalisation or cosmopolitanism as a ‘unifiedworld’. If cosmopolitanism does provide animaginary that comes close to capturing aprogressive notion of urban assemblage, then,it is nonetheless operative within what Slavoj[Zcaron]Zizek (2009) has called a deepening ‘socialapartheid’ on a global scale. So why attemptto recuperate cosmopolitanism as a normativepolitical project of urban assemblage?

One reading of cosmopolitanism as anormative political project is the sometimes

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romanticised discourse of ‘one-worldism’.To return to Badiou (2008, p. 39), in thesimple axiom ‘there is only one world’ thereis a political project of togetherness thataffirms a decent standard of living for all. Hewrites:

‘A first consequence is the recognition that all belong to the same world as myself: the African worker I see in the restaurant kitchen, the Moroccan I see digging a hole in the road, the veiled woman looking after children in the park. That is where we reverse the dominant idea of the world united by objects and signs, to make a unity in terms of living, acting beings, here and now.’ (ibid.)

To echo the discussion of the commonsearlier in the paper, this relational one world-ism is not a homogenous unity. It is an invo-cation of a single world where an unlimitedset of differences exist, and where thesedifferences do not cast doubt over the unityof the world but are its principle of existence.Urbanism is, in part, assemblage throughdifferences, and there is an important princi-ple here for critique in ensuring that thisimage is genuinely plural, hospitable andequal. One response, then, to the call for anormative cosmopolitanism is a kind of exis-tential cosmopolitanism as an image ofassembly and reassembly, and that locates aprivileged ‘I’ or ‘us’ in relation to sufferingothers in a way that insists on a decent stan-dard of living regardless of national identityand without understating the crucial role ofpower, conflict and difference.

The political consequences of this one-worldism is not to somehow eschew theongoing inequalities of class, gender, race,ethnicity, religion, caste, disability or age thatare actively folded into the constitution ofcities. It is, instead, to demonstrate that weare constitutive parts of those inequalities.The response is not simply an espousal ofsympathy, but an attempt to enter into theassemblage of a more socially just city. Oneimage of the reassembled just city, then, is aprogressive cosmopolitan urbanism thatconstantly invokes an alternative, more

inclusive urban commons based on mutualrecognition, solidarity and resistance. Again,we are not standing outside of the traditionsof critical urbanism here, but instead echoingexisting concerns through a spatial grammarof progressive cosmopolitanism. We returnhere, for instance, to Henri Lefebvre’sfamous invocation of the right to the city, aright cast not just as material access to urbanspace, but a renewed right to urban life. Theright to the city, wrote Lefebvre:

‘should modify, concretize and make more practical the rights of the citizen as an urban dweller and user of multiple services. It would affirm, on the one hand, the right of the user to make known their ideas on the space and time of their activities in the urban area; it would also cover the right to the use of the centre, a privileged place, instead of being dispersed and stuck into ghettos (for workers, immigrants, the “marginal” and even for the “privileged”).’ (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 2342, translated in Kofman and Lebas 1996, p. 3; Mitchell, 2003; Harvey, 2008)

This double affirmation—of both access tothe city and active participation of a rangeof groups in the production of the city as alived reality—closely connects to theimage of urban assemblage as inclusivecosmopolitanism.

It is worth recalling at this point thediscussion of agency and the nonhuman inthe previous section, because this offersanother sense in which assemblage mightfunction as a critical imaginary in the shapeof a cosmopolitan becoming together acrossdifference. As Hinchliffe et al. (2005)suggest, cosmopolitanism can be conceivedbeyond rubrics of inclusion and participa-tion. In their work on urban wildlife andecologies in Birmingham, they extendcosmopolitan thinking beyond a politics ofinclusion and instead attempt to write anontological project of generating experimentsthat constitute new collectives and politics.They draw on Stengers’ characterisation ofcosmopolitics (1997) in an effort to ‘ecolo-gise the political’, an experiment with a poli-

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tics of changing engagements and ontologicalstruggle in relation to urban wildlife biodi-versity (Hinchliffe et al., 2005, p. 650). Partof the ‘experiment’ here is to put knowledge‘at risk’, to attend to the unexpected behav-iour of urban wildlife in ways that co-produces new assemblages of knowledge,people and wildlife—‘to allow others, of allshapes, sizes and trajectories, to object to thestories we tell about them, to intervene inour processes as much as we intervene intheirs’ (ibid., pp. 655–656).

This cosmopolitical experimentation aimsto develop not just better, more inclusiverepresentations, but alternative ontologies ofhuman–nonhuman collectivities that changein process, potentially evoking new possibili-ties for knowing and acting in the city. Awayfrom urban wildlife, attention to urbannature and metabolisms has been an impor-tant part of different strands of critical urbanthought (for example, Keil and Ali’s 2007account of global networked disease likeSARS and its impact on urban governance;and see Heynen et al., 2006; Swyngedouw,2006). As an approximation of cosmopolitan-ism, the assemblage imaginary recalls theconcern with the rights to the city but doesso through a politics of recognition that hasthe potential implication of generating newurban knowledges, collectives and ontolo-gies. Assemblage’s imaginary of gatheringand composition is one vehicle throughwhich the rights to the city might potentiallybe realised, whereby assemblage extends therights to the city as a process of agonisticcomposition.

Conclusion

In order to consider how it might connectwith and differ from critical urbanism, I havediscussed assemblage in expansive terms asan orientation, a concept, and an imaginary.As a relational process of composition,assemblage signals the emergence, labour andsociomateriality of the city, and the ways inwhich this process becomes structured and

hierarchical through inequalities of power,resource and knowledge. Assemblage under-lines the ways in which urbanism is producedas an unfolding set of uneven practices thatare—while being more or less open orenclosed—never inevitable, but always capa-ble of being produced otherwise. It signifiesthe city not simply as an output or resultantformation, but as ongoing construction.What, then, does assemblage offer a readingof critique?

I have offered three intersections here. First,assemblage emphasises thick description ofthe relations between history and potential,that is, of the different processes that histori-cally produce urban inequality and the possi-bilities for those conditions of inequality to becontested, imagined differently and altered.This focus on the actual and possible hasclearly been at the heart of critical urbanthinking, but assemblage thinking under-scores an emphasis on the processes of assem-bling the urban commons and of the potentialof generative critique. Second, assemblagedistributes agency across the social and thematerial, and in doing so draws attention tothe agency of the materials themselves asprocesses within assemblages. If this resonateswith the long history of critical urbanism—forinstance, around the materialities of thecommodity, the gated enclave or indeed ofurbanisation itself as a form of capital accumu-lation—assemblage thinking is particularlyconcerned with whether and how materialitiesmight make a difference to the ways in whichpoverty and inequality are produced andexperienced — not to pretend to tell the wholestory (if that is ever possible), but to disclosedifferent insights into how urban worlds aremade. This focus on agency in part calls uponcritical urbanists to consider how seeminglymundane micro-materialities—such asJockin’s train tickets in the example givenearlier—change their function through newinteractions within assemblages, and haveeffects in terms of helping to structure andmaintain resistance campaigns. Third, theimaginary of assemblage as collage, composi-tion and gathering contains a potential

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222 CITY VOL. 15, NO. 2

political contribution to urban critique.Assemblage as composition is an imaginary ofprogressive cosmopolitanism which impli-cates a privileged ‘us’ with an exploited ‘they’and uses that as a basis for collective recogni-tion, forging solidarities and resistance, andwhich resonates with the Lefebvrian rights tothe city tradition.

Assemblage thinking does not oppose thelong tradition of critical urbanism, but it doesoffer some specific orientations and questionsthat could prove useful—three in particular.First, it offers an emphasis on potentiality. Asa process of generating concerns and assem-bling difference, assemblage’s orientation isas much on creating alternatives as it is ondebunking existing claims. This focus onpotential, however, casts up not just thepossibilities of assembly, but the possibilitiesthat remain unfulfilled: potentiality exists as atension between hope, inspiration and thescope of the possible, and the sometimesdebilitating recognition of that which has notbeen attained. Second, in drawing attentionto the agency of materials themselves, and tohow they might help shape inequality and theprospects for resistance and alterity, assem-blage asks us to consider how critical praxisemerges through sociomaterial interactionrather than through a separation of the socialand material. And, third, assemblage offers animaginary of cosmopolitanism compositionthat can be used to carve out strategies foralternative urbanisms based upon mutualrecognition and solidarity, and on the genera-tion of new compositions across difference.

Acknowledgements

Several people have helped me a great deal informulating the arguments in this paper bytaking the time to read an earlier draft. I amvery grateful to Joe Painter, Mustafa Dikeç,David Featherstone, Ben Anderson and AlexVasudevan for providing insightful and help-ful comments. Two anonymous referees alsoprovided useful comments. None of them, ofcourse, bear any responsibility for the argu-

ments here. The paper also benefitted fromseminar discussion in several places, espe-cially: the ‘Alternative Urbanism’ workshoporganised by the RGS-IBG Urban Geogra-phy Research Group in November 2010;discussion at the ‘Assembling Cities’ confer-ence organised by Allan Cochrane and KevinWard at The Open University in June 2010;and seminars in Geography at both theUniversity of Cambridge and Kings CollegeLondon. Finally, thanks to Dan Swanton foreditorial support.

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