Urban Assemblages: Decentring the Object of Urban Studies
Abstract：
This paper reviews briefly a useful and plastic toolbox for urban studies provided by ANT with a broad pool of perspectives for questioning cities in new ways. What all these perspectives offer is a rich theoretical ground to develop radically relational and symmetrical understandings of the city, which decentres urban theory and research in different ways. Opening the actor-network toolbox for urban studies entails not only a new way of posing research questions, but provides also a new interdisciplinary space for the interplay of the social sciences and the humanities disciplines. The paper further points out that ANT destabilizes the monolithic assumption that the reality of the city has been understood in highly stable and bounded ways. Based on this, the paper criticizes the three traditions of urban studies of the Chicago School, Weber, and Simmel and indicates the main contribution that ANT approach lies in the delineation of an alternative ontology for the city, i.e., that the city is not socially constructed, but enacted into being in networks of bodies, materialities, technologies, objects, nature and humans. Thus, the city as multiple objects emerges from urban assemblages in the plural forms.