This paper briefly introduces the intellectual background of “relational turn” brought about by poststructuralism, the origin, Chinese translation, main meanings of the idea of assemblage, its contribution and restriction and the main contents of six papers in this special issue. In favor of easily understanding assemblage and its backdrop of Deleuze-Guattari philosophy and actor-network theory (ANT), the paper briefly explains the concepts of “multiplicity”,“territorialization/deterritorialization”, “intensity/extensity/quality”, “the virtual/the actual/the real”,“rhizome/arborescent schema”, “becoming”, “agency”,“object”, “actor/actant”, “enact”, “translation”, “flat”, and “symmetrical”.

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.

Assemblage of the city on the digital platform by mobile phones is the new form of the evolution of the city in its 12 400 years of non-linear development. It is advisable to analyze the process via assemblage theory of Deleuze and Delanda in order to enhance the assemblage of the city on the cloud computing platform in the climate change. Assemblage the origin of the city should be the new ground of architecture, urban studies and philosophy of design.

In this paper, the author considers what “assemblage” might offer a conception of the city. Although assemblage is gaining currency in geography and beyond, there has been little effort to consider how it might be conceptualized and what its specificity might be. In offering a conceptualization of assemblage, the author brings assemblage into conversation with particular debates around dwelling and argue, first, that assemblage provides a useful basis for thinking of the city as a dwelling process and, second, that it is particularly useful for conceiving the spatiality of the city as processual, relational, mobile, and unequal. Despite their distinct intellectual histories, the author suggests there is a productive debate to be had by bringing assemblage and dwelling into dialogue. The author examines some of the ways in which assemblage and dwelling might interact and reflect on particular moments of fieldwork conducted in S?o Paulo and Mumbai and on diverse examples ranging from “slum” housing to urban policy and mobility.

There are such problems as insufficient creativity, spatial homogeneity, and similar research on current cultural creative clusters. These problems are related to the fact that identity ontology is unable to deal with the problem of difference-becoming. Based on Deleuze-Guattarian concept of assemblage, this paper proposes a different interpretation. Firstly, the paper criticizes the “clustering myth” and points out the gellable spatiality of cultural practices. It then goes on to explain Deleuze-Guattarian conceptual framework of assemblage with such terms as rhizomatic assemblage, arborescent assemblage, abstract machine, etc., and their connections with difference becoming. The paper points out a rhizomatic assemblage is a social field maintaining the productive energy of non-identity. Finally, it selects two typical cultural creative clusters, Tianzifang in Shanghai and “Nanjing 1865”, as the comparable research objects, briefly describes their development process, identified the abstract machine of overcoding, flight lines of mutation and deterritorialisation, and analyzes the promotion and limitation of rhizomatic and arborescent assemblage on cultural and creative activities. It reflects on the inefficiency of the fine-quantified index system which has been broadly used as regulating means for cultural creative clusters. However, this essentialist way may eventually throttle the creativity and spatial differences of cultural creative clusters.

The homogeneous development of historical districts has become a critical problem. Scholars have widely recognized the danger of capitalization and pointed out the theory lagging behind practice. This paper indicates an easily overlooked but more fundamental reason that lies in insufficient reflection on “how historical district exists.” “Historical district”, as a notion, was put forward due to conservation practice. By reducing the physical forms into a representation of a specific historical culture, such a notion cannot fully reveal the inherent uniqueness and constant adaptability of historical urban forms. This paper thus returns to the ontology of historical urban forms and looks into their existential orders. This paper extends theorizations from Bruno Latour and Gills Deleuze and provides an alternative ontology of historical urban forms. It suggests understanding a historical district as being constructed by assemblages of human and non-human entities; the uniqueness of a historical district is thus akin to “difference in itself”, generating heterogeneities in the multiple processes of assemblage. Based on this ontological hypothesis, this paper develops the notion of “everyday thing” to probe into the productive heterogeneities of historical urban forms and further elaborates on this theorization based on the reality of Beijing Dashilar.

The refinement of urban planning has posed new challenges to contemporary spatial practices beyond the construction of material spaces, requiring the management of complex information and the mediation between heterogeneous actors and their re-creation of space through use. Urban research is being challenged to provide appropriate theoretical tools. While mainstream assemblage thinking effectively describes how actual assemblages change, it lacks methodologies for representing, analysing and evaluating the concrete genesis of change. To fill this gap, this paper revisits Deleuze’s concept of “the virtual” as the ontological source of change and introduces the notion of “boundary space” as an analytical tool for urban planning. Taking the Jiugulou neighbourhood of Beijing Old City as an example, the study traces the changes in the material spaces, residents’ activities, individual memories and the broader urban history before and after the “Relocation, Remediation and Improvement” initiative. Through a series of maps, we discover that boundary space tends to maintain the consistency of the nodes of virtual networks and actual assemblages of a particular urban site. This paper reminds practitioners of urban regeneration to heed this natural force of boundary space.