Ignacio Farías and Thomas Bender (eds.) Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies. 2010. London: Routledge. 352 pp. ISBN: 978-0-415-48662-0
Reviewed by Andrew Karvonen, Manchester Architecture Research Centre, University of Manchester (UK)
In past three decades, actor-network theory (ANT) has infiltrated a wide range of theories, methods, and empirical studies throughout the social sciences and humanities by rejecting conventional ontological and epistemological assumptions in exchange for a relational perspective. And at long last, a compendium has arrived that is solely devoted to ANT and the study of cities. Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies, edited by Ignacio Farías and Thomas Bender, includes twelve chapters by scholars in geography, sociology, anthropology, and science & technology studies, as well as brief interviews with three noted urban theorists. The book’s strong theoretical emphasis is underpinned by empirical findings from cities and regions throughout the world to demonstrate the opportunities and challenges of supplementing urban studies methodologies and approaches with key insights from ANT. Reflecting on the changes that ANT presents, Farías (pg. 1) writes, ‘The city and the urban do indeed look quite different when explored with symmetrical and radically relational eyes.’
[cc photo credit: Darcy Zhou]
The first section of the book (‘Towards a Flat Ontology’) critiques conventional spatial and scalar interpretations of cities. Manuel Tironi uses the avant-garde music scene in Santiago, Chile to reveal a ‘liquid spatiality’ that is performed rather than pre-given, consisting of decentred and multiple configurations. Likewise, Alan Latham and Derek McCormack study internationally renowned marathons that define unconventional spatial morphologies based on connections rather than scale. Richard Smith critiques the conventional containerized notions of space by describing the actor-networks of legal services in Singapore that transcend a priori categories of local, national, and international. And Don Slater and Tomas Artztía examine the spatial achievements of a virtual cultural centre in northern Spain, arguing that it functions as a ‘scaling device’ to subvert global knowledges and ideas to suit the needs of local actors. The section concludes with an interview with Nigel Thrift who urges urban researchers to follow currents rather than scalar, territorial, and bounded categories to reveal the lived conditions of cities.
Contributors to the second section (‘A Non-Human Human Ecology’) focus on notions of hybridity and the role of materiality in the co-production of cities. Andrés Valderrama Pineda analyses Bogota’s mass transit system to demonstrate how politics are inscribed in the materiality of the city. Anique Hommels uses a contested Dutch highway proposal in Maastricht to compare and contrast three dominant traditions from science & technology studies – ANT, the social construction of technology, and the large technical systems approach. Michael Guggenheim considers buildings as quasi-technologies and argues that from this perspective, they are ‘mutable mobiles’ because they occupy a fixed location that exposes them to many user groups and they are singular in that they cannot be standardised. Israel Rodríguez Giralt, Daniel López Gómez, and Noel García López highlight an aspect of cities that is often overlooked – sound landscapes – and use a Barcelona blackout incident to examine sonorous practices of protest that shape urban relations in indelible ways. The section concludes with an interview with Stephen Graham in which he emphasizes the importance of materiality to ongoing processes of urban development.
In the third section (‘The Multiple City’), Ignacio Farías examines tourist buses in Berlin to argue for an increased emphasis on the virtual, an element of cities that he argues is neglected in ANT approaches. Michael Schillmeier presents Georg Simmel’s work on urban modernity as an early form of ANT and examines the intermediation of money practices to understand how bodies, senses, and things connect or resist connection. Caitlin Zaloom also focuses on monetary flows but in the form of financial markets and the architecture of the trading floor in Chicago that links the virtual and the real. And Rosalind Williams demonstrates the plurality of cities by comparing the nineteenth century writings of Charles Baudelaire and Jules Verne in Paris and their creation of a second world through language. The final section concludes with an interview with Rob Shields who argues that the virtual is as important to cities as the physical.
As a whole, the collection engages with an enormous breadth of urban research traditions and topics, demonstrating the multiple ways that ANT is influencing the study of cities. It is doubtful that the collection will convince newcomers or critics of ANT to embrace a flat, relational ontology; instead, the book serves as a useful stopping point to reflect on some of the ways that ANT is currently being applied in urban studies. As Thomas Bender (p. 317) summarises in the postscript, ‘Perhaps what ANT offers is an unusually rich heuristic device rather than a formal method for studying cities….It is a sensibility that encourages one to think past the outer surface of the urban world.’ It is this sensibility that connects the contributions to this compendium, revealing the promise for richer approaches to urban research that can embrace the multifaceted, messy character of cities.