I.

STILL THINKING CITIES

RELATIONALLY
What is a City?
• A relatively permanent and highly organized
center of population, of greater size and
importance than a town or village (Britannica)
• An inhabited place of greater size, population,
or importance than a town or village.
(Merriam-Webster).
 INTRODUCTION
• Cities exist in an era of increasing geographically extended
spatial flows.
• Rural to urban and transnational migration is transforming
the demography of cities in unprecedented ways, such that
there is more internal multiplicity and the spatiality of city
dwellers is stretched between here and there.
• Where cities end and rurality begins is unclear, and city
effects pulse outwards drawing in rural-based lives and
spaces, creating hybrid urbanisms and new types of con-
joined city regions.
• Cities are nowadays intensely embedded in
global networks of connectivity, be they
economic, cultural or political.
• Contemporary city is ‘open, discontinuous,
relational and internally diverse’ (Allen et al.,
1998: 143) It exists in, and manifests, a
condition of relationality that defies
territorial depiction
• ‘Cities ... come with no automatic promise of
territorial or systemic integrity, since they are
made through the spatiality of flow, juxtaposition,
porosity and relational connectivity’ (Amin, 2004).
• ‘[t]hinking space relationally’ (Massey, 2004: 3)
has had a profound effect of how urban geography
is conducted and how its project is conceptualized
(see K. Ward, 2010).
• This new ‘mantra’ of early 21st-century geography has
brought novel geographies of urbanization into view and
placed into question the very nature and logics of the city
(Jones, 2009: 488).
• Within urban geography, relationality is interpreted and
put into action in quite different ways.
• There are urban geographies making claims to relational
thinking that are radically incompatible, and live not in
relation to each other but in parallel universes
• One dominant articulation of relational thinking in geography
has been to think beyond the city-as-territory.
• New Topographies of Relationality- urban geographical
scholarship that concerns itself with flows and relational
networks between city entities
• Amin and Thrift (2002a: 2) not so recently claimed that ‘[w]e
can no longer even agree on what counts as a city’ for ‘[t]he
city is everywhere and in every thing’. This is not a
networked urbanism, but something far more dissipated and
emergent.
Urban Policy Mobilities
One especially productive line of inquiry
into urban relationality has been the
work on urban policy mobilities.
• TOPOGRAPHICAL AND PHYSICAL
MOBILITY
– Focus on how people and things move across
absolute space and why some people and
things travel further than others.
– On foreground are mobility events and
variables explaining participation in such
events.
• TOPOLOGICAL AND IMAGINATIVE
MOBILITY
– Cities are pulled together, and pushed apart
in relational space by comparisons made.
– This ‘actually existing comparative urbanism’
also takes place via knowledge transfer and
‘best practice’ publications, and urban
network and partnership schemes.
• Fast Policy Transfer- In a mobile world,
knowledges, expertise and techniques routinely
and quickly move from one city to another (Peck
and Nik Theodore, 2001)
• The scholarship on urban policy mobilities seeks
to better understand how and why cities are
produced in and through cross-scale, intercity
relationships and movements (McCann, 2010: 108).
• Range of Urban Policies and Practices:
– investigations into mobile urban social policy (McCann,
2008, 2011),
– studies of urban governance structures (Clarke, 2011),
– accounts of mobile urban economic policy,
– some of the work on creative city strategies,
– research into mobile urban design and development
styles, including new urbanism, and
– megaprojects
• Eugene McCann and Kevin Ward have recently
coordinated a range of like-minded studies in a
welcome themed issue of Geoforum (2010) entitled
‘Mobilizing Policy’, as well as in an edited collection
aptly entitled Mobile Urbanism (McCann and Ward,
2011a). the approach of contributors to these
collections is largely within a neo-Marxian political
economy, extending a critique of the global effects
of neoliberalism as a mobile technology.
• Urban policy mobilities are not new.
• Clarke (2011) has argued that contemporary urban
policy mobilities are decidedly different from
mobilities of the past.
• Their novelty arises because of their speed and
frequency, the type of policies being transferred,
the mechanisms of transference, and the
technocratic-managerial-entrepreneurial context of
transfer.
• John Friedmann (2005) raised a useful note of scepticism
with respect to planning ideas on the move when he asked
‘do planning ideas travel?
• This is not so much a questioning of the fact of policy
mobility as an opening to think more carefully about what
exactly is moving when ‘policy’ travels.
• Especially useful in this respect is the scholarship that
shows us something more of what McCann (2010: 109) has
referred to as the ‘connective tissue’ of cities as global-
relational nodes.
• This work has brought into view the ways in
which policy does not simply move as a preformed
thing (be that a technology, a design, or a set of
ideas or procedures) through a smooth space of
flow via rational agents called ‘policy-makers’
• Policy mobilities are embodied, material, piece-
meal and often irrational (McFarlane, 2006).
• Urban policy is not a preformed, well-bounded
and immutable thing that moves through time
and space. And policy transfer is a stop-start
process of ‘lesson learning’ or ‘lesson drawing’
(see Marmor et al., 2005; S. Ward, 2009)
that entails ‘dialogic ... connections between
policy actors and policymaking sites’ (Peck and
Theodore, 2010: 170).
• Policies arrive in cities not as a replica from
elsewhere but as policies in transformation.
• Policies ‘move as they move’ because cities are
not only relational but also territorial-
meaning that policies must be
deterritorialized from one place before being
reterritorialized elsewhere.
• Larner and Laurie (2010) note, there are far more
actors involved in policy transfer than just the
policy-makers themselves.
– Knowledge Actors can include non-state experts
(such as academics, activists or personality
professionals) who supply a knowledge terrain
(sometimes factual, sometimes rhetorical) that
cultivates a receptive ground for policy adoption
• Such relationalities are not enacted in an entirely novel, smooth
space of openness.
• ‘Fixity-mobility dialectic’ or as a ‘relationality/territoriality
dialectic’ of contemporary urbanisms: These transnational
urban practices are, as McCann (2010: 109) notes, ‘socially
produced’ and so ‘develop in, are conditioned by, [and] travel
through’ contextualized networks, policy communities, and
institutions.
• In other words, transnational urbanisms operate in rather
sticky, history-laden contexts that shape what goes where and
how, as well as in what form they materialize.
• One richly suggestive aspect of this work on the ‘connective
tissue’ of mobility has been the attention given to policy and
technology teaching and learning processes called Urban
‘policy tourism’ (Ward, 2011).
• Event-led policy tourism: in which ‘urban policy
entrepreneurs’ (Hoyt, 2006) (architects, economists,
engineers, designers) are invited by a specific host city to
share their experiences
• Visit-led policy tourism: in which urban policy-makers and
city builders tour cities famous for their successes
• To date, insufficient attention has been given to
the ways in which such ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’
events are often themselves commodified
exchanges with contracts and tenders in the
making
• These policy tourism events can have as much in
common with the commercial trade fair (with
expert providers promoting their wares) as they do
knowledge conferences
• In developing these threads of urban policy research
there is much common ground between such
events/visits and touristic logics (see Clarke, 2011) as
well as the research on civic and other exhibitions (see
Meller, 2000).
• Such connective practices remind us of the centrality of
comparative thinking in urban governance and
development nowadays – what Robinson (2004, 2011) has
referred to as ‘actually existing’ comparative urbanism.
• These are the prosaic, ongoing but highly
influential comparisons that occur among city
dwellers and city builders alike.
• In this intercity comparative practice, certain
cities and certain urbanisms – ‘usual suspects’,
McFarlane (2010: 732) calls them – may
dominate and be especially influential.
• There are many alternative geographies of urban
comparativism that contemporary scholars overlook in
their often Western-centric or North–South axial
imaginaries (McFarlane, 2011a)
• These exist, for example, through alternative or
overlooked language and knowledge epistemes, such as
the networks between Mandarin or Portuguese speaking
cities (to name just two possibilities), or regionally
affiliated cities such as the cities of Southeast Asia or
South Asia or Africa.
Emergent Urbanism Assemblages
The emphasis has been on better
understanding the ways in which cities are
networked, and how these relations shape
their trajectories of development. In this
conception the city is understood as
deterritorialized in as much as it is known
to be part of a global network, as opposed
to an autonomous and bounded entity.
• As Smith and Doel (2011) have recently argued, for all of
the added complexity and process charted in geographies
of urban networks, it is a geography not entirely freed of a
topographical conceptualization of the city.
• For example, although the recent research insists on
thinking about policy as diversified mobilities (as opposed
to unidirectional transfers), it nonetheless often speaks of
following policy presences from one city to another and
engages in detection of the effects of such transfers.
• It is not uncommon for a policy mobility study
to both assume networks along which ideas
travel and at the same time speak of far more
spatially and temporally crumpled imaginative
geographies (say of intercity comparativism or
aspirationalism), which fold cities together in
ways that are non-linear and non-sequential.
• As Clarke (2011: 4) notes, ‘mobility across relational
space may well be a necessary precursor to mobility
across absolute space’.
• Urban policy mobilities are better thought about
topologically.
• Topological urbanism as ‘a subtle folding together of
the distant and the proximate, the virtual and the
material, presence and absence, flow and stasis’
(Amin, 2007).
• A topological urban geography would not simply chart
mobilities between cities, but see the city as mobility or
through an ontology of movement (Latham and McCormack,
2004).
• An urban geography cities are not understood to be in
networks, but are seen as networks (Smith and Doel,
2011).
• One variant of this relational urban geography insists on
seeing the city as a virtuality, as something emergent and
eventful.
• This altogether more demanding variant of thinking cities
relationally is indebted to a range of poststructural
theories (of eventfulness, complexity, performativity and
becoming).
• Perhaps most ambitious among this work is that by Richard
Smith and Marcus Doel. Smith’s (2003) contribution to
this ‘great experiment’ in urban studies has been to
challenge the existing space, time and scale assumptions in
world city theory and move towards a ‘topology of
circulation and network folding’
• His relational urban geography collapses the
separation of humans and objects, relies on
concepts of folded space, and deconstructs how we
see distance, proximity, scale and linearity.
• Despite the apparent theoretical promiscuity of
Smith and Doel’s project, it is dedicated to
introducing concepts to urban geography that can
allow the city to be seen as ‘a topology of
intensities and relations’
 City as assemblage
• Assemblage refers to the immanent effect of the
association of heterogeneous elements (humans,
organizations, tools, objects, technologies, texts,
organisms, other cities) (Latour, 2005)
• These assemblages are never fixed or stable, but
always in a process of making or unmaking.
• Such instability (mobility) means that there is always
potential for innovation, an eventful differentiation.
• It is also assumed that assemblages have
distributed agency such that, for example, a
toxic material may act within an assemblage
just as a policy-maker might.
• In short, assemblage offers a way of thinking
the world, including the urban world, as a
‘relational processuality of composition’
(McFarlane, 2011b: 652).
• Urban Assemblages (Farias and Bender
2009)- This collection specifically explores how
an actor network perspective changes the types
of questions asked of the city, as well as the
nature of the settings and objects scrutinized.
– showcases the ‘undeniable affinity’ between
urban studies and ANT (Madden, 2010: 585;
see also Jacobs and Cairns, 2011).
• Farias, for example, sees the city as an ‘open building site’,
and one that is ‘relentlessly being assembled at concrete
sites of urban practice’ (Farı´as, 2009: 2).
• Bender sees the urban as bundled networks, be they human,
infrastructural, architectural or hybridized).
• These networks, Bender (2009: 316) argues, ‘agglomerate
into assemblages, perhaps a neighborhood, or a crowd at a
street festival, or a financial center like Wall Street in
New York City. The metropolis, then, is an assemblage of
assemblages’.
• Farı´as (2009: 13) argues that ‘assemblage’
offers an ‘alternative ontology for the city’,
wherein the emphasis is always upon
discerning how assemblages are being made
and unmade at particular sites of practices.
• This making and unmaking does not simply
occur in social hands (the constructivist social
shaping of technologies).
• Rather, an actor-network perspective conceives of
sociotechnical process as enactments
(performativities), what Farı´as (2009: 13) refers
to as ‘heterogeneous ecologies of entities acting’
(see also Latham and McCormack, 2004).
• This notion of a hybridized, or cyborg, city-in-the-
making resonates with a range of studies of how
city places and urban technologies are assembled
incrementally and contingently.
• At least some of the more strictly Latourean versions of
this scholarship can appear overly detailed and seemingly
apolitical to the critical urban scholar
• Such scholarship can not only overlook the ‘political and
politicized nature of technological assemblages’ (Graham,
2009: 204); it can often emphatically resist such lines of
explanation.
• Indeed, Madden (2010: 588), in reviewing Urban
Assemblages, concludes that ‘with too much ANT, critical
urban studies would be impossible’.
• This is more evidently loyal to a range of concerns within
a critical political economy of urban development, and the
existing traditions of critical scholarship on
sociotechnical or cyborg urbanisms and relational regional
geographies.
• McFarlane (2011b) draws upon the concept of assemblage
because it offers a way of approaching and representing
relations between multiple actors that are variously
present or absent, near or far, interior or exterior,
human and non-human.
• For McFarlane, the concept of assemblage is
of value because of the way in which it
‘attend[s] to why and how multiple bits-and-
pieces accrete and align over time to enable
particular forms of urbanism over others’ and
how such processes may be ‘subject to
disassembly and reassembly through unequal
relations of power and resource’.
• Deleuzian conception of assemblage such that
assemblages are not a ‘spatial category’, a condition
or a formation produced as a result of points being
joined by linear, fixed, essential or filial relations.
• They are much more open and mobile alliances and
alloys – gatherings – that can stabilize (be
territorialized or reterritorialized) and destabilize
(be deterritorialized) (McFarlane, 2011b: 653).
• Agencement- This term better expresses a
coextensive process of arrangement and
action.
– Callon (2007: 313) refers to agencements
as ‘arrangements endowed with the capacity
of acting in different ways depending on
their configuration’.
• The use of the term ‘assemblages’ is almost
ubiquitous in contemporary urban geography, and
not all uses carry the kind of theoretical
infrastructure outlined above.
• For example, within urban policy mobilities work the
term is commonplace and is also used by McCann
and Ward (2011b) as the key concept of the
opening chapter of their recent edited collection.
• Some notable ways in which it has been used with
respect to urban contexts is McFarlane’s application
to the making and unmaking of urban dwellings.
• Another variant of assemblage thinking with respect
to contemporary urbanisms has seen the concept
applied to social relations previously understood in
largely dematerialized and disembodied ways (as social
constructs, for example).
• Extending a trajectory of inquiry laid down by
Amin and Thrift’s (2002b; see also Amin,
2002) call for an ‘ontology of encounter’, Dan
Swanton has examined what he has dubbed
‘the new racism of assemblages’.
• His work charts assemblages of technologies
and bodies that contingently actualize urban
race subjectivities and relations.
Presence and Proximity
• Friedmann’s (2005) scepticism about what moves
when policy moves leads him to call for scholars to
thicken their descriptions of policy mobilities.
• There is a crucial evidence trap that must be
vigilantly worked against, lest our studies of
mobilities simply feed universalizing narratives of
same-ing and in so doing, once again, position some
cities as command centres (exporters of ideas) and
others as passive receivers and imitators.
• Robinson’s (2005) project of a postcolonial or
cosmopolitan urban theory reminds us not only of
the perils of such thinking, but the opportunities
for alternative urban imaginaries that are missed.
• She asks urban scholars to extend the relationships
that matter to their scholarship (and the theory
they build) by looking to ‘ordinary cities’, the cities
that are off the map, or down the hierarchy of
existing theories of globalized urbanism.
• In diffusionist models of policy mobility it is often
assumed that knowledge is produced in a centre
somewhere (the West, a Global City) then moves
outward to influence and shape more distant others
(Jacobs, 2006).
• But it is crucial that we replace diffusionist models
of mobilities (including our residual diffusionist
imaginaries) with ones invested in a more Latourean
concept of translation (see also McFarlane, 2006).
• Latour’s concept of translation was developed specifically
as a critical alternative to diffusionist storymaking in
which a relatively stable thing moves through space and
time by way of social effort.
• Translation brings into view not only the work required for
a thing to reach one point from another, but also the
multiplicity of add-ons that contribute, often in
unpredictable and varying ways, to transportation, arrival,
adoption and (something current urban policy mobility
studies are entirely blind to) non-arrival and nonadoption.
• The concept of translation brings back in not only
the forgotten many who carry policies but also
the crowds of acting entities that shape the
affiliations that form around a thing on the move.
• These entities meaningfully contribute to how
coherent and convincing something that moves
remains or becomes, and so the extent to which
it is likely to take hold or not take hold.
• Jamie Peck (2011) has argued something similar in his
case to see policy movement not as ‘transfer-diffusion’
but as ‘mobilitymutation’, but even then there is a
tendency for scholarship to stay fixated on policy
presences, following what has already arrived and
formed.
• It is true that scholars contributing to the new urban
policy mobility studies increasingly acknowledge that the
quest is not simply to hunt for ‘global convergence or
homogeneity of outcome’
• A ‘will to map and explain how neoliberal programmes
get extended across space’ even while scholars may
acknowledge that ‘neo-liberalization processes are ...
contested, unstable’ (Clarke, 2011).
• In this mapping process it is true that certain
knowledges and actions emerge as ‘best practice’ or
‘model urbanism’, some technologies as unquestioned
and immutable, and some experts as global gurus
(McCann, 2004).
• Although urban policy mobility scholarship claims
to ‘follow the policy’ (Peck and Theodore, 2010;
Olds, 2001), essentially through techniques of
policy review and key player interviews, it is more
often a method of joining the dots.
• Instances of a policy presence are discerned and
then a back story of connection, translation and
arrival is charted.
• There is a need to reflect on how exactly one ‘follows the
policy’.
• Smith and Doel (2011; see also Doel, 2009), complaining
about Latourean-inspired notions of assemblage, argue
that such conceptions are too wedded to ‘a metaphysics of
presence’ and the traceable association between these
presences
• This kind of additive, ‘associative ontology’, they argue,
cannot grasp the complex multiplicity and virtuality of
contemporary urbanism.
• Not least a methodological diversification (more
ethnography and less policy review) might allow
instances of repetition to be better understood as
effect, and thus an ambiguous signifier of
monotone and linear stories of neoliberal same-ing.
• If one follows presence, say policy presence, then
it may guarantee that all we ever see in our urban
geographies is neoliberal extension.
• Policy mobilities produce a set of ‘actionable
ideas’, then studies of them must be better
attuned not only to the motives and politics of
action-in-the-name-ofrepetition (adoption,
learning) but also to the motives and politics
of action-in-the-name-of differentiation,
reaction, rejection, de-activation, detour,
redirection and failure (McCann, 2010).
 End of Topic.
Questions? Clarifications?