Book Review Forum—Learning the City with Colin Mcfarlane

INTRODUCTION

Colin McFarlane's 2011 book Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage offers an exciting and thought-provoking contribution to the RGS-IBG Book Series. It taps into, and drives forward, a small but growing body of research that seeks to explore the nature and constitution of processes of urban “learning.” While learning has often been neglected in work on urban politics and everyday life, this book conceptualizes learning as an important political and practical domain through which the city is assembled, lived, and contested, and as a critical opportunity to develop a progressive urbanism. In doing so, it address five key interrelated questions. How might learning be conceptualized? How does learning take place on an everyday basis? How does learning occur translocally? How do different environments facilitate or inhibit learning? And how might we develop a critical geography of learning?

Theoretically, the book develops a conceptualization of “urban learning assemblages” in order to understand the experience and contestation of learning in different contexts: residents of informal settlements, activists working on urban informality, urban forums involving state and civil society, and urban planners and policymakers. The book suggests that attending to such urban learning assemblages can reveal important conceptual resources and empirical domains through which urbanism is produced, lived, and contested. The critical purchase of this framing lies not in a straightforward call to know more of cities, but to expose, evaluate, and democratize the politics of knowing cities by placing learning—understood here through the conceptual triad of translation, coordination, and dwelling—explicitly at the heart of urban debate. Viewed through the lens of assemblage, the spaces of urban learning are the product of relations of history and potential, practice and events, and are structured through unequal relations of knowledge, resource, and power.

The book develops a further series of conceptual frames for locating learning in different urban practices. “Incremental learning,” for instance, connotes an experiential geography of urban accretion evident in a diversity of forms, from the bit-by-bit ways in which informal housing is added to or altered to meet new needs or possibilities, to pooling contacts and resources to develop new economic opportunities, or building reciprocal exchange systems among family and friends. “Tactical learning,” in turn, is a form of resistance that can emerge through everyday dwelling and through particular forms of translation and coordination. McFarlane illustrates tactical learning in the work of social movements, drawing in particular on his work in Mumbai.

A key debate in the book is to consider how learning occurs translocally. This is explored in several ways: through the use of traveling tactics among social movements, in the work of urban learning forums that involve groups operating across the global North-South divide, and in relation to translocal urban planning and policy. The crucial role of ideology in shaping translocal urban policy learning becomes very evident as McFarlane develops a framework combining four inter-related domains: the forms of power that structure learning, the objects of learning that ideology can produce, the organizational form of learning that facilitates the propagation of this ideological learning, and the imaginaries that provide a potent visualization of ideological learning.

Building on these conceptual frames and empirical encounters, McFarlane seeks to develop a critical geography of learning. This begins by proposing a framework that seeks to evaluate existing dominant forms of urban knowledge and learning, democratize the groups and knowledges involved, and to propose alternative knowledges and forms of learning based on that democratization. He then seeks to extend this framework by first considering what the notion of assemblage might offer a critical geography of urban learning, and second, by exploring how the project of critical urban learning might operate translocally across the global North-South divide as a basis for a critical postcolonial comparative urbanism. He argues that these two concepts—assemblage and comparison— while distinct in their form and use, need to be brought together if a meaningful translocal geography of critical urban learning is to be forged.

Overall, this is a rich, innovative, and thought-provoking book that charts new ways of thinking about urban learning. In what follows, five renowned urban geographers— Ananya Roy, Kevin Ward, Andrew Harris, Ola Söderström, and Tim Bunnell—offer their evaluations of the intellectual contributions of Learning the City. Although they write from differing perspectives and differing geographical locations, all agree that the book is a significant and notable achievement that has encouraged them to think in new ways about how cities are produced and reproduced. At the same time, they all also raise constructive critical concerns about the analysis and how it might be pushed further. McFarlane himself concludes the forum by offering an initial response to these issues. ¹

—Neil M. Coe

LEARNING FROM THE TRANSLOCAL SLUM: POSTCOLONIAL ASSEMBLAGES

Colin McFarlane's Learning the City is an important contribution to our understanding of the geographies of knowledge. It charts a shift from formations of expertise and authority to the tacit and tactical imaginations engendered by urban inhabitation. And it makes the case that these different and differentiated forms of learning are, at this historical conjuncture, inevitably translocal. What is at stake here is much more than a theory of learning; it is a new theory of the city—as assemblage.

In this brief commentary on the book, I want to suggest that an integral part of McFarlane's theory of the city is a radical reconceptualization of that iconic site of Third World urbanism, the slum. For years McFarlane has been conducting careful research in the slums of Mumbai, paying particular attention to associational life and to the federations that make possible collective action. In Learning the City, he demonstrates how the slum is a space of “incremental urbanism” (p. 32), an everyday bricolage, a constant improvization. Today such views of the slum are beginning to proliferate. Architects and urban designers in particular have been drawn to what one recent architectural exhibit described as the “inspired, duct-taped ingenuity” of the slum (Agrawal, 2011), or what McFarlane labels “makeshift urbanism” (p. 39). As I write this commentary, The New York Times carries a lengthy exegesis of Mumbai's Dharavi slum, the icon of iconic slum geographies. More than the usual slum reality tour, the essay presents Dharavi as misery and opportunity, tuberculosis and filth mixed in with “a self-created special economic zone for the poor.” Above all, this Dharavi is a site of learning, where new migrants from the countryside learn the skills of entrepreneurialism and survival (Yardley, 2011).

As the idea of “makeshift urbanism” becomes a popular discourse, so a critical intervention is necessary. This is what McFarlane provides in Learning the City. McFarlane's concept of “incremental urbanism” situates the entrepreneurial bricolage of the slum in translocal circulations of political strategy and activism, or “global slumming” (p. 66). In other words, McFarlane politicizes the slum, revealing the complex translocal alliances and collaborations through which a politics of urban inhabitation is crafted. I would argue that this is the first full account of slum federations, and particularly of their knowledgeproducing work, or what McFarlane calls “data urbanism” (p.78). What intrigues me is a point that McFarlane implies but does not fully draw out: that such an assemblage is not only “a spatial grammar of urban learning” (p. 1) but also a distinctive temporality of learning. In his provocative article on urban politics, Appadurai (2002, p. 30) provides a clue to such a temporality when he describes the everyday lives of the poor as the “tyranny of emergency.” In contrast, he designates the work of slum federations as the “politics of patience” (Appadurai, 2002, p. 27). I am not wholly convinced with Appadurai's account of patience, especially because it rests on a rather essentialist reading of women's politics, but I am interested in temporalities that disrupt the short cycles of World Bank expertise or the frantic travels of policy models. It is in this sense that incremental urbanism is a type of alternative urbanism, a spatio-temporal interruption in the making of urban futures. The makeshift futures of incremental urbanism are not those of the traveling policies outlined by McFarlane later in the book, and this is precisely why they may lend themselves to what McFarlane outlines, with considerable hope, as “a critical geography of urban learning” (p. 152).

But there are other connections as well between incremental urbanism and the ideology of urbanism that McFarlane analyzes in Chapter Five. Especially important about this chapter is that McFarlane situates “neoliberal urban learning assemblages” (p. 134) in the long history of (post)colonialism. That colonial urban planning was an endeavor in translocal experiments, and thus a prehistory of sorts for today's policy mobilities, is a fact worth emphasizing and reiterating. But what I am equally interested in are the connections between incremental urbanism and the global assemblages of neoliberalism. The urban learning forums that McFarlane pinpoints as spaces of translocalism and translation (p. 105) may very well be this hinge. McFarlane is correct in noting that such “dialogic urban forums” (p. 98) are extraordinary sites of learning, and that the standard technologies of expertise and authority—from budgeting to census-taking—are dramatically remade here. This is the stuff of alternative globalization, the simple motto of the World Social Forum that “another world is possible.”

But let me suggest that another type of learning is also afoot here, one where global regimes of capital and truth commandeer incremental urbanism and its everyday bricolage. The mobile policies of today are not only those of the creative economy or of novel models of penality but also of the entrepreneurial slum, of the “duct-taped ingenuity” of the informal economy. The translation at work in these translocal circuits is more than the progressive learning that McFarlane outlines; it is also the conversion of incremental urbanism into new forms of value—a capitalization of poverty, if you will (Roy, 2010). Instead, I would argue that we need to understand the ways in which the work of slum federations both resists and deepens dominant ideologies of urbanism. Put another way, this is the hybrid and mongrel character of neoliberalism itself, an argument that Peck (2010) has put forward, but it is also the hybrid and mongrel character of social movements themselves. Put yet another way, transactions of development—such as those between Mumbai's SPARC (Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres) and the World Bank or between Dharavi slum-dwellers and Mumbai real-estate developers—are implicated in the forms of learning that McFarlane so brilliantly analyzes. These too are translations and “misreadings” (p. 111), but in ways that are not necessarily conducive to the type of collectivist politics that captures McFarlane's sympathies. Although McFarlane does not necessarily establish the connections I am seeking, his particular deployment of the concept of assemblage can greatly further such analysis of global frontiers of development. Here I am especially drawn to his idea that assemblage connotes fragility, requires reassembly, and is often prone to failure. Such fragility attends not only incremental urbanism but also ideologies of urbanism and dominant global systems of truth. The latter too must make-do; they too are makeshift, duct-taped.

Finally, although McFarlane does not belabor this argument, it is one that I wish to make as a testament to the contributions of Learning the City. The concept of assemblage has recently become influential in urban studies and more broadly in social science inquiry. In a much-cited text, Ong and Collier (2005, p. 4), for example, give us a theory and methodology of assemblage, and especially of “global” assemblage by which they mean “abstractable, mobile, and dynamic” phenomena. McFarlane not only shows us how such mobility is produced—through processes of translocalization—but he also reminds us of the postcolonial character of globality. By the postcolonial, I do not mean the aftercolonial condition. Instead, I am concerned with, as is McFarlane, the forms of worlding that thoroughly reimagine and refashion modernity in a global order of difference. For me, then, Learning the City is not only a theory of the city (as an urban learning assemblage) but also a theory of postcoloniality (as an assemblage that both rehearses and ruptures colonial mimesis). These are abiding contributions and they will be taken up by new rounds of scholarship.

—Ananya Roy

URBAN POLICY ASSEMBLAGES, MOBILITIES, AND MUTATIONS

² How are we to understand Figure 1? Well, first, let me explain why I have started this commentary with it. The figure is taken from the business case document produced by Edinburgh City Council for the Scottish Government (Ward, 2010). On it hinges the financing of the city's proposed waterfront redevelopment. It represents the Tax Increment Financing (TIF) model. This is a mechanism for borrowing money to invest in an area, and then using the future rise in an area's taxable value to repay the debt. This “uplift” in an area's Assessed Value (AV) is diverted away from where tax revenue would normally flow, and instead is redirected to a “TIF authority.” A series of costs are then allowed to be paid out of this account, including repaying the debt incurred to fund the initial investment. Although I cannot be sure, I suspect Figure 1 first appeared sometime in the 1950s in California, the first U.S. state to establish a TIF. Since then it has been doing the rounds— it has been traveling. It has appeared and reappeared in numerous documents across the U.S., as 47 states and the District of Columbia have established TIF enabling legislation. As it has moved, so it has remained largely unchanged, although the model around it has morphed and mutated, as it has entered in a recursive relationship with existing institutional arrangements in cities and counties. Interestingly, from my perspective at least, since the late 2000s Figure 1 has begun to appear in documents for consumption outside of the U.S. In a number of countries, TIF has been promoted as a potential solution to the financing of economic redevelopment. In the UK this period has seen a flurry of activity by consultants, lobbyists, and think tanks. Informed by various visits to Chicago—which, with its 165 TIFs, has been constructed as the TIF “truth spot” (Gieryn, 2006)—as well as through a range of other acts of intermediation and translation, actors in the UK have set about learning from the many U.S. experiences. The TIF model has also appeared in many different ways in interviews I have been conducting since the summer of 2011, both in the UK and the US.

Fig. 1. The Tax Increment Financing model. Source: Ward (2010).

How are we to understand Figure 1? Underpinning it is a set of beliefs. Those involved— from city officials to development consultants, from financial brokers to investment analysts, from community groups to real estate developers—have to believe in Figure 1, i.e., believe that this future is knowable in this format. Each has learned to read the figure in a particular way, as an actor embedded in a particular set of cultural, economic, and social fields. Disbelief, the possibility of something else happening over the 25 years, of the investment “failing” and not generating revenues to repay the debt, is suspended (or unlearned). In believing in it, and acting accordingly, both individually and collectively, there is a sense that the likelihood of this version of the future being realized is made more likely. The figure is not a free-floating “object,” however. Instead, it functions as an assemblage, as one of a number of urban materials that are “put to work in various ways” (p. 218), within a relational comparative field that is shot through and structured with inequalities and unevenness (Brenner et al., 2011). It is also profoundly ideological. This enumeration of an urban future—in this case, of Edinburgh's waterfront—is believable in part because of where the figure comes from—“successful” US examples—and in part because of the financial and technocratic knowledge that it draws upon. It is represented— and for the most part learned and understood by the various stakeholders—as a sort of science, the outcome of a complex web of financial calculations generated from sophisticated economic models that are apolitical, objective, technical, and hence beyond reproach.

In thinking about this figure, its role in a wider matrix of comparisons and exchanges, adaptations and imitations, mobilities and mutations, and the work that it has already done and looks set to continue to do in the future, I draw upon Colin McFarlane's excellent Learning the City. The cornerstone of this impressive research monograph is his conceptualization of learning as “an important political and practical domain through which the city is assembled, lived and contested” (p.1). So, learning not in the narrow sense of the word, but rather as “as a name for the specific processes, practices and interactions through which knowledge is created, contested and transformed, and for how perception emerges and changes” (p. 3). Using a series of examples from Mumbai, India, particularly those generated from his work with the Federation of Tenants Association and from Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI), he provides a series of powerful and sophisticated insights into how the learning of the city occurs, as a means of moving toward what he names a “critical geography of urban learning” (p. 14). There is a lot I take from this book. Here I just want to concentrate on one aspect, learning, as it relates to my own ongoing fieldwork.

In light of this, Learning the City is an outstanding addition to a series of debates currently reverberating across the social sciences. McFarlane's theorizing of “learning” allows him to contribute in a unique way to a fledgling subfield of urban studies, that which is interested in the making up and making mobile of urban policies. Drawing on, and in the process, critiquing the political science literature on policy transfer (e.g. Ward, 2006; Peck and Theodore, 2010; Gonzalez, 2011; McCann, 2011; McCann and Ward, 2011; Peck, 2011), this heterogeneous set of literatures is interested in how, according to McFarlane (p. 5), “urbanism is … assembled through a variety of sites, people, objects and processes.” He offers us a “critical framework for conceptualizing urban policy mobilities” as a means of examining the “ideologies and inequities of mobile policy learning” (p. 115). This consists of four aspects; “first, the power at work in policy learning … second, the object of learning … third, the form of learning … and, fourth, the imaginary at work in learning” (p. 115, original emphasis). This attention to learning and the crucial role of ideology is a genuinely innovative contribution to the urban assemblages, mobilities, and mutations literature. It forces those of us working in this field to think seriously about something that has been all too often neglected in urban studies, an unopened “black box” if you like. That is why Learning the City will stand the test of time, its importance only increasing as more work is done on the theoretical and methodological issues raised through studies of urban policy on the move. All of which takes us back to where I began this commentary; Tax Increment Financing and the transatlantic travels behind its appearance in Edinburgh in 2010.

—Kevin Ward

CROSSING DIVIDES: LEARNING ABOUT URBAN GEOGRAPHY

Over the last five years, Colin McFarlane has published an impressive number of articles critically exploring an array of conceptual themes within contemporary geography, including assemblage theory, comparativism, translocal politics, and cosmopolitanism. In Learning the City, McFarlane draws together these different strands in a confident, cogent, and compelling account, clearly demonstrating the continued importance of monographs in allowing room and scope for developing and disseminating research agendas. As McFarlane states, the book “opens up the black box” of urban learning, showing how learning has not only been ignored or downplayed in urban studies, but can be used to develop critical perspectives on the creation and transmission of urban knowledge. Moreover, the book demonstrates how key recent themes in human geography can be approached differently. The book pushes researchers to think more carefully about how exchange, knowhow, and innovation occur in the voluminous literature on clusters and networks. It encourages greater heed to be paid to tactics of resistance and coping mechanisms in research on social movements and global civil society. And the book identifies clear gaps in how the surge of recent work on policy mobilities addresses history and ideology.

Learning the City makes three important, intersecting contributions to reframing and reimaging approaches toward urban geography. First, the book demonstrates the opportunities presented by poststructural theories in developing new innovative conceptual engagements in the subdiscipline. Throughout the book, relational ontologies are carefully maintained, showing how component parts of urban life exist through their interaction rather than through any pre-existing templates. Knowledge and learning are consistently examined as mediated through doing and relational processes of composition rather than being innate and possessed. Connected to this is the importance shown to attending to materiality in exploring urban life. Materials clearly matter from model houses (p. 70) to the journals, plans, charts, and diagrams of Ekistics (p. 129) and the use of railway tickets by social activists in blocking politicians’ phones (p. 161). These are the objects, mediating structures, artifacts, coordinating tools, and devices that enable learning and instigate “chains of translations.” Another conceptual component emphasized is the everyday and the dwelt. Learning is posited not as a formal, linear, cognitive process but as experimental and the outcome of immersion, rhythm, and improvization. Examples given range from the incremental tinkering and making-do of people living in informal housing (p. 36), to the “tinkering” of formal planners (p. 130). These conceptual foci are diligently slotted together through the different questions and approaches pursued so an overall triad is shaped around translation-relationality-emergence-commoning, coordination-materiality-agency-gathering, and dwelling-everyday-imagination-cosmopolitanism.

The second contribution Learning the City makes to re-orienting urban geography is in its geographical imaginations. McFarlane uses the notion of the “translocal” to problematize spatially conceiving learning, and urban politics more generally, as simply “local”, “global,” or territorial. This allows topological spatialities of reach and relatedness between sites to be broached, often cutting across Global South and North divides, yet without flattening out or dismissing the continued role for scalar imaginaries and metaphors in shaping understandings and narrations of urban life. This emphasis on the translocal is accompanied by the deployment of comparison as not only an operational tool of research but as a key means of examining how urban knowledge and theory is formed, learned, and contested. For example, as well as being used to highlight how a “window of opportunity” (p. 104) existed in Porto Alegre—in comparison to Sao Paolo—for urban learning forums to flourish, comparison is also deployed to foreground how Bombay was produced—in comparison to British planning models—as a modern city (p. 125). Most significantly, comparativism is emphasized as a way of postcolonializing urban knowledge through situating and provincializing existing claims in urban theory and opening up alternative ways of learning (and unlearning) about cities.

Thirdly, this postcolonial approach to processes of comparison is a key component to an explicit critical stance developed by the book. McFarlane marks out how a productive dialogue might be shaped in urban geography between Marxist critiques of global capitalism and post-structuralist theorizations of assemblages, actants, and multitudes—approaches often deemed to be incommensurate and invariably antagonistic. In Learning the City, concepts such as “immutable mobiles,” “quasi objects,” and “education of attention” are woven more or less seamlessly with ideas such as the “right to the city,” capitalist accumulation, and dispossession. Although perhaps underplaying significant epistemological differences, drawing across both sets of theoretical resources offers McFarlane a much richer intellectual apparatus and wider array of conceptual tools with which to formulate new approaches to contemporary critical urbanism. This theoretical openness is accompanied by an empirical focus across a broad range of social groups. Bringing together residents of informal settlements and elite policymakers within the same analytical framework enables new critical insights to be developed around political engagements. These include highlighting the role of enumeration as a means of mobilizing marginalized groups, and carefully considering how NGOs such as SPARC in Mumbai have cultivated an entrepreneurial conception of slum-dwellers in developing recent partnerships with the state. What is most impressive and hopeful about the critical urban geographies generated by Learning the City is the refusal simply to evaluate and debunk. The focus on learning is used to propose political strategies and experiments that create and name new emancipatory worlds, including possibilities for “collaborative and dialogic urban learning” (p. 114).

However, despite the important conceptual, geographical, and critical contributions Learning the City makes to urban geography, I am less comfortable with the use of “assemblage” as the dominant spatial imaginary and grammar throughout the book. It clearly has enabled McFarlane to open up new conceptual avenues beyond a traditional geographical lexicon of network and scale, and emphasize themes of emergence and heterogeneity (including within urban theory). But the repeated reliance on assemblage, not only as a concept but also as a description, object, approach, orientation, and style, does mean it loses some precision and critical imaginative value. Given the theoretical ecumenism displayed through the book, it seems inconsistent for McFarlane to plant his flag firmly and rigidly on this one term. The few stretches where the language of assemblage falls away are revealing for tending to focus on the historic and contingent; for example in detailing the political context for policy innovation in Porto Alegre. This suggests other approaches and terms, such as milieu and landscape, might be necessary to open out (and assemble) alternative spatial imaginaries, address different audiences, and cater to stories considering the longer-term entrenching of private and state interests.

In part, my discomfort with assemblage in Learning the City stems from the way conceptual explorations tend to be foregrounded prior to their location in empirical examples. This allows McFarlane to outline his theory of “learning assemblages” in the first chapter and emphasize its relevance beyond simply urban life. But this sits less well with assertions that “the relations between learning and politics must … be examined in … particular and contingent contexts” (p. 66) and “specific geographies” (p. 167). I am curious as to what extent the book's focus on learning emerged from McFarlane's engagement with groups such as Slum/Shack Dwellers International and their placing of urban learning at the center of their practical engagement in the world. How did McFarlane learn about learning? What forms of translation, co-ordination, and dwelling were involved? There is similarly very little on the sorts of methods, case studies, and comparative frameworks that were adopted in relation to some of the theoretical challenges posed by the book. McFarlane does recognize his “selection of cases is, to be sure, selective” (p. 117) but why were certain cities, neighborhoods, organizations, and sites (and actants and things) chosen in the research and illustrations cited, and the comparisons made? Were examples of less well traveled and less visible and coherent forms of urban learning considered? Despite the emphasis on “thick description of relations of history and potential” (p. 164), there is relatively little original ethnographic material, especially in the section on “Learning, rhythm, space.” As well as providing more clues as to how to access experiences, memories, and feelings in socio-material processes of urban learning, richer empirical detail would also help soften some passages that rely on a register of vocabulary dominated by gerunds and conceptual terminology.

Notwithstanding these concerns, Learning the City has opened up an important routemap for accounts of urban learning and knowledge, and will prove a rich stimulus for new research questions and approaches across an array of urban contexts. For instance, what are the changing actors, contexts, and logics involved in the travel of urban learning forums? How can we provide new historical perspectives on urban learning in everyday life and social movements? As McFarlane himself makes clear, plenty of further research is required in elucidating the “genealogies of comparison” (p. 151) and “the different logics, geographies, and political economies of urban learning” (p. 145). One area of further enquiry that the book does not consider in depth, perhaps surprisingly, is urban education and pedagogy. How is urbanism produced, lived, and contested within different types and locations of classroom? How do these involve “experimental forms of learning initiatives” (p. 154)? What scope exists for “a more horizontal comparative field” (p. 167) and forms of “democratic learning” to be inculcated in teaching practice? Opening up the black box of urban learning and developing a progressive international urbanism will also necessitate new ways of learning about urban learning itself.

—Andrew Harris

ON THEORIES OF URBAN LEARNING

Learning the City is an important and theoretically sophisticated piece of work. It is like a good movie: you need to re-view it in your mind several times to position yourself. So, it took me a long time to figure out what I thought of it and also what it was precisely that puzzled me about it. Going back to my notes and central passages of the book for this review, I eventually found out that my core concern was simply the question of learning. So, I will focus my comment on McFarlane's processual and compositional conceptualization of it. Although I see such a conceptualization as a fruitful one, I also think that it tends to make us lose sight of some important dimensions of what the author wants to develop: a critical geography of urban learning. Therefore, in this sympathetic critique of McFarlane's highly stimulating book, I will try to point at ways in which the author's theory of urban learning could be further developed.

I will, more precisely, advance three main arguments: the first is that McFarlane's theory of learning does not pay enough attention to the content or substance of learning (i.e., knowledge). As a consequence, the divergent priorities and interests of actors involved in learning practices tend to recede into the background. My second argument will be that by focusing excessively on process and composition, this theory does not provide a sufficient and convincing typology of urban actors. Thirdly and finally, I will suggest that the author's conceptualization of learning in interaction would benefit from a more thorough engagement with social learning as theorized in planning. Before I develop these three arguments, I will briefly summarize McFarlane's theory.

McFarlane's book proposes to see the city as “an assemblage for learning” (p. 14) and aims thereby at “placing explicitly learning at the heart of urban debate” (p. 175). By focusing on learning, the author explicitly distances himself from a theory of urban knowledge (“the sense that people make of information” [p. 3]) to look instead at “the specific processes, practices and interactions through which knowledge is created” (p. 3). Moreover, he rejects a “traditional conception of learning,” implying “a cognitive formal process of training or skill acquisition as a linear additional of knowledge” to “conceive learning as a distributed assemblage of people, material and space that is often neither formal nor simply individual” (p. 3). So, simply put, for McFarlane understanding learning means looking at processes relating people with things and spaces, rather than at the motivations of people to engage in learning activities, or at the results of their learning. Learning is then more precisely theorized by McFarlane as based on three interrelated processes: translation, drawing on actor-network-theory; coordination, drawing on Hutchins's distributed cognition; and dwelling, drawing on Tim Ingold's combination of phenomenology and affordance theory. To conceptualize how this process is composed in space through open-ended power-laden practices and relations, McFarlane relies on assemblage thinking. Finally, he explores these urban learning processes in different situations organized according to a quasi-scalar order: from everyday ordinary practices to policy circulations through social movements and state–civil society relations.

This complex conceptualization, which at times uses too many typologies and theoretical resources, is a creative and fruitful one. Instead of considering cities as populated by actors “walking around” with different forms of knowledge in their minds, it makes us look at them as places where (and between which) knowledge is constantly created in context-sensitive and non-predictable ways by the assemblage of different heterogeneous entities. In that sense, the book attains its main goal, which is to make us envisage cities as learning milieus in which actors and things are involved in a variety of learning games. However, this sophisticated analytical unpacking of learning leaves little space (I am not saying there is none) to reflect on what these processes are about: What is the content of these learning practices? Why is it important for the actors involved? Why are different actors in different situations engaged in quite different learning processes? To critically reflect on the different priorities and interests motivating these actors to engage in learning practices, it is necessary to consider the fact that, to name but a few, street kids in Mumbai learn survival strategies, whereas NGOs learn how to speak efficiently to governments and city officials learn recipes for economic growth. In other words, an indispensable aspect of a critical theory of urban learning which tends in this book to be forgotten is the relation between learning processes and what Habermas called a long time ago “knowledge interests” (Habermas, 1972).

A second problem with McFarlane's theorization is, despite his great ability in forging typologies, the absence of a typology of actors involved in urban learning. One of the major strengths of the book is that, by considering a wide range of other actors including ordinary citizens and NGOs, it provides a broad view on urban learning, while in the recent and productive field of policy mobility studies (McCann and Ward, 2011) it tends to be limited to policymakers. But, in the absence of a typology of actors, the reader is left wondering why other actors, such as those in the private sector, are not considered. What about the powerful learning processes developed by IBM to become a key player in the smarter cities business? What about real estate investors, civil engineers, planners, or architects? It seems to me that there is instead an implicit theory of urban actors inspired by the work of De Certeau and Lefèbvre, often quoted in the book, which I find problematic. Both authors’ urban theories are grounded in the high-modernist, politically conservative and in many ways caricatural context of French urbanism of the 1960s and 1970s, in which the tactics of everyday life versus the strategies of the State as well as the lived space of the users versus the conceived space of planners could work as a useful heuristic and critical dichotomies. The influence of these two authors is also perceptible in the relation made between categories of actors and forms of learning, as tactical learning seems to be the privilege of ordinary citizens and NGOs whereas the strategic tools of translation and coordination are what institutional actors are busy with. As a geographer trained and working in a French-speaking context, I am often surprised by uncritical and decontextualized uses of De Certeau and Lefèbvre in Anglo-American geography and think that their categories of thought are today in many ways insufficient to make sense of urban learning or other aspects of urban life. We need not only more sophisticated typologies of urban actors but also, and more importantly, ways of thinking that help us better understand how their knowledge is constituted and transformed in interaction.

This brings me to my third point, which concerns social learning. McFarlane shows very well how learning is not only a social but a socio-material process when he describes, for instance, the use of enumeration documents by Slum/Shack Dwellers International to gain credibility vis-à-vis donors and local states (Chapter 3). He also proposes a thoughtful critical evaluation of other forms of dialogical situations in which different types of actors and rationalities interact when discussing the famous participatory urban forums in Porto Alegre. To analyze these learning situations McFarlane draws on Callon et al.’s (2009) excellent work on controversies related to science and technology issues, and more specifically on their three criteria of intensity, openness, and quality. The author justifies his choice on the grounds that Callon et al.’s work offers, more than work in planning theory, a yardstick to “appraise the nature and possibilities of urban learning collectives” (p. 96). Despite the fact that I have myself drawn a lot of inspiration from it, I think that actor-network theory has more to learn from planning theory than the other way round, especially on questions of social learning and participation. Learning has been central to planning for at least 50 years, to the point that some argue that what planning actually means as an activity lies in the word “learning” (Bertolini, 2011). Because the early critique of rationalist planning models in the 1960s through communicative planning theory in the 1980s to collaborative planning in the 1990s and 2000s, there is a rich body of work on how learning works (or not) in the interaction between different urban actors. ³ There is notably a long-standing empirically based reflection on a question emphasized by McFarlane: how we learn not despite difference, but through difference (in interests, status, values, etc.). Patsy Healey's work on urban situations (not the type of situation Callon et al. work on), with its sophisticated post-Habermasian analysis of the conditions of truly democratic planning forums (Healey, 1997), brings in particular a wealth of insight into how learning collectives can be mapped and coordinated while having also an interest for the (non-human) mediations involved in their interaction. ⁴

In sum then, I think McFarlane's innovative theory of urban learning is very helpful to an understanding of contemporary urbanism and of how it can be changed for the better. Its great merit is to make us see cities as complex learning assemblages and milieus. It will be even more helpful if it were more explicitly articulated with a theory of urban knowledge, actors, and planning.

—Ola Söderström

LEARNING CITIES IN AN ASIAN CENTURY

Scholars who buy Learning the City will certainly get their money's worth, especially in theoretical terms. Colin McFarlane has packed the 180 or so pages of his book with insights from many of the key strands of social theory in contemporary human geography—from critical political economy and postcolonial theory to actor-network theory and theorization of assemblage. These diverse theoretical resources are, as the book's title suggests, woven together around the concept of learning. McFarlane takes learning beyond its conventional subdisciplinary location in economic geography and innovation studies to inform a critical approach to urban politics and possibilities. The book will thus be of particular interest to urban scholars in human geography and cognate disciplines. Because I am one of five such commentators assembled as part of this review forum, I will begin by focusing on those aspects of Learning the City that speak to my ongoing urban research interests in Southeast Asia, before highlighting two areas which I would have liked to have seen covered in more detail in the text.

The first aspect that speaks to my own ongoing research has to do with McFarlane's critical take on the urban policy mobility literature. While this body of work has focused on the travel of policies associated with contemporary forms of neoliberalization, McFarlane contests such “presentism,” drawing attention to important historical antecedents, such as the translation of ideas on sanitation to British colonial Bombay from the metropole, or the Soviet-style monumentalization of East Berlin during the Cold War era. In contrast to the tendency of existing work to cast contemporary urban learning in a negative light—in the form of the circulation of revanchist policies, free market ideologies, and variants of urban entrepreneurialism, for example—McFarlane insists on the progressive possibilities of translocal learning. In addition, if existing work has overwhelmingly concerned the networks and practices of professional, epistemic communities, what McFarlane terms “urban learning forums” involve the participation of a much wider range of actors and knowledges. Although he is at pains to acknowledge recognition of the fact that participation always occurs in the context of uneven power relations, McFarlane offers a refreshingly positive outlook: “… we should not allow ourselves … to cede the ground to power by becoming overly cynical about the possibilities of collaborative and dialogic urban learning” (p. 114). Learning the City is far from being a naïve celebration of “participation,” but the book is hopeful that learning experiments in and across diverse regions of the world can bring about “the emergence of a different kind of city.”

The second aspect of Learning the City that speaks to my research in Southeast Asia concerns postcolonial approaches to comparative urbanism. Building upon the work of Jennifer Robinson (2002, 2006), McFarlane foregrounds diverse geographies of “comparative learning” (p. 122). In particular, this means processes of learning that extend beyond either: (1) hierarchical conceptions of urban development, where it is deemed possible to learn only from other cities that are more highly ranked or tiered; or (2) pre-given categorization of urban diversity, in which learning is understood to be possible only between cities that are in some way similar. There is no doubt that cities such as London or New York—conventionally understood as sitting atop global urban hierarchies—continue to serve as aspirational models for various aspects of world city-ness. However, McFarlane highlights a much more diverse range of cities whose attributes may travel or translate translocally. This includes the Brazilian cities of Curitiba and Porto Alegre ⁵ and cases where cities in the Global North learn from those in the Global South. An example of the latter in the book is that of a London-based NGO working on issues of homelessness, which learns from NGO activities in Mumbai. At issue here is not merely that cities of the Global South be recognized as sites of innovation and learning, but the importance of a wider “open-ness to learning through difference” (p. 113). A key constraint to translocal urban learning identified in the book is the way in which divisions such as Global North and South hold differently categorized cities apart as sites of possible inter-urban learning. For McFarlane, in contrast, comparative urban learning is much more than direct transfer of knowledge among supposedly similar cities, and so must cross-cut global geographical categories.

There is no doubt that the diverse empirical cases to which McFarlane refers are sufficient to exemplify his wider claims. Nonetheless, there are two aspects of the book where I would have wished for elaboration. The first has to do with the methodological underpinnings of the empirical cases. We learn, mostly in passing, that material on various empirical cases was gathered as part of doctoral and/or postdoctoral fieldwork. For me, this begs a series of questions. To what extent was the conceptual framing of Learning the City established during the Ph.D.? Were subsequent fieldwork forays designed to add empirical flesh to theoretical bones that had already been developed in the doctoral thesis? Or, conversely, did the overall framing of the book emerge from a disparate range of postdoctoral projects that were retrospectively woven together? I appreciate that one of the first steps that scholars take in making their doctoral thesis look more like a book is precisely to remove the methodological chapter. Yet in this case, precisely because the book is clearly much more than doctoral—and may itself be considered to be a kind of multi-locale urban learning assemblage—elaboration of the translocal route through which it was assembled could have yielded important methodological and practical insights.

Second, and relatedly, I found myself wishing for more empirical detail. Some of the most engaging passages in the book are those in which McFarlane details experiences in the field, such as his visit to the large favela of Paraisópolis in São Paulo (in Chapter 2). However, these passages are quite few and far between. My disappointment here may be because Learning the City is simply a different kind of book from the one I had expected or hoped for. It is worth noting that I had previously read several policy mobility journal articles that were very thin empirically but which also made a point of emphasizing the need for more in-depth, ethnographic labor (presumably by other scholars) in the future. In advance of receiving my copy of Learning the City, I imagined that this would be the answer to the repeated calls for sustained empirical treatment. In fact, the book ranges across a series of sites and cases without providing a great deal of ethnographic detail on any of them. At one level, of course, this may be considered as a strength of the book—its multi-sited coverage is necessary and fully appropriate for examination of people, policies, and various kinds of representations on the move (precisely why, as noted above, I think that it would have been good to have given more details of how translocal learning connections were identified, followed, and investigated methodologically). However, especially given McFarlane's acknowledgement early on in the book that learning is “embedded in the current of people's lifeworlds” (p. 7), I would have liked to have heard more about how learning is lived. Almost all of the extended quotations in the book, including those giving voice to learning actors, are taken from secondary sources rather than from direct ethnographic encounters in the field.

These comments are not intended to question the importance of Learning the City or the impact that it is likely to have in and beyond geography. The book draws together and builds upon a series of journal articles that have already established Colin McFarlane as a significant contributor to relational comparative urban studies. If this is not the book that I had anticipated then that is partly because it seeks to do so much more than my simple desire for more in-depth (and especially book length), grounded research in urban geography.

—Tim Bunnell

LEARNING THE CITY: A RESPONSE TO THE COMMENTARIES

I am very grateful to Tim Bunnell, Andrew Harris, Ananya Roy, Ola Söderström, and Kevin Ward for their generous and insightful commentaries on Learning the City, and to Neil Coe for organizing this forum. The five commentaries offer a rich and varied set of questions and themes, from “urban learning assemblages” as a theory of learning, policy mobility, and urbanism itself, to translocal conceptualizations of comparison, radical participation, and informal settlements. ⁶ These are all very useful questions and themes that I will take away from the forum. While there is not the space to respond to all of them here, there are common threads that I will focus on here around both the form and politics of urban learning, and around theorizing and researching translocal urbanism.

If learning is based not just on formal systems and linear addition but everyday tacit experiences and shifts in perception—i.e., on different ways of inhabiting and seeing space-then what conceptual devices might allow access to learning? The book's answer is a set of inter-related concepts: translation (e.g., new ways of using materials), coordination (e.g., models, plans, or maps), dwelling (e.g., attuning perception to emerging conditions), comparison (e.g., between different cities or urban imaginaries), incrementalism, improvization, learning forums, and relations between ideology and mobility (e.g., of traveling policies). While the commentaries discuss many of these concepts, they dwell less on the explicit conceptualization of learning and more on the form and politics of learning, i.e., on the emphasis on “urban learning assemblages” as processes of urban composition that help produce, sustain, and contest urbanism.

Roy positions “urban learning assemblage” as a theory both of the city and of postcoloniality “as an assemblage that both rehearses and ruptures colonial mimesis.” This relation between rehearsal and rupture is important: dominant forms of learning are assembled over time as the inevitable “truths” of urban development, and part of the work of the social movements discussed in the book is on the one hand to disrupt this historical mimesis and its power structures, and on the other hand to install a different set of reference points for building socially just urbanism through learning. Rehearsal and rupture, however, carry on through the politics of activist learning. Learning can become simultaneously important to the production of the sorts of activist learning politics discussed in the book, and co-opted by elite forms of translocal urban development. Roy finds the conceptualization of assemblage useful for thinking about this dual role for certain strands of urban activist learning. In this context, she asks a key question of the politics of learning: what are the logics, processes, and geographies “where global regimes of capital and truth commandeer incremental urbanism and its everyday bricolage”? We need more accounts of how slum activists do not just resist but enter into the co-production of mainstream development strategies, and the sorts of learning politics that enable and emerge from this co-production.

Let me take the example from recent work I've been doing on sanitation in informal settlements. In 2007, the prestigious Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award was given to a toilet block built by community activists through state and World Bank funding in Khotwadi, a well-established informal settlement in west Mumbai. The award was given not just because the activists have built a well-run and well-maintained toilet block, but because the block has become an unlikely focal point for a range of additional activities, from basic computer classes and women's groups involved in microcredit, to the construction of a sports and dance center, the development of solar hot water, and new systems of solid waste management, where waste is sorted into wet and dry garbage and transformed into value through recycling. These activities involve different ways of learning how to manage and perceive the problem and possibilities of sanitation. But while the award itself is an entirely laudable effort to raise the profile of slum sanitation and to support a creative and committed group of community activists, it is also a reminder of the sorts of stories elite groups wish to hear about slum sanitation, and which thereby become mobile through these kinds of translocal routes—not the messy, excremental politics of daily grind, but the shining and seemingly harmless success stories that fit with elite aspirations to build more entrepreneurial cities. Here, a model of slum activist learning is both part of an everextending set of ideologies around urban entrepreneurialism, and part of an important set of social activities that exceed those ideologies.

There is a wider politics of learning here structured unequally through actors like the World Bank or influential voices like Urban Age, where the scope of learning both the problem and the solution of slum sanitation is reduced to the role of self-organized entrepreneurial subjects. There is, for instance, a strong effort underway to marketize slum sanitation through small-scale toilet entrepreneurs. For example, Tova Solo, an urban specialist with the World Bank's Water and Sanitation Division, has argued that a loosely regulated market of small-scale entrepreneurs in lower-income cities could meet sanitation needs more flexibly and inclusively than state-run subsidized systems. Drawing on a range of examples, such as private providers of toilet blocks in Bangladesh running a “brisk business,” Solo (1999, pp. 121, 129) argued for a “new paradigm” in water and sanitation that shifted the focus from “price caps, subsidy issues and quality control to one of encouraging competition and sharing information.” The task for Solo is simply one of learning better ways to generate and maintain the inevitable truth of slum sanitation: that only entrepreneurialism can work. Here, ideologies, models, and techniques (e.g., charging “users”) of entrepreneurialism structure forms of translocal learning that connect slums and shifting global architectures of “truth.” Yet for all the wide-ranging debate on how ideologies and techniques of entrepreneurialism have led to critical shifts in how cities are managed (Harvey, 1989; Hall and Hubbard, 1998; MacLeod and Jones, 2011), there has been little consideration of the place of “slums” in the co-production of new frontiers of entrepreneurialism (McFarlane, 2012).

Söderström, in contrast to Roy, wonders whether the book could have done more work to produce a typology of different actors in urban learning beyond the focus on policymakers, activists, and residents, and here he lists the private sector (e.g., actors like IBM and the smart cities agenda), real estate investors, civil engineers, and architects. While I did not examine it in the book, I am now beginning work on the “smart city” debate that connects to questions of learning. Given that the promise of this largely privatist corporate agenda is one of real-time and smoothly run urbanism (in governance, economy, environment, and everyday life), there is a crucial set of questions around the sorts of learning that are being presented as “necessary” for the workings of contemporary urban capitalism, and around who owns that learning. There is also a set of questions involving the sheer disparate nature of the smart city phenomenon—from corporate giants to grassroots initiatives, from governance to infrastructure, buildings and “smart meters”—including whether or not they inform changing perceptions of urbanism, and whether they encode different ways of learning urban interactions, patterns, and valuations as they sift, sort, atomize, and aggregate data-urbanism. Typologies of urban learning would be useful, but perhaps less as typologies of actors and more—extending Roy's position—as typology of urban learning assemblages, in which different actors (the World Bank, slum community activists, etc.) are often important in the co-production of the capacities of the same multi-faceted assemblage.

Important here too, though, is the question of how different actors within particular learning regimes differentially learn through context. Söderström welcomes the emphasis on the “processual and compositional conceptualization” of learning but wonders whether the book could have paid more attention to the reasons why people are engaged in the learning practices they are engaged in. His focus on the context of composition raises an important question about the sorts of learning that become possible for different individuals and groups. For instance, what kind of political strategies might be learned when the scope for political agency is historically shattered? Where life is a fundamental toil for urban inhabitation—struggles for water, sanitation, food, shelter, basic health (Graham et al., forthcoming)—then the question is not just how learning takes place, but also one of the sorts of learning that are possible and how that informs the kinds of politics that seem affordable. It is important, then, to keep a hold both on how different actors can become enrolled in dominant urban learning assemblages but nonetheless produce distinctive forms of learning through the contexts in which they work and live.

In this context, I found assemblage a useful supplement to the compositional emphasis of learning, and in particular for thinking about translocal geographies of urban learning. There are four main reasons for this: first, assemblage focuses attention on how relations are held together across space despite different logics, techniques, and actors; second, because assemblage attends not just to the properties of parts but the capacities that emerge through interactions; third, because assemblage emphasizes nonlinear causality and is attuned to the contingency of sociomaterial agency (the book looks at the catalytic role of house models, maps, saris used as measuring devices, train tickets, etc., as well as planning, policy, and ideologies of development); and fourth, because assemblage does not assign any pre-given geography to urban formations, but instead draws attention to how assemblages are spatially structured through particular narratives, forms of power and resource, and spatial metaphors (territory, network, scale, place, flow, mobility, etc.) (see McFarlane, 2011a, 2011b). These emphases are used by Roy in relation to thinking “makeshift urbanism” as a feature of both slum development and policy “truths,” and by Ward in relation to the “matrix of comparisons and exchanges, adaptations and limitations, mobilities and mutations” that compose mobile urban policy. For Harris, though, while the concept of assemblage can open new avenues beyond languages of network and scale due to its emphasis on capacities, heterogeneity, and emergence, it can become too dominant as a form of socio-spatiality for thinking about the composition of learning, and here he usefully suggests alternative imaginaries such as “milieu” and “landscape” as ways of charting different spatial formations and imaginaries.

As several of the commentaries indicate, Learning the City itself is something of a translocal assemblage. Bunnell notes the book's “diverse theoretical resources … from critical political economy and postcolonial theory to actor-network theory and theorization of assemblage,” while Harris points out that “concepts such as ‘immutable mobiles,’ ‘quasi-objects,’ and ‘education of attention’ are weaved more or less seamlessly with ideas such as ‘right to the city,’ capitalist accumulation and dispossession.” He goes on to wonder whether the epistemic differences between these different concepts are underplayed, but adds that the mixture allows for “a much richer intellectual apparatus and wider array of conceptual tools with which to formulate new approaches to contemporary urbanism.” This echoes Söderström's suggestion that while the book “at times uses too many typologies and theoretical resources,” the combination “is a creative and fruitful one.” This may be due in part, as Harris suggests, to the book's “refusal simply to evaluate and debunk,” but to attempt to “propose political strategies and experiments that create and name new emancipatory worlds.”

My emphasis in the book was indeed to try to be experimental and generative with concepts, and to use a range of concepts as tools depending on the questions being asked and the context in which they were being put to work. While the commentators appear to welcome this conceptual diversity, there are of course differences between certain strands of thought that the book uses which could have been further examined—for example, around the different status of “knowledge” in strands of organizational theory, phenomenology, actor-network theory, and development studies, or the different way the book uses terms like “ideology,” “discourse,” “dialogic democracy,” and “materiality,” all of which emerge from different intellectual and political traditions and contexts. On the other hand, it is worth remaining mindful of the risk of overstating the differences between particular concepts and intellectual histories, sometimes bound up with reductive invectives of this or that area of work, which itself can be intellectually and politically stifling. If Söderström and Harris are right that a “richer intellectual apparatus” can emerge from writing through diverse theoretical contexts, and that this can proliferate conceptual and political approaches, then there is an important set of tricky navigations here for critical urban experimentalism and praxis.

If the project of analyzing and critiquing the politics of urban learning assemblages is aided by a theoretical experimentalism, the book does not share a similar approach to thinking about methodologies. Several commentators raise the increasingly important question of how critical urban researchers might respond methodologically to proliferating forms of translocal urban learning. How do we make visible the empirics of translocalism and the methods that get us there? As Jennifer Robinson (forthcoming) has recently put it, “theorizing cities … can be thought of as a condition in which elsewhere is always pressing on our imaginations,” yet urban researchers are only beginning to consider the methodological stakes in earnest (e.g., see Cochrane and Ward, 2012). For Bunnell, an “elaboration of the translocal routes through which it [the book] was assembled could have yielded important methodological and practical insights.” This point is echoed by Harris, who raises the important question of how we (researchers) “learn about learning.” Bunnell and Harris also call for more empirical work on translocal learning, and they are right of course to point out that the book is less an empirical study and more a conceptual set of interventions around the broad terrain of urban informality, translocal knowledge, and mobility. If one of the aims of the book was to write, as Harris puts it, “spatial topologies of reach and relatedness,” there remains a need, in Bunnell's words, for more ethnographic accounts of “how learning is lived.” This is an enduring and central problem of thinking the relations between particular urban places and translocal mobilities, and here urban research needs to reflect on whether and how the suite of methodologies that we have inherited and routinely employ are up to the task of capturing the shifting relations and forms of contemporary urbanism.

—Colin McFarlane

Notes

¹All quotations and page numbers in what follows, unless otherwise specified, refer to McFarlane's Learning the City.

²The supportive comments of Ben Anderson, Michael Crang, Adam Holden, Gordon MacLeod, and Colin McFarlane informed the writing of this short commentary.

³For a useful summary on social learning in planning theory, see Holden (2008).

⁴As an aside, I am surprised by how little dialogue there is between political geography and planning on the same research questions. Healey's recent co-edited book on international exchanges in planning (Healey and Upton, 2010), for instance, totally ignores research on urban policy mobilities in geography. Mutual learning across that disciplinary boundary would certainly be useful for further advancing the critical study of urban learning.

⁵Both have been cited by planners in my ongoing work on Indonesia, most recently in the form of the aspiration for Makassar to become Curitiba-nya Indonesia, the “Curitiba of Indonesia.”

⁶More specifically, the issues covered include: the question of “a new theory of the city” through “urban learning assemblages” (Roy); a conceptual approach for analyzing urban policy mobilities, especially in the chapter on ideology and translocal urbanism that develops a fourfold framework of “power-object-form-imaginary” (Ward); the conceptualization of the “slum” through optics of incrementalism, activism, and translocalism (Roy); the framing of the possibilities of urban comparison through difference and a related set of questions around methodologies (Bunnell, Harris, Ward); the potential and limits of certain strands of post-structuralist theory for understanding urbanism (Harris, Söderström); the possibilities of radical participation and “urban learning forums” (Bunnell, Roy); questions about typologies and contexts of actors in learning, and the potential contribution of debates in planning theory (Söderström); and the implications for urban education and pedagogy (Harris).