How does ANT help us to rethink the city and its promises?

Abstract

Why is ANT good for studying the city? Here, I will argue that although the incorporation of ANT as assemblage research into the field of urban studies has been highly contentious, it has been variously productive and offers useful conceptual perspectives on the city and the urban. In conceptualising the city as promissory assemblage, we can grasp how resources and opportunities are centralised; how the city becomes an object of desire and how urban promises articulate these and other expectations of the city. Referring to different conceptual takes on the promise – from speech act and social theory, to literary and anthropological approaches – this article firstly unfolds the analytical potential of the city as promissory assemblage around notions such as elusiveness and endurance. Secondly, it suggests examples of how these articulations of promise in/of the city implicate the project of Western modernity and therefore invite analysis with an ANT-orientation. To study the city as promissory assemblage gives analytical access to the promises attached to modernity that are articulated in urban infrastructuring; to the elusiveness of promises that we confront throughout modernisation and urbanisation; to the connection between urban opportunity (and misfortune), subjectivation and endurance as a mode of activity that does not facilitate change. Here lies the contested political relevance of researching the city with an ANT lens, as it also helps us to find enduring means when addressing collectively the false promises in and of the city.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 18 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.