Encountering, describing and transforming urbanism

Abstract

In this paper, I present some concluding reflections on the ‘Assemblage and Critical Urban Praxis’ debate that has taken place in the last few issues of City. Prompted by the eight insightful commentaries in the debate, I consider just three sets of contributions and limitations that assemblage thinking brings to making sense of and developing alternatives to contemporary urbanism: on encountering urban life, on the limits of description and on the possibilities for a radical urban commons. I argue that assemblage thinking provides a set of useful perspectives for conceptualising and intervening in urbanism, and that its potential can only be realised in conjunction with different urban critical, activist and marginalised knowledges.

Keywords:

• assemblage
• critical urbanism
• encounter
• description
• commons

Acknowledgements

I have been fortunate to benefit from conversations around various possibilities, strengths, shortcomings and limits of assemblage approaches with a variety of people in the process of writing my three contributions to the ‘Assemblage and Critical Urban Praxis’ debate in City. I would like to acknowledge, in particular, Ben Anderson, Ash Amin, Tariq Jazeel, Alex Jeffrey, Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria, Joe Painter, Steve Graham, John Allen, Alex Vasudevan, Adam Holden, Gordon MacLeod and Sean Knox. I am also very grateful to the editors of City and the various contributors who have made the time and space to allow this debate to take place.