Abstract
Contemporary urban thinkers can be divided into those who view the city as inherently knowable and those who do not. In the former category, the city has a logic that enables us to predict what will happen in the face of capitalist markets (Edward Glaeser), agglomeration (Allen Scott and Michael Storper), and knowledge spillovers (Richard Florida). The city is not a mystery; it can be explained. In the second category, we can only guess at what will happen when actors encounter each other across the elusive spatial scales of the city. Whatever outcomes emerge do so out of an over-determined array of ever-changing relationships. For Abdul Malik Simone, Ananya Roy, Steve Pile, Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, ‘the city can be known only partially, provisionally, and experimentally’ (p. 27). The former perspective sets us on solid ground; with the latter we risk Soren Kierkegaard’s ‘dizziness of too many possibilities’.
In Seeing Like a City, Amin and Thrift offer a relational approach that portrays the city as composed of numerous ‘logics and happenings’ (p. 25). Its associations are ‘combinatorial and disjunctive’ (p. 16) and ambiguity reigns. Cities are viscous, non-local, discontinuous, configurational and incomplete, and best understood as hyper-objects ‘both in and outside human awareness’ (p. 60). In this ‘ontology of spatial “throwntogetherness”’ (Acknowledgements, no pagination), prediction is a waste of time and explanation an act of hubris. Instead, we are offered a way of ‘seeing’ the city – a way of thinking and experiencing rather than knowing and acting.
Nevertheless, Amin and Thrift share with their opposites the belief that ‘cities have become world-making’ (p. 9). If we want to understand the global flows of people, goods and currency; threats to the environment; and cultural borrowings; we need to look to cities. The world is now an urban world with cities the ‘main products and producers of the Anthropocene’ (p. 34), that new era in which humans have come to destructive dominance over nature. Cities are critical actors in the flow of economic relations that extend across the globe and neither prosperity nor poverty can be understood without reference to their contingent workings. Cities, moreover, have complicated and unravelled what it means to be human. We exist at the intersection of ‘colliding planes’ of subjectivity that roll over us in waves of existential complexity, and yet empower us with hybridity (p. 69).
The city is an assemblage in which humans, technologies and infrastructures are closely juxtaposed and interwoven. Most importantly, it is constituted by its infrastructure; that is, by ‘moments of standardization, technical compatibility, professional rivalry, bureaucratic imperatives, regulatory competences, and general dispositions which allow things, quite literally, to fit together’ (p. 34). And although Amin and Thrift’s theoretical approach and the style in which the book is written are meant to resist closure, confinement and commitment, they are clear on one thing: infrastructure – ‘the gross material of materiality’ (p. 35) – is the defining element of cities and a major contributor to inequality within and across them.
I am sympathetic with the casting of the city as an assemblage of heterogeneous collaborations, the emphasis on contingency, the refusal to submit to theoretical closure, the concern with materiality and the implicit post-humanism. Nevertheless, these qualities can be re-combined to produce other ways of seeing the city. Such a rearrangement would have to include at least three additional elements, each of which compensates for absences in Amin and Thrift’s argument: their inattention to the sedimentation of relationships, the marginalisation of nature and a relative silence on human associations.
First, Amin and Thrift are so enthralled by the indeterminacy of relationality that they fail to recognise that much of the world is relatively stable. For centuries, the same cities have served as the nodes for the global flows of money, politics and culture. Over hundreds of years, the nations where wealth is concentrated have hardly changed. The same people – white, male, Anglo-American-western European – prosper disproportionately despite decades of development assistance. And, the academic literature continues to be led from the Global North. Amin and Thrift come close to recognising these structural relationships when they discuss global poverty, but their theoretical perspective leads them elsewhere. Contrary to what they imply, world-making is not relentlessly contingent.
Second, the city they envision brings together humans and technologies but leaves out an equally important set of actors – representatives of nature. If one is going to think a fully hybridised city, then rats and cats, snowstorms and rising sea levels, tectonic plates and hillsides, mosquitoes and cockroaches, ginkgo trees and kudzu, hawks and pigeons have to be included. Much of what we think of as infrastructure has been developed to address nature by bringing water to the city, removing waste that might breed vermin and holding back rising sea levels. Cities are not a displacement of nature but an accommodation to its inevitable presence. The city of Seeing Like a City is bereft of the natural world of non-humans, an absence all the more glaring in a perspective committed to the city’s unavoidable heterogeneity.
Third, Amin and Thrift are insufficiently appreciative of human associations. With the exception of the discussion of how individual humans have changed, humans in their myriad collaborations are ignored. Yet, many of the city’s assemblages are dominated by humans: local governments, business corporations, neighbourhood associations, churches, drug cartels, families. And while these associations are entangled in relationships with nature, technologies and built forms, to subordinate them to only one of the assemblage’s actors – infrastructure – is to flatten the world beyond recognition. By pushing humans into the shadows of their argument, they subvert politics. Consequently, when Amin and Thrift consider the need for the city to be governed, infrastructure to be managed and poverty to be alleviated, the reader wonders how this might happen in a city where relationships are incessantly in flux and human associations seemingly absent. Governance and redistribution require a politics that includes humans. By subtracting human associations from their perspective, politics is emptied of power, compromise and strategy.
With this book and their earlier Cities: Reimagining the Urban (2000), Amin and Thrift present a compelling theoretical argument and take an extreme position amongst those who resist the determinativeness and embrace the relationality of cities. To use a phrase from the world of poker, they are ‘all in’. I am not. Cities are not without structure. Things exist in certain ways and not others. For example, cities in the USA tend to the oligarchic in governance, are prone to inequality in income and wealth, are environmentally problematic, and, when it comes to the treatment of African-Americans, intolerant (Beauregard, 2018). These conditions do not fit comfortably in a theoretical perspective committed to disjuncture, experimentation, indeterminacy and contingency. The enduring structures of injustice and inequality are not easily accommodated by an urban theory that pivots on ‘thowntogetherness’.
Seeing Like a City is a book worth grappling with; not to know its argument is to be uneducated in the world of urban theory. Still, this is not a book for the faint-hearted. It offers no reassurance, as do the theorists in the ‘other’ urban category, that change can be managed and all will be well. Rather, it challenges us to re-think our fundamental understandings of what we mean by a city.