Assemblage as heuristic: unveiling infrastructures of port city waterfronts

ABSTRACT

This article presents an ‘assemblage heuristic’ as a methodological and context-specific approach to examine port city waterfront infrastructures, responding to the insufficiency of structural models to fully account for their complexity. As sites of rapid change and urban investment, waterfronts offer generative, variegated and deeply empirical opportunities for the use of assemblage thinking to advance urban theory and development, through which alternative means of producing the city can be conceived and pursued. Drawing on a Latourian methodological approach as well as an anthropological understanding of the urban as problem-space, we present case data from the Central Puget Sound region (Washington State, USA) as indicator sites, where nature, imaginary and policy shaped socio-spatial configuration of waterfront infrastructures. We surface and trace alliances between people, places and things that have shaped the ongoing assemblage of regional waterfronts, and offer three conceptual vectors for generalizable analysis, suggesting how port city infrastructures can resist socio-economic structural forces in multilayered and sometimes surprising ways.

KEYWORD:

• regional development
• spatial planning
• sustainable development
• urban governance
• water infrastructure
• assemblages

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Initial work on this paper took place in Hong Kong at the 2018 meeting of the Sustainable Cities and Landscapes hub of the Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU), where all authors took part in the Transitions in Urban Waterfronts working group. We are grateful for early conversations at that gathering with Nick Smith. A preliminary draft was presented at the North America meeting of the Regional Studies Association (RSA), in Montreal, Canada, September 2019; and revised for inclusion in the NOIR (Network on Infrastructural Regionalisms) virtual gathering that took place in September 2020. Finally, the Inner Life of Policy sessions co-organized with Koen Bartels and Raul Lejano at the International Public Policy Association meeting in 2021, and the ‘heuristic framework’ (Bartels & Turnbull, 2020) of those conversations, contributed to the evolution of this study. We appreciate the feedback and interest of Jen Nelles, Michael Glass and J. P. Addie, co-leaders of the RSA-NOIR group, and the opportunity to be in conversation with other scholars interested in the regional implications of infrastructure development; finally, the authors thank UW Tacoma Dean of Urban Studies, Ali Modarres, for supporting this work.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 For explorations of Latourian actor–network theory (ANT) in planning and urban studies, see Beauregard (2015), Farias and Bender (2010) and Rydin and Tate (2016).

2 For discussions of assemblage as a more useful tool than ‘network’ as well, see, for instance, Acuto and Curtis (2014), McFarlane (2009) and Ong (2004).

3 See Braun (2014) on the usefulness of Michel Foucault’s notion of dispositif to examine a ‘heterogeneous set of discourses, practices, architectural forms, regulations, laws, and knowledges’ that are brought together to find solutions to urgent problems (see also Foucault, 1980).

4 If indicator sites are assemblages of complex and differentiated enactments (Kitchin et al., 2015), they provide a provisional spatial site for examining more closely the global contradictions and hyper local embedding of regional infrastructure policy mobilities (McCann & Ward, 2011; Savage, 2020; Yang et al., 2022).

5 For a more detailed understanding of the history of the City of Seattle and its founding roots in settler and extractive colonialism and relations of ‘Land, Nature, Resource, Property’, see Liboiron (2021) as well as Cummings (2020), Klingle (2002) and Thrush (2007).

6 See also Wakefield (2020) and Collier et al. (2016) on the role of Hurricane Sandy in problematizing waterfronts.

7 The total estimated cost to redevelop the Central Seattle Waterfront is more than US$4 billion. The seawall replacement was US$410 million, the surface redevelopment is estimated at US$835 million and the tunnelling of SR99 beneath the waterfront cost US$2.8 billion (EnviroIssues, 2021).