Assemblage as heuristic: unveiling infrastructures of port city waterfronts

Abstract

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.