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

ISSN 1360-4813 print/ISSN 1470-3629 online/11/020225-16 2011 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/13604813.2011.568717

Assemblage urbanism and the challenges of critical urban theory

Neil Brenner, David J. Madden and David Wachsmuth1Taylor and Francis

Against the background of contemporary worldwide transformations of urbanizing spaces,this paper evaluates recent efforts to mobilize the concept of assemblage as the foundationfor contemporary critical urban theory, with particular attention to a recent paper byMcFarlane (2011a) in this journal. We argue that there is no single assemblage urbanism,and therefore no coherence to arguing for or against the concept in general. Instead, wedistinguish between three articulations between urban political economy and assemblagethought. While empirical and methodological applications of assemblage analysis havegenerated productive insights in various strands of urban studies by building on politicaleconomy, we suggest that the ontological application favored by McFarlane and severalother assemblage urbanists contains significant drawbacks. In explicitly rejecting concepts ofstructure in favor of a nave objectivism, it deprives itself of a key explanatory tool forunderstanding the sociospatial context of contexts in which urban spaces and locallyembedded social forces are positioned. Relatedly, such approaches do not adequately graspthe ways in which contemporary urbanization continues to be shaped and contested throughthe contradictory, hierarchical social relations and institutional forms of capitalism. Finally,the normative foundations of such approaches are based upon a decontextualized standpointrather than an immanent, reflexive critique of actually existing social relations and institu-tional arrangements. These considerations suggest that assemblage-based approaches canmost effectively contribute to critical urban theory when they are linked to theories,concepts, methods and research agendas derived from a reinvigorated geopolitical economy.

Key words: assemblage, actor-network theory (ANT), planetary urbanization, critical urbantheory, urban political economy

Introduction

he field of urban studies is todayconfronted with significant theoret-ical, conceptual, epistemological and

methodological challenges. As was arguablyalso the case in the late 1960s and early 1970s,when debates on the urban question (e.g.,

Harvey, 1976; Castells, 1979 [1972]; Lefeb-vre, 2003 [1970]) destabilized inheritedChicago School ontologies, establishedparadigms of urban research now appearincreasingly limited in their ability to illu-minate contemporary urban changes andstruggles. As in previous rounds of debateon the urban question, the source of the

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contemporary urban impasse (Thrift,1993) is the restless periodicity and extraor-dinary slipperiness of the urban phenome-non itself. Even more so than in the 1970s,urbanization today astonishes us by itsscale; its complexity surpasses the tools ofour understanding and the instruments ofpractical capacity (Lefebvre, 2003 [1970],p. 45). A decade ago, Soja (2000, p. xii) aptlycaptured this state of affairs:

It may indeed be both the best of times and the worst of times to be studying cities, for while there is so much that is new and challenging to respond to, there is much less agreement than ever before as to how best to make sense, practically and theoretically, of the new urban worlds being created.

Some strands of urban studies, particularlythose rooted in the professionalized routinesof academic disciplines, remain mired inoutdated research agendas that only partiallygrasp the contours and consequences ofemergent urban transformations. Fortunately,however, there is elsewhere considerableintellectual adventurousness on display, asurbanists across the social sciences andhumanities, as well as in the cognate fields ofplanning, architecture and design, grapplecreatively with the tasks of deciphering therapidly transforming worldwide landscapes ofurbanization (Sassen, 2000; Soja, 2000; Taylor,2004; Roy, 2009). Among the key agendas forsuch researchers is to investigate the evolvingpositionalities of citiesand urban landscapesmore generallywithin such large-scale,long-term trends as geoeconomic restructur-ing, market-driven regulatory change (includ-ing both privatization and liberalization), theworldwide flexibilization/informalization oflabor, mass migration, environmental degra-dation, global warming, the creative destruc-tion of large-scale territorial landscapes andthe intensification of polarization, inequality,marginalization, dispossession and socialconflict at all spatial scales.

In the face of these developmental dynam-ics, we believe there is an increasingly urgentneed to rethink our most basic assumptions

regarding the site, object and agenda ofurban research. The urban questionfamously posed four decades ago by Lefeb-vre, Harvey and Castells remains as essentialas ever, but it arguably needs to be reposed,in the most fundamental way, in light ofearly 21st-century conditions. In otherwords: do we really know, today, where theurban begins and ends, or what its mostessential features are, socially, spatially orotherwise? At minimum, the town/countrydivide that once appeared to offer a stable,even self-evident, basis for delineating thespecificity of city settlements, today appearsincreasingly as an ideological remnant ofearly industrial capitalism that maps onlyproblematically onto contemporary urbanprocesses (Wachsmuth, 2010). More radi-cally still, a case can be made that Lefebvrespostulate (2003 [1970]) of an incipientprocess of complete or planetary urban-ization is today being actualized in practice.Despite pervasive sociospatial unevennessand persistent territorial inequality, theentire fabric of planetary settlement space isnow being both extensively and intensivelyurbanized (Schmid, 2005; Soja and Kanai,2005; Madden, 2011). In the face of thisprospect, and especially given the unprece-dented pace, scale and volatility of contem-porary worldwide urbanization, it seemsessential to consider whether inheritedconcepts and methods for understanding andtransforming cities remain at all adequate tocontemporary conditions. Quite simply, theoft-repeated mantra that a global urbantransition has recently occurred due to theapparent fact that over half of the worldspopulation now lives within cities does noteven begin to capture the intellectual, repre-sentational and political complexities associ-ated with grasping the contemporary globalurban condition.2

It is, we would argue, certainly not amoment for intellectual modesty or a retreatfrom grand metanarratives, as advocated bysome poststructuralists a few decades ago.On the contrary, from our point of view,there is today a need for ambitious, wide-

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reaching engagementstheoretical, concreteand practicalwith the planetary dimensionsof contemporary urbanization across diverseplaces, territories and scales. Yet it would behighly problematic to suggest that any singletheory, paradigm or metanarrative could, initself, completely illuminate the processes inquestion.3 Theoretical ambition need not bepursued through the construction of reduc-tionist, simplifying frameworks; the task,rather, is to create concepts and methods thatopen up new questions and horizonsforboth thought and action. Accordingly, incontrast to some of the more closed modelsof urbanism that prevailed during the high-points of Chicago School urban research inthe 1930s through the 1960s and, in a differ-ent way, within the structuralist Marxisms ofthe 1970s, urban theory today must embraceand even celebrate a certain degree of eclecti-cism. Today more than ever, there is a needfor a collaborative, open-minded spirit toprevail in urban studies, particularly amongthose scholars who are most committed toconfronting the daunting challenges of recon-ceptualizing the parameters and purposes ofthis research field. When such scholars makedivergent or opposed theoretical, conceptualand methodological choices, useful opportu-nities may emerge for all those involved toclarify the stakes of such choices, and theirpossible implications.

In that spirit, our goal here is to evaluatecritically the growing literature on an assem-blage-theoretical approach to urbanism, andin particular Colin McFarlanes recent argu-ments in City (2011a) and elsewhere (2011b).Given our remarks above regarding the situ-ation of contemporary urban studies, wecertainly welcome the innovative, intellectu-ally adventurous impulse behind recentassemblage-theoretical interventions byMcFarlane and others (Faras, 2010; Farasand Bender, 2010). Their work represents aserious effort to transcend certain inherited,intellectually constraining assumptionsregarding the urban question, and on thisbasis, to open up new methodologicalwindows into the various forms in which

that question is being posed and fought outtoday. However, while we strongly supportassemblage analysts concern to reinventurban theory for early 21st-century condi-tions, our own orientations for such a projectdiverge considerably from those that have todate been proposed by the major authorsadvancing this framework. In outlining thisdivergence, with particular reference toMcFarlanes recent paper in City (2011a), ourintention is not to attempt to patrol theboundaries of theoretical innovation inurban studies. Rather, by posing some criti-cal questions regarding McFarlanes frame-work and the larger intellectual terrain onwhich it is situated, we hope to contribute toa broader dialogue, in the pages of City andbeyond, regarding the challenges of contem-porary urban theory, and the most appropri-ate strategies for confronting them. Becausewe do not believe there is any single correctsolution to such challenges, our questionsare intentionally open-ended. The goal, werepeat, is to open up horizons for thoughtand action, and through collective dialogue,investigation and debate, to begin to explorethese horizons.

Towards assemblage urbanism?

Prior to its elaboration within urban studies,the concept of assemblage has been mobi-lized towards diverse ends within severaltraditions of contemporary social theory.Although the word is sometimes used in adescriptive sense, to describe the coming-together of heterogeneous elements within aninstitution, place, built structure or art form(Sassen, 2006; Madden, 2010a), its philosoph-ical usage in English derives principally fromthe work of Deleuze and Guattari (1987[1980]). Their concept of agencement wastranslated as assemblage by Brian Massumiin the English version of A Thousand Plateauspublished in the late 1980s, and this conven-tion was generally preserved through a looseconsensus among subsequent translators andcommentators (Phillips, 2006, p. 108). But, as

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Marcus and Saka (2006) demonstrate, theconcept of assemblage has subsequently beenmobilized in multifarious ways, only some ofwhich are explicitly Deleuzoguattarian (as in,for instance, the influential work of DeLanda, 2006). Significant elements of whathas today come to be known as assemblagetheory are only partially linked to the philo-sophical apparatus of Deleuze and Guattari(Venn, 2006). Well-known examples of thelatter include emergent approaches to globalanthropology (e.g. Ong and Collier, 2004;Collier, 2006) and, perhaps most influentially,the actor-network theory (ANT) developedby scholars such as Bruno Latour, MichelCallon, John Law and their followers (for anoverview, see Law and Hassard, 1999;Castree, 2002; Latour, 2005). While Latour(1999, p. 19) has said that ANT is derivedfrom an actant-rhizome ontology, it argu-ably departs significantly from the philosoph-icalpolitical project of Deleuze and Guattarithemselves.

Aside from the heterodox, broadly Deleu-zoguattarian strand of architectural theoryand criticism developed as of the late 1980s inthe now-defunct journal Assemblages, it isonly relatively recently, above all since thepublication of Faras and Benders importantvolume on the possible applications of ANTin urban research (2010), that the discourse ofassemblage has been explicitly deployed as amajor analytical tool for more-than-descrip-tive purposes in studies of cities and urbanspace. McFarlanes work (2011a, 2011b)builds upon and extends the latter line ofresearch. Like Faras (2010) and Bender(2010), McFarlane argues that the conceptof assemblage can help illuminate someneglected intricacies of urban spatiality and,more generally, urban life. Additionally,McFarlane attempts to specify some of theepistemological and methodological implica-tions of applying this concept in specificrealms of urban researchfor instance, onurban inequality, particularly in the realmof housing. Perhaps most intriguingly,McFarlane situates his analysis quite explic-itly in the tradition of critical urban theory,

as presented in a recent issue of City byMarcuse (2009) and Brenner (2009).

As a motif within urban theory, McFarlaneargues, the notion of assemblage is primarilyfocused upon sociomaterial transformation(2011a, p. 206), grammars of gathering,networking and composition (p. 207), andinteractions between human and nonhumancomponents that as co-functioning can bestabilised or destabilised through mutualimbrication (p. 208). Assemblages are proces-sual relationships that cannot be reduced toindividual properties alone (p. 208). Assem-blage thinking highlights processes of compo-sition and recognizes diverse forms of humanand nonhuman agencieswhile striving toavoid reification, reductionism and essential-ism. In this sense, McFarlane contends, assem-blage thinking has an inherently empiricalfocus (p. 209). As urban theory, assemblagethought asks how urban thingsincluding,quite appropriately, the urban itselfareassembled, and how they might be disassem-bled or reassembled.4

In the core sections of his paper, McFarlaneoutlines three specific contributions that hesees the assemblage approach making to criti-cal urban theory. First, he sees assemblagethought as an empirical tool for engaging inthick description of urban inequalities asproduced through relations of history andpotential (p. 208). He suggests that by payingdetailed, ethnographic attention to processesof assemblage, urbanists may better under-stand how actually existing urban situationsare constituted and, on this basis, may bebetter equipped to imagine alternatives tothose situations. Second, McFarlane notes,assemblage thought can help attune research-ers to the problematic of materialitythat is,to the significance and purported agency ofmaterials themselves, whether [they] 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 (p. 215). By distributing agency

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across social and material entities, such thatboth human and non-human forms of agencymay be considered coevally, assemblagethinking diversifies the range of agents andcauses of urban inequality, while potentiallymultiplying the spaces of critical intervention(p. 219). Third, McFarlane sees the assemblageidea as activating a more general criticalimaginary (p. 219) and political sensibilitycontaining a distinctive image of the desirablecity-to-come. While noting the risk of theideas co-optation by various elitist or oppres-sive projects, McFarlane offers cosmopoli-tanism as a normative political project ofurban assemblage (p. 219).

In sum, then, McFarlane sees the conceptof assemblage as opening up a variety of newurban questionsor at least new orientationstowards inherited urban questionsas wellas new sites of analysis, methodological tools,targets of critique and political visions. As anillustration of the potential of this discourse,McFarlane briefly discusses his own work onurban informality in Mumbai, where heobserved the crucial role that various materi-alities play in the constitution and experienceof inequality, and in the possibilities of amore equal urbanism (p. 216). Here, margin-alized city dwellers recycle the city by gath-ering materials from local constructiondebris, riverbeds, manufacturing waste, orpatches of tree cover (p. 216). Unequal accessto infrastructure and other resources isshaped by the state and various other power-ful actors. For some activists, the materialnetworks of the city can be used as objects ofresistance and tools of protest, generating asubaltern form of urban cosmopolitanism orone-worldism (p. 220) that militates for anew urban commons. McFarlane suggeststhat an assemblage-based urban imaginarycan produce new urban knowledges, collec-tives and ontologies (p. 221) that invoke andpursue new rights to the city among the mostmarginalized city dwellers.

Insofar as it enables urban scholars to ques-tion outdated categories and epistemologies,to demarcate new objects and terrains ofurban research, and to highlight the political

stakes and consequences of previously taken-for-granted dimensions of urban life, theassemblage-theoretical urbanism advanced byMcFarlane and others opens up some impor-tant new prospects onto the urban question.But despite these valuable contributions, weare concerned that McFarlanes constructionof an assemblage-theoretical urbanismremains too broadly framed, at times evenindeterminate, to realize its proper analyticalpotential.

If the assemblage approach is intendedsimply to serve as a guiding sensibility orresearch orientation, such a framing mightprove feasible. However, like other advocatesof such an approach (e.g. Faras, 2010), McFar-lane has larger ambitions for assemblagethought, proposing an extremely wide arrayof analytical and normative purposes to whichit may be applied, and attributing to it somerather impressive explanatory capabilities, upto a point at which its definitional parametersbecome extremely vague. Rather thandisavowing the ideas mercurial nature,McFarlane affirms it, noting that the termassemblage is increasingly used in socialscience research, generally to connote indeter-minacy, emergence, becoming, processuality,turbulence, and the sociomateriality ofphenomena (2011a, p. 206). As McFarlaneacknowledges, the assemblage concept ispolysemic, alternately functioning as an idea,an analytic, a descriptive lens, or an orienta-tion (p. 206); elsewhere he suggests that it issimultaneously to be considered as a concept,process, orientation and imaginary (p. 208).The question, however, is how much and whattype(s) of intellectual and political work thisterm, and the mode of analysis associated withit, can plausibly be expected to accomplish.

In our view, the power of the assemblageapproach may be most productivelyexplored when its conceptual, methodologi-cal, empirical and normative parameters arecircumscribed rather precisely. Against inter-pretations of this concept as the basis fortransforming the very ground of urban stud-ies and as an alternative ontology for thecity (Faras, 2010, pp. 8, 13), we argue here

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for a narrower, primarily methodologicalapplication. The concept is most useful, wecontend, when it is mobilized in the contextof a broader repertoire of theories, concepts,methods and research agendas that are notderived internally from the assemblageapproach itself, whether in its ANT variantor otherwise.5 In elaborating these concerns,we are particularly interested in addressingwhat we view as the highly ambiguous statusof political economy, and the concept ofcapitalism itself, within significant strands ofassemblage analysis. This issue is closelyintertwined with the still larger question ofwhether and how assemblage analysis mightcontribute to the project of critical urbantheory.

The specter of political economy

At the outset, it would appear that radicalurban political economy and the new theo-retical idioms associated with assemblageanalysis could coexist and even mutuallytransform each others methodological orien-tations, descriptive categories and objects ofanalysis (Faras and Graham, 2010). In somesections of his paper, McFarlane seems tosupport such a procedurefor instance,through his statement that he do[es] not seeassemblage as an outright contrast to thecomplex and varied history of debates oncritical urbanism, including urban politicaleconomy, capital accumulation, inequality,and so on (2011a, p. 204). However, despitehis suggestion that assemblage thinking canbuild upon critical theorys concern withcapitalism, the thrust of McFarlanes analysisactually appears to displace or even bypasssuch considerations.

Indeed, an unstated agenda of McFarlanespaper seems to be a redescription of urbanprocesses, transformations and inequalitieswith almost no reference to the key conceptsand concerns of radical urban political econ-omyfor instance, capital accumulation,class, property relations, land rent, exploita-tion, commodification, state power, territorial

alliances, growth coalitions, structured coher-ence, uneven spatial development, spatial divi-sions of labor and crisis formation, amongothers. Without articulating his grounds fordoing so, McFarlanes paper simply enacts thisdisplacement, offering neither an explicitcritique of these concepts nor a clear sense ofhow the assemblage approach might betterilluminate the dimensions of contemporaryurbanization to which the latter have gener-ally been applied.6 Yet the social relations,institutions, structural constraints, spatio-temporal dynamics, conflicts, contradictionsand crisis tendencies of capitalism do notvanish simply because we stop referring tothem explicitlyespecially under conditionsin which their forms are undergoing deepmetamorphoses, they arguably still requireexplicit theorization and analysis in any criti-cal account of the contemporary global urbancondition.

The ambiguities surrounding this issue inMcFarlanes text are replicated more gener-ally in the recent literature on assemblageurbanism. Among the major practitioners ofassemblage-based approaches, there appearsto be considerable confusion as to whethersuch categories should be mobilized todeepen, extend, transform or supersede theanalysis of capitalist structurations of urban-ization. Does the term assemblage describe atype of hitherto-neglected research object tobe studied in a broadly politicaleconomicframeworkthus generating a political econ-omy of urban assemblages? Is assemblageanalysis meant to extend the methodology ofurban political economy in new directions,thus opening up new interpretive perspec-tives on dimensions of capitalist urbanizationthat have been previously neglected or onlypartially grasped? Or, does the assemblageapproach offer a new ontological startingpoint that displaces or supersedes the intel-lectual project of urban political economy?

Following from these questions, Table 1identifies what we view as the three majorarticulations between assemblage thinkingand political economy that have been devel-oped in the recent urban studies literature.

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The rows in the table represent both the corelogical positions in terms of which thisarticulation may be understood and themajor analytical strategies that have beenadopted by assemblage researchers. There is,of course, considerable overlap and slippageamong the positions outlined here, and thework of several authors listed in the tablecould be positioned in more than one row.For present purposes, our intention is at onceto illustrate McFarlanes contention thatthere is no necessary antinomy between thetwo approaches while also demarcating thevarious ways in which researchers haveexplored their articulations.

The first row demarcates the use of assem-blage as a distinctive type of research objectwithin urban political economy. Sassen(2006), for example, uses assemblage to referto a particular historical interrelation of terri-tory, authority and rights, while Graham andMarvins Splintering Urbanism conceives of

infrastructure networks as sociotechnicalassemblies or machinic complexes ratherthan as individual causal agents with identifi-able impacts on cities and urban life (2001,p. 31, original emphasis). These authors donot draw on assemblage thinking as an onto-logical foundation, but instead mobilizecertain propositions from such approaches inorder to reframe concrete urban analysis onan ad hoc basis. Consequently, authorsworking in this tradition tend to analyze theassemblages they have identified along moreor less politicaleconomic linesin effect,they are engaged in a political economy ofurban assemblages.

In the second row, assemblage thinkinggenerates a predominantly methodologicalapproach that builds upon urban politicaleconomy while extending and reformulatingsome of its core elements and concerns. Thisprocedure parallels the ways in which thecognate field of urban political ecology has

Table 1 Articulations of assemblage analysis and urban political economy

Relation to urban political economyExemplary research foci

Representative authors

Level 1: empiricalPolitical economy of urban assemblages

Assemblage is understood as a specific type of research object that can be analyzed through a politicaleconomic framework and/or contextualized in relation to historically and geographically specific politicaleconomic trends.

Technological networks within and among cities (e.g. electrical grids); intercity networks; assemblages of territory, authority and rights.

Graham and Marvin (2001); Sassen (2006); Ali and Keil (2010); Graham (2010)

Level 2: methodologicalAssemblage as a methodological extension of urban political economy

Assemblage (often in conjunction with the closely related concept of metabolism) is presented as a methodological orientation through which to investigate previously neglected dimensions of capitalist urbanization. The core concerns of critical urban political economy remain central, but are now extended into new realms of inquiry.

The production of socionatures; infrastructural disruption or collapse; flows of energy, value, substances, microbes, people, ideas.

Kaika (2005); Heynen et al. (2006); Bender (2010); Graham (2010); McFarlane (2011a)

Level 3: ontologicalAssemblage as an alternative ontology for the city (Faras, 2010, p. 13)

Assemblage analysis displaces the investigation of capitalist urban development and the core concerns of urban political economy (e.g. the commodification of urban space, inequality and power relations, state intervention, polarization, uneven spatial development).

Urban materialities and infrastructures, including buildings, highways, artifacts, informal settlements, communications systems, traffic flows, inter-urban networks

Latour and Hermant (2006); Faras (2010); various contributions to Faras and Bender (2010); Smith (2010); McFarlane (2011a, 2011b)

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used the idea of metabolism to capture theinterconnected yet fluid dynamics thatcharacterize the production of urban socio-natures (Gandy, 2004; Kaika, 2005; Heynenet al., 2006; Swyngedouw, 2006). As theseauthors note, the metabolism concept has along heritage in political economy (Foster,2000) as well as obvious affinities with somestrands of contemporary assemblage analysis.Urban political ecology explicitly connectsthese two positions, using the concept ofmetabolism and selected methodologicaltools from ANT to build upon and reformu-late the treatment of socionatures within crit-ical urban political economy. For theseauthors, the concept of metabolism servessimultaneously as a way to characterizeobjects of inquiry (particularly urban socio-natural networks) and also as an explanatoryand theoretical device. On the one hand, themetabolic circulation of matter causes it tobecome "enrolled in associational networksthat produce qualitative changes and qualita-tively new assemblages (Swyngedouw, 2006,p. 26). On the other, urbanization itself isretheorized as a metabolic circulatoryprocess that materializes as an implosion ofsocio-natural relations, a process which isorganized through socially articulatednetworks and conduits (Swyngedouw, 2006,p. 35). Such arguments amount to a substan-tial rethinking of urban theory, but it is onethat retains the central concerns, concepts andanalytical orientations of political economywithin a methodologically expanded frame-work.

Finally, in the third row, assemblage think-ing subsumes the entire conceptual apparatusand explanatory agenda of urban studies.Authors working in this manner look toassemblage analysis as a way to reconceptual-ize the fundamental character of the (urbanand non-urban) social world. The urbanprocess is now conceived as a huge collectionof human and nonhuman actants within a flatontology devoid of scalar or territorial differ-entiations. Ways of understanding the citybased on concepts from political economy orspatial sociology are considered illegitimate

or at least bracketed; categories of sociospa-tial structuration such as scale and territoryare understood primarily as data to be inter-preted rather than as theoretical, explanatoryor interpretive tools (Smith, 2010). In thisway, the assemblage approach comes to func-tion as a radical ontological alternative topolitical economy: it is not merely a concep-tual motif, an empirical tool or a methodolog-ical orientation, but an alternative mapping ofthe urban social universe. Representativeexamples of this position include Latour andHermants study of Paris (2006), Farassprogrammatic statement on ANT and urbanstudies (2010), several contributions to Farasand Benders edited volume on assemblageurbanism (2010), and significant segments ofMcFarlanes recent work (2011a, 2011b).

On close reading, McFarlanes position isin fact rather ambiguous; he sometimesframes his arguments in methodologicalterms, but he also more frequently appears toadopt a strong ontological stance. Thus, atcertain points of his analysis, McFarlane(2011a) seems to embrace a position withinlevel 2 of the table by advocating a mutuallybeneficial dialogue between assemblagetheory and political economy in the service ofa revitalized critical urban theory. Substan-tively, however, the thrust of his elaborationof assemblage analysis is situated on level 3.As he unfurls his argument, the concept ofassemblage increasingly becomes an open-ended, all-purpose and potentially limitlessset of abstractions regarding the urban ques-tion that displace rather than dialogue withthe questions, concerns and orientations ofurban political economy. To capture thisapparent tension in his work, we have placedMcFarlanes paper on both level 2 and level 3of the table, reflecting his declared commit-ment to the research agendas of radical urbanpolitical economy along with his simulta-neousand in our view more forcefuldisplacement of these concerns in the bulk ofhis concrete analysis.

Distinguishing between these three broadways of articulating assemblage thought andpolitical economy should clarify that there is

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no single assemblage urbanism, and there-fore no coherence to arguing for or against theconcept in general. At the same time, as thepreceding discussion already anticipates, webelieve that some of its specific manifestationsare more defensible than others. Specifically,we would argue that the merits of levels 1 and2the empirical and methodological levelshave already been theoretically and substan-tively demonstrated in the urban studiesliterature, and certainly warrant further elab-oration in future research. These strands ofassemblage thinking have productivelyamended and continue to transform theresearch focus and theoretical orientation ofurban political economy. However, forreasons we now elaborate, we are much moreskeptical regarding the possible contributionsof analyses conducted on level 3 of the tableassemblage as an ontologyparticularly withregard to their relevance to the project of crit-ical urban studies.

An ontology of naive objectivism and the context of context

A notable strength of much assemblagethinking is its careful attention to the multi-ple materialities of socionatural relations.Additionally, the approach has pioneered theanalysis of how and when nonhuman actants,from buildings and building materials toinfrastructural grids, forms of energy andeven weather systems, may generate signifi-cant forms of reactive power or agency.7

But, without recourse to political economyor to another theoretical framework attunedto the structuration of urban processes(whether by capital, states, territorial alli-ances or social movements), an ontologicallyinflected appropriation of assemblage analy-sis confronts serious difficulties as a basis forilluminating the contemporary global urbancondition.

In particular, the descriptive focus associ-ated with ontological variants of assemblageurbanism leaves unaddressed importantexplanatory questions regarding the broader

(global, national and regional) structuralcontexts within which actants are situatedand operateincluding formations of capitalaccumulation and investment/disinvestment;historically entrenched, large-scale configu-rations of uneven spatial development,territorial polarization and geopolitical hege-mony; multiscalar frameworks of statepower, territorial alliance formation andurban governance; and the politico-institu-tional legacies of sociopolitical contestationaround diverse forms of dispossession, depri-vation and discontent. In explicitly rejectingconcepts of structure as remnants of anoutdated model of social science explanation(or in simply ignoring such concepts), onto-logical approaches to assemblage analysisdeprive themselves of a key explanatory toolfor understanding the sociospatial, politicaleconomic and institutional contexts in whichurban spaces and locally embedded socialforces are positioned. Within such a frame-work, moreover, there is no immanent princi-ple for distinguishing relevant and irrelevantactants, whether of a human or nonhumannature. As Bender (2010, p. 305) explains,such approaches risk engaging in an indis-criminate absorption of elements into theactor-network with the effect of levellingthe significance of all actors. The result ofthis procedure is a metaphysics of associationbased on what Sayer (1992, p. 45) has else-where aptly termed a nave objectivism. Thismode of analysis presupposes that thefactsin this case, those of interconnectionamong human and nonhuman actantsspeakfor themselves rather than requiring media-tion or at least animation through theoreticalassumptions and interpretive schemata.

These issues are very much in evidencewithin McFarlanes brief analysis of infor-mal housing in Mumbai (2011a), whichoffers a broad description of housingarrangements in a marginalized neighbor-hood of that city. The experience of povertyand inequality, he shows, is crucially medi-ated through the building materials andinfrastructural elements that comprise thebuilt environment. On this basis, McFarlane

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appropriately suggests that the materiality ofinformal housing in Mumbai deserves moreanalytical attention due to its important rolein mediating the everyday experience ofpoverty. As he indicates, housing is bothmade and edited, in contexts of deeplyunequal resources and precarious lives(McFarlane, 2011a, p. 216, original empha-sis). But does the thick description of assem-blages offered in his analysis suffice toilluminate the specific forms of inequalityand deprivation under investigation? Towhat degree does an assemblage-theoreticalanalysis help explain the underlying contextsand causes of urban sociospatial polariza-tion, marginalization and deprivation,whether in Mumbai or elsewhere?

While McFarlanes rendering of assem-blage may shed valuable light on the dynam-ics of making and editing, and on the broadspectrum of socionatural processes involvedin the latter, it is precisely the contexts ofdeeply unequal resources and precariouslives (p. 216) that are bracketed in his analy-sis. This bracketing is problematic insofar asit leaves underspecified the question of whathistorical geographies of land ownership,dispossession, deprivation and strugglegenerated and entrenched the unequal distri-bution of resources and the precarious life-conditions in the areas under discussion.After all, many of the details McFarlane givesof informal housing materialityfoundconstruction materials, vertical modularconstruction, accreted rather than plannedbuilt forms, and the likewould equally welldescribe sociomaterial conditions withinother zones of informality and marginaliza-tion in mega-cities across Latin America, theMiddle East and South Asia (Roy andAlsayyad, 2004). Yet the shantytowns andsquatting settlements within each of theseglobal regions are positioned in quite differ-ent ways within any number of broaderhistorical geographies of powerforinstance, global divisions of labor and circuitsof capital investment/disinvestment; legaciesof colonial and postcolonial statecraft;modes of geopolitical control, subordination

and intervention by imperial powers andglobal institutions such as the World Bankand the International Monetary Fund; differ-ential patterns of agro-industrial transforma-tion and associated ruralurban migration;state strategies to shape urbanization throughspeculative real estate development, infra-structural production, housing policy andslum clearance; and diverse forms of socialmovement mobilization at various spatialscales. In an analytical maneuver that ischaracteristic of this strand of assemblageanalysis, contexts such as these are scarcelymentioned, much less theorized or systemati-cally analyzed. However, without a sustainedaccount of this context of context, the analysisremains radically incomplete.8

While the assemblage ontology focuses onthe materials themselves, it is essential toconsider the politicaleconomic structuresand institutions in which they are embedded.In fact, the building materials under discussionhere are highly polysemic and promiscuous.Graffiti paint, unadorned brick, dirt in back-yard gardens, corrugated metaleach can bean expression of precarious impoverishmentor of dominating, aestheticized prosperity,depending upon its context. In a telling illus-tration of his conception of sociomaterialassemblages, McFarlane asks, what [is] theparticular agency of Richard Floridas sleekPowerPoint presentations of the creativecity [] when set against existing local urbanplans? (2011a, pp. 218219). But is the realissue here the sociomateriality of PowerPoint,or the structural contexts and institutionallocations in which this technique is deployed?It is quite possibly the case that policy entre-preneurs who are aligned with real estatedevelopers will use sleek PowerPoint presen-tations while, say, working-class housingactivists will not. But what matters about thePowerPoint presentations are the projects ofideological legitimation towards which theyare mobilized; the words, phrases and narra-tives they contain have a non-arbitrary rela-tionship to historically and geographicallysituated, differentially empowered socialmovements, forces, alliances and institutions.

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Substitute a PowerPoint presentation focusedon the purported benefits of the creative classor a state-subsidized office tower for onefocused on residential displacement, politicaldisempowerment or labor rights, and it is anassemblage with a very different form andfunction, even though it may appear identicalin purely material terms. An empirical focuson such assemblages could be helpful in unrav-eling certain aspects of such dynamics, but thiswould entail exploring their contested instru-mentalities within the politicaleconomic andinstitutional forcefields mentioned above. Bycontrast, an ontological conception of assem-blage substitutes for such considerations anaive objectivism that is difficult to reconcilewith the basic questions about power, inequal-ity, injustice, politicization, struggle andmobilization that lie at the heart of criticalurban theory (P. Marcuse, 2009; Soja, 2010).

Actuality, possibility and critique

ANT has had, at best, a lukewarm relationshipwith critical theory, particularly in its Marxianforms (Latour, 2004; for discussion seeMadden, 2010b); this generalization applies tosignificant strands of assemblage analysis aswell. Perhaps for this reason, those branchesof critical urban studies that have incorpo-rated assemblage thinking into their intellec-tual apparatus have tended to marry it to moreexplicitly politicaleconomic approacheswhich supply a strong dose of critical energies.The authors whose work is positioned on theempirical and methodological levels of Table1 thus rely extensively upon urban politicaleconomy to ground the critical elements oftheir respective analyses. By contrast,McFarlane proposes to derive a distinctivelycritical stance from the methods and norma-tive orientations of assemblage analysis.McFarlanes chief argument to this endfocuses on the relationship between the actualand the possible which, as he acknowledges,has also long been one of the primaryconcerns of critical theory, urban and other-wise (Brenner, 2009). McFarlane argues that

assemblage [analysis] supports this line ofcritical thinking due to its concern to uncoverhow formations of the urban might be assem-bled differently (2011a, p. 210).

The issue, however, is not whether theactual and the possible are related, but how.Here, we believe, there is a fundamentaldistinction worth making between dialecticalapproaches to critique and those derivedinternally from assemblage analysis. InMcFarlanes account, potentiality is exterior-ity: any assemblage may, in principle, bedecomposed and a new one formed byincorporating new sociomaterialities; thesenew elements, which lie outside the extantassemblage, supply the possibility for differ-ent arrangements of human and nonhumanrelations. This possibility is ontologicallypresupposed rather than being understood ashistorically specific or immanent to thesociomaterial relations under investigation.Although McFarlane introduces fruitfulnormative categories such as the right to thecity, the commons and cosmopolitanism, theassemblage approach appears to operateprimarily by describing alternatives unreflex-ively, as abstract possibilities that might bepursued. In our view, however, thisapproach offers no clear basis on which tounderstand how, when and why particularcritical alternatives may be pursued underspecific historicalgeographical conditionsor, more generally, why some possibilitiesfor reassemblage are actualized over andagainst others that are suppressed orexcluded.

A critical theory, by contrast, holds thatcapitalism and its associated forms containthe possible as an immanent, constitutivemoment of the realas contradiction andnegation (H. Marcuse, 1990 [1960]; Ollman,2003; Lefebvre, 2009). Specific historicalstructures produce determinate constraintson the possibility for social transformation,as well as determinate, if often hidden orsuppressed, openings for the latter. Withinsuch a framework, the impulse towardscritique is not an external, normative orienta-tion or a mental abstraction, but is embedded

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within, and enabled by, the same structures,contradictions and conflicts that constrainthe realization of what might be possible.From this point of view, a key challenge forany critical theory is to explicate reflexivelyits own conditions of emergencenotsimply as a matter of individual oppositionor normative commitment, but in substan-tively historical terms, as an essentialmoment within the same contradictory,dynamically evolving social totality it isconcerned to decipher and ultimately to tran-scend (H. Marcuse, 1990 [1960]; Postone,1993).

When we compare this immanent, dialecti-cal conception of negation with the external-ist normative orientation of assemblagetheory, we also find a difference in politicaloutlook. Despite its stated goal of expandingour understanding of agency into nonhumanrealms (as argued forcefully by Bennett,2010), ontological forms of assemblagethinking are not well equipped to identify thespecific human agents and social forces thatmight engage in the process of social trans-formation. Instead, a passive-voice politicsprevails in which assemblages are anony-mously, almost mysteriously destabilized ordismantled. McFarlane argues, for example,that urban assemblages are structuredthrough various forms of power relation andresource and information control (2011a,p. 210). But if this is the case, it is essential toexplore who (or what, as the case may be) isdoing the structuring to whom. In a worldanimated by passive interactions amongactants, the forcefield of struggle amongdiverse sociopolitical agents battling toappropriate and reappropriate urban space(P. Marcuse, 2009) is relegated to the back-ground. While there are strands of assem-blage theory that have successfullyarticulated powerful, even radical, visions ofalternative futures (see Bennett, 2010), itseems impossible to pursue the latter withoutengaging with the fundamentally politicaldimensions of human agency. In short,perhaps because of the inert way that theyinterpret the world, ontological variants of

assemblage thought do not offer much guid-ance for how to change it.

Reassembling assemblage urbanism?

In a recent assessment of contemporaryurban theory, Roy (2009, p. 820) argues thatit is time to blast open [the] theoretical geog-raphies associated with late 20th-centuryurban studies and thus to produce newgeographies of theory that can come toterms with the contemporary global urbanmoment in both North and South. Our goalin this paper has been to assess the degree towhich various newly emergent strands ofassemblage-theoretical urban studies cancontribute to this wide-ranging intellectualand political task. While we are broadlysympathetic to the empirical research agen-das and methodological orientations thathave been opened up through such discus-sions, we have expressed a range of reserva-tions regarding the more ontologicallygrounded applications of assemblage urban-ism, which offer no more than a partial, if notmisleading, basis for critical urban studies.

By way of conclusion, we want to reiteratethe need for intellectual adventurousness andexperimentation in this research field, and tounderscore the useful ways in which, despiteits blind spots, the debate on urban assem-blages is productively contributing to suchimpulses. It is certainly not the case that criti-cal urban theory, as it currently exists, hasready-made analytical tools for decipheringthe rapidly transforming condition of world-wide urbanization. Without a doubt, thequestions posed by assemblage urbanistsfor instance, regarding human/nonhumaninterfaces, networked interdependencies andthe production of sociomaterial infrastruc-turesare essential ones, and they certainlydeserve serious, sustained exploration infuture forays into the urban question.

Today, new forms of urbanization andworld-making (Lefebvre, 2009; Roy, 2009)co-constitute each other in a volatilecontext of geoeconomic, geopolitical and

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environmental crisis, ongoing market-drivenregulatory experimentation and intensesociopolitical contestation at all spatial scales.As the urban condition becomes worldwide,it does so not through the absolute territorialexpansion of an inherited urban object, butrather through the emergence of qualitativelynew, genuinely planetary forms of urbaniza-tion in which a densely if unevenly urbanizedfabric of sociospatial and politicaleconomicinterconnectivity is at once stretched, thick-ened and continually redifferentiated acrossplaces, territories and scales, throughout thespace of the entire globe. This becoming-worldwide (in Lefebvres terms [2009],mondialisation) of the urban is not simply aquantitative expansion of city populations oran outwards extension of inherited metropol-itan jurisdictional boundaries, but hasentailed a qualitative reconstitution of theurban itself in which a host of inheritedspatial oppositionsfor instance, city/suburb; urban/rural; core/periphery; North/South; society/natureare being fundamen-tally rearticulated, if not superseded entirely.

In light of these unprecedented trends andtransformations, a key challenge for any crit-ical approach to urban theory is to generate anew lexicon of spatial difference throughwhich to grasp emergent forms of unevengeographical development in ways thatcapture their tendential, planet-wide system-aticity as well as their equally pervasive vola-tility, precariousness and mutability. Could itbe precisely here, faced with the extraordi-nary challenge of mapping a worldwide yetinternally hierarchized and differentiatedurban ensemble (Lefebvre, 2003 [1970]), thatthe conceptual and methodological gesturefacilitated through assemblage approachesbecomes most productive? Whereas theconcept of structured coherence presentedby Harvey (1989) confronted this problem atthe scale of an individual urban region, thereis today a need to decipher the variegatedarticulations among the disparate spatial,politicalinstitutional and environmentalelements of the emergent planetary urbanconfiguration.9 This task is especially urgent

given the continued circulation of ideologicalprojections of world capitalism as a heterar-chical, cosmopolitan, flexible, borderlessand creative world order that mask anentrenched repressive agenda of (reconsti-tuted) market fundamentalism, accumulationby dispossession and deepening environmen-tal catastrophe. Because assemblage thinkingopens up the prospect for thinking space as arelationally overdetermined plenitude(Bender, 2010; see also Massey, 2005), it mayoffer useful insights for exploring andmapping these emergent geographies ofdispossession, catastrophe and possibilitybut, as we have suggested, such an exercisewill be most effective when it is linkedsystematically to the intellectual tools andpolitical orientations of critical geopoliticaleconomy.

Even though the urban process has takenon new forms in its planetary mode, we havesuggested that it remains a fundamentallycapitalist urban process. In our view, thisdimension of urbanizationmediated, ofcourse, through state institutions, diversesocial forces and systemic crisis tendencies atall spatial scalesfigures crucially in produc-ing and reproducing contemporary geogra-phies of deprivation, dispossession andmarginalization, both within and amongurban regions throughout the world. Conse-quently, for urban theory to remain intellec-tually and politically relevant, it mustcontinue to explore the prospects for thecritique of capitalism that are immanentwithin contemporary sociospatial relationsacross places, territories and scales.

The approach to critical urban theoryproposed here is not grounded upon a tran-shistorical metaphysics of labor, a structural-ist framing of the urban or a class-theoreticalreductionism. Instead, through a spiral move-ment involving a combination of theoreticalreflection, methodological experimentationand concrete research forays (Sayer, 1992), itreflexively subjects its own explanatory appa-ratus to continual re-evaluation and reconsti-tution in light of the ongoing trends,contradictions and struggles associated with

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contemporary forms of sociospatial restruc-turing. Against this background, a keychallenge is to link the analytical and method-ological orientations of assemblage urbanismto the tools of geopolitical economy in waysthat contribute to a genuinely criticalapproach to ongoing planetary urban trans-formationsone that is attuned not only tolocal specificities and contingencies, but alsoto broader, intercontextual dynamics, trajec-tories and struggles (Roy, 2009). In short, thepresent age demands neither the inert catego-ries of traditional urban theory nor theconceptual quietude to which some strands ofassemblage thought are unfortunately suscep-tible. Instead, we must continue to seek outthe ingredientsintellectual and politicalfor a critical imagination that is orientedtowards the possibility of a radically differenttype of worldwide space (Lefebvre, 2009).This in turn requires forging a critical urbantheory that is capable of grasping our globalurban world by the root (Marx, 1963, p. 52).

Notes

1 1 This paper emerged from our collaboration in the Urban Theory Lab New York City (UTL-NYC), a working group devoted to the challenges of reconceptualizing urban theory in a manner that is adequate to emergent 21st-century transformations and struggles. We describe this working group as a lab to underscore the experimental, trial-and-error and open-ended character of our efforts. However, in contrast to most laboratories, our experiments are devoted most centrally to problems of theoretical conceptualization, not to data collection or analysis per se. In addition to the present authors, other current participants are Hillary Angelo (NYU) and Natan Dotan (Columbia).

2 2 Louis Wirth (1995 [1937], p. 58), whose work is usually associated with more traditional approaches to urban theory, offers a fascinatingly prescient critique of this assumption in his famous 1937 essay on urbanism: The degree to which the contemporary world may be said to be urban is not fully or accurately measured by the proportion of the total population living in cities. The influences which cities exert upon the social life of man [sic] are greater than the ratio of the urban population would indicate, for the city is not only in ever larger

degrees the dwelling-place and workshop of modern man [sic], but it is the initiating and controlling center of economic, political, and cultural life that has drawn the most remote parts of the world into its orbit and woven diverse areas, peoples, and activities into a cosmos.

3 3 This claim applies not only to the contemporary conjuncture: urbanization has always been an open system insofar as its basic patterns and consequences cannot be derived from any single theoretical framework or causal mechanism (Sayer, 1992).

4 4 Benders thoughtful postscript (2010) to his edited volume with Faras on the urban applications of ANT offers a strikingly cautious reflection on the same issue.

5 5 An interesting reference point in this context is Amins recent paper in City (2007). Amins orientation towards the urban question (also elaborated in Amin and Thrift, 2002) closely parallels the substance of McFarlanes argument, but he does not classify his analysis under the assemblage rubric or even use the latter term. While some of the concerns we raise below regarding McFarlanes text may also apply to certain aspects of Amins framework, our focus here is specifically on the various ways in which the notion of assemblage is currently being used in the field of urban studies. However, the fact that Amin (2007) can develop an ostensibly ANT-based approach to urbanism without relying upon the term assemblage does open up the question of whether McFarlane may be overloading this concept with more analytical weight than it is properly equipped to carry.

6 6 Although the contributions included in his edited volume with Bender are quite heterogeneous, Faras (2010) moves in an analogous direction in his programmatic essay on decentring the object of urban studies. Interestingly, Faras is careful to distinguish his proposed approach from traditional Chicago School models of urban space, but he does not discuss the post-1970s tradition of radical urban political economy associated with authors such as Lefebvre, Castells and Harvey.

7 7 Although she does not link it specifically to the field of urban studies, Bennett (2005, 2010) offers an impressively clear philosophical and sociological explication of this position. Latour (2005) offers the more standard reference point on these matters in the context of a rather sweeping critique of 20th-century social science.

8 8 For a discussion of the need for consideration of the context of context in relation to neo-Foucauldian analyses of neoliberalization see Brenner et al. (2010). Our critique of the ontological strand of assemblage urbanism here closely parallels this argument.

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9 On this problem in general, see Ong and Collier (2004); with reference to Harveys work, see Brenner (1998); see also Sassen (2006) on the nature of the global.

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