Uprooting critical urbanism

Abstract

This paper engages the debate between assemblage thinking as an emerging body of critical urban theory and the desire to contain it within a framework of urban political economy. I take critical urban theory to mean the broad intellectual engagement with the ways in which cities and urban spaces are implicated in practices of power. Assemblage thinking moves outside a strict political economy framework and embodies different ontologies of power and place, yet this is not a shift away from criticality. Such thinking connects disparate threads of current urban theory as it opens new modes of multi-scalar and multi-disciplinary research geared to urban design and planning practices and therefore to potentials for urban transformation. To contain emerging assemblage theory under political economy is to neuter it and potentially produce conservative forms of practice. The framework of urban political economy brings enormous explanatory power to our understanding of cities and will develop most effectively if it does not consume its offspring.