Urban assemblages: ANT and the examination of the city

Abstract

This article presents new research perspectives and analytical challenges that actor-network theory opens for urban studies. First, it reviews how the ANT principles of hybrid relationality and flat associativity are being adopted in urban studies to symmetrically expand the urban ecology to nonhumans and contest scalar conceptions of urban space and economy. Second, it proposes that ANT brings along an even more fundamental challenge related to the understanding of the city as a research object. While common understandings as a spatial object, political-economical entity and/or sociocultural form underlie its singular, stable and bounded character, ANT allows thinking the city as a multiple and decentered object. The notion of urban assemblages is introduced to account for the circulation and becoming of the city in multiple hybrid and translocal networks. Finally, it concludes by discussing some consequences of this examination of the city, especially the reassertion of the problem of complexity, especially urban complexity, if not as a starting point, then at least as a point of arrival for ANT.