Learning the City

Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage

Colin McFarlane

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781405192811, 9781405192828
• eBook ISBN: 9781444343410
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Learning the City: Translocal Assemblage and Urban Politics critically examines the relationship between knowledge, learning, and urban politics, arguing both for the centrality of learning for political strategies and developing a progressive international urbanism.  

• Presents a distinct approach to conceptualising the city through the lens of urban learning
• Integrates fieldwork conducted in Mumbai's informal settlements with debates on urban policy, political economy, and development
• Considers how knowledge and learning are conceived and created in cities
• Addresses the way knowledge travels and opportunities for learning about urbanism between North and South

Chapter One

Learning Assemblages

Introduction

This chapter offers a conceptualization of learning. My aim is to consider what learning is, and to begin to think through what that might mean for thinking and writing about urbanism. The theory of learning that I develop is intended to then take shape relationally through the urbanisms discussed in the subsequent chapters. At its most general, learning involves either the acquisition of knowledge or skill, and/or a shift in perception from one way of seeing a problem, issue, relation or place, to another. It is not necessarily explicitly cognitive. Skills can be implicitly acquired, for example, through the experiential practice of craft. Learning embodies a transformation of knowledge, and/or perception, and/or self, and can be a process of control and ordering, or confusion and instability. It can arise from repetition, from performances on the wing, structured training, autonomous experimentation, events that interrupt the ‘known’ or that lead to a new way of seeing, and more. Rather than presupposing, as Tim Ingold (2000: 416) has put it, that ‘a body of context-free, propositional knowledge – namely a technology, or more generally a culture – actually exists as such and is available for transmission by teaching’, learning emerges through practical engagement in the world (see Lave 1988).

Learning is distributed as, in Callon et al.’s (2009: 58) description, ‘embodied forms of know-how, knacks, knowledge crystallized in various materials, and craft skills’, and is often an uncertain affair, for instance in relation to moments of creativity and invention. As a practice-based distribution, learning involves particular constituencies and discursive constructions, entails a range of inclusions and exclusions of people and epistemologies, and produces a means of going on through a set of guidelines, tactics or opportunities. As a process and outcome, learning is actively involved in changing or bringing into being particular assemblages of people–sources–knowledges. It is more than just a set of mundane practical questions; it is central to the emergence, consolidation, contestation, and potential of urban worlds. In this chapter, I first offer a conceptualization of what learning is in practice, and, second, consider how we might conceptualize the spatialities of learning through the notion of ‘assemblage’. In doing so, I develop a conception of learning that serves the rest of the book by making three arguments in relation to learning.

Firstly, learning is always a process of translation. This underlines the importance of intermediaries in the production of travelling knowledge; the spaces and actors through which knowledge moves are not simply a supplement to learning, but are constitutive of it. Secondly, and following on from this, learning is not simply a process of translating knowledge through space or accessing stored data, but depends on the (re)construction of functional systems that coordinate different domains. Thirdly, while learning can be structured through the inculcation of facts, rules, ideas or policy models, in substantive practice learning operates as the ‘education of attention’ (Gibson 1979; Ingold 2000). This means that learning can entail shifts in ways of seeing, where ‘ways of seeing’ is defined not simply as an optical visuality, but as haptic immersion. These three interrelated aspects can be summarized as translation, coordination and dwelling. Each step in the argument focuses on the importance of appreciating learning as a distributed process that foregrounds the materiality and spatial relationality of learning. In addition, in each of these three areas there is an important set of ethico-political concerns around how learning occurs, what sorts of urbanisms are privileged, and the potential role of various constituencies within that, including activists, policy-makers and researchers. In order to advance this argument, I will draw on a wide terrain of debates that have approached learning, including within geography, organization theory, science studies, cognitive anthropology, postcolonial studies, and urban studies.

I bring this conception of learning to a particular conception of assemblage. While the concepts of translation, coordination and dwelling are thought of as spatial processes in the chapter, they do not in themselves provide a theory of the spatialities of learning. It is in this context that I use assemblage to highlight how learning is constituted more through sociospatial interactions than through the properties and knowledges of pre-given actors themselves, and to think of the spatialities of learning as relational processes of composition. As I will explain, I use assemblage both as a concept and as an orientation by emphasizing three important spatialities of learning. Firstly, assemblage locates the constitution of learning in relations of history and potential, or the actual and the possible. Assemblage draws attention to the particular alignments produced through multiple spatiotemporalities of translation, coordination and dwelling, and to how they are reconstituted through different relations and contexts. Secondly, and following this, assemblage signals how learning is produced not simply as a spatial category, output or resultant formation, but through doing, performance and events. Thirdly, and finally, assemblage emphasizes how learning is sociospatially structured, hierarchalized and narratavized through unequal relations of knowledge, power and resource. While I illustrate many of the arguments in this chapter through urbanism, I concentrate the discussion on developing a conception of learning assemblage that will be applied to urbanism in the subsequent chapters.

Translation: Distribution, Practice and Comparison

Translation offers four perspectives to a conception of the constitution of urban learning through the creation and transformation of knowledge: a focus on distributions; a concern with intermediaries and displacement; as partial, multiple and practice-based; and as produced through comparison. Firstly, translation challenges the diffusion model that traces the movement of knowledge as innovation (Latour 1986, 1999). While the diffusion model focuses on travelling knowledge as the product of the action of an authoritative centre transmitting knowledge, translation focuses on travel as the product of what different actors do in and through distributions with spaces and objects, from artefacts and ideas to products and models (Gherardi and Nicolini 2000: 335). That is, translation emphasizes the materialities and spatialities through which knowledge moves and seeks to unpack how they make a difference to learning, whether through hindering, facilitating, amplifying, distorting, contesting, or radically repackaging knowledge. For example, as Chapters 3 and 5 will show, urban activists and policy-makers learn in part by translating knowledge through models and documents that move through multiple spaces, from resource centres and conference meeting rooms to Internet sites and chats over coffee. This serves to remind us that urban learning through translation is not reducible to urbanism per se, but to a diverse host of encounters across multiple space-times.

Secondly, and crucially, this draws attention to the importance of various forms of intermediaries, and promotes two inseparable relational perspectives: the importance of relations between the ‘near’ and ‘far’ in producing knowledge, for instance in the ways in which the Internet or an exchange of activists or policy-makers may make distant actors proximate; and the agentic capacities of materials in producing learning, for example, the differential and contingent role of urban plans, documents, maps, databases or models in producing, shaping and contesting urban learning (Amin and Cohendet 2004). These intermediaries matter; translation is open to the possibility of varying degrees of stability and flux. It is not the case that every encounter must always involve change, nor is it the case that every encounter must always involve the recreation of a periphery in the image of a centre. Consequently, translation positions learning as a constitutive act of world-making, rather than occurring prior to or following from engagement with the world. It positions learning as, to paraphrase Derek Gregory (2000) writing in the context of colonial cultures of travel, an epistemology of displacement in which travel is not a mere supplement to learning, but constitutive of it.

Thirdly, given the focus on intermediaries and distributions, the geographies of translation centre on the idea of practice. The attention to practice collapses traditional dichotomies that separate, for example, knowing from acting, mental from manual, and abstract from concrete, that continue to contour ontologies of learning (Polanyi 1969; Hutchins 1995; Wenger 1998: 48). If we reject the functionalist view of knowledge as static, bound and fixed, and argue instead for a view of knowledge as social, then the practices and materialities through which knowledge is learnt are brought into view. Learning is a process of heterogeneous engineering that demands a relational materialism; for instance, a range of materials, from commodities and shops to public art, parks and infrastructure, make a difference in the production and movement of urban knowledge (Thrift 2007; Graham and Thrift 2007; McFarlane 2009b). The attention to practice reveals the partial and multiple nature of learning. Learning is territorialized through various forms of inclusion and exclusion, meaning that it can be to varying intensities in or out of the ‘proper’ spaces (Law 2000). The notion of ‘situated knowledge’, popularized most notably by Donna Haraway (1991), underlines partiality by focusing on the embodied nature and contingencies of knowledge production. The emphasis on the situatedness of knowledge also reminds us that practice is not simply of the present, i.e. of the immediate encounter in the city, but can also be a practice of individual or collective remembering or imagination oriented towards the past or future. But while situated, this knowledge is also mobile: it is formed not simply in place but through multiple knowledges that run through and call into being various spaces.

Fourthly, and finally, a key form of learning through translation is comparative learning. Urbanism, for example, has always been conceived and known comparatively. I am referring here not just to explicit forms of comparison – comparing city A with city B, for instance – but implicit comparisons that to different extents constitute how claims are made about the city. When we read a study of a particular city, we often find ourselves comparing the arguments, claims and instances with other cities that we ourselves study or know of. The implication is that claims about ‘the city’, or about a particular form of urbanism, are an implicitly comparative claim, because our claims and arguments are always set against other kinds of urban places, experiences, possibilities or imaginaries. And yet we rarely acknowledge this in urban studies. Here, I am thinking of comparison not as an explicit research methodology, but as an implicit mode of thought that informs how we construct knowledge and theory of the urban – in short, comparison as a crucial site in how we learn about what the urban is. Comparison is not just a spatial register of learning cities; there is also a temporal dimension as we learn in relation to our memories of past experiences and cities. Taken together, these four elements of translation – distribution, intermediaries, practice and comparison – identify sites and methods through which learning functions by creating or changing knowledge or perception.

Coordinating Learning

Translation always occurs in relation to multiple sites and objects, meaning that it requires coordination. Anthropologist Edwin Hutchins (1995) showed how distributed knowledge shifts learning from individual decisions or actions to allocations of collective agency, and indeed enables the agency of that collective. This requires, in Hutchins’ terms, seeing learning as ‘softening’ the boundary between individual and environment: ‘Learning is adaptive reorganization in a complex system’ (Hutchins 1995: 288, 289). In these distributions, different phenomena act as organizing devices in learning, what Hutchins called ‘mediating structures’. In cities, these devices might be as varied as language, models, procedures, rules, documents, instruments, traffic lights, market layouts, ideas, discourses, and so on (ibid. 290). They are not, however, necessarily forms of codified knowledge: individuals, such as the leader of an urban social movement, can coordinate different forms of tacit and codified knowledge in the communication of new ideas or strategies to members of the movement (Chapter 2). One example Hutchins used was that of the written artefact. In order to put a written procedure to work, people must coordinate with both the procedure and the environment in which the actions are to be taken. Words, meaning, document and world coordinate with each other over time, producing a kind of ‘situated seeing’ that makes it difficult to clearly demarcate the individual and the outside (ibid. 300), meaning that it can be difficult to locate learning as ‘belonging’ to one or the other.

Hutchins’ discussion of the written artefact reminds us of the performative role of representation within learning, and insists that learning depends upon constantly constructing functional systems that coordinate different domains. Coordination is a process of sociomaterial adaptation. Fischer (2001), for example, showed how an urban planning experiment bridged a range of different interests across space through the assistance of an interactive electronic table – acting as a coordinating tool to align different actors by enabling people to jointly design and edit an urban layout (Amin and Roberts 2008a: 362). Sennett (2008: 127–9) discussed learning as coordination in relation to ‘domain shifts’, referring to a practice or form being translated through multiple sites. For example, urban plans (e.g. of infrastructure) coordinate domains as different as science, engineering, and social policy by instigating a chain of translation between them. Sennett (2008: 201–5) provided an example of domain shift in relation to the seventeenth-century polymath Christopher Wren, who was tasked with designing a plan for London following the Great Fire of 1666. Wren drew upon his experience as a scientist in his urban plans; he drew upon the principle of circulation of blood to imagine streets as arteries and veins of free-flowing traffic, goods and people (see Joyce 2003); he drew upon telescopic imagery to imagine streets as disappearing into the distance of deep space; and he drew upon microscopic imagery to plan for urban density, for instance in the number of churches for people in different parts of the city. Wren was using the medium of the plan to coordinate domains as different as perspectives from science, including the particular ways of seeing that scientific instruments afford, the body, mobility, infrastructure, services, and the hope that a devastated London could be planned anew. These domain shifts – a kind of ‘reformatting’ (Sennett 2008: 210), or ‘learning-by-switching’ (Grabher and Ibhert 2006: 261) – constitute coordinating devices that involve relays of translation, and that can stimulate the imagination in learning new kinds of urbanism.

The list of urban coordination tools is, then, a long one, and includes sites as mundane as travel timetables or maps as well as policy documents, urban census databases, statistical databases of urban labour markets and investment histories, one-off events like policy conferences, study tours, exchanges of activists, and the town-hall meeting. They can function as what Latour (1999) has called ‘centres of calculation’ in that they combine different forms of knowledge to make calculation possible. Coordination devices are not, of course, neutral: there is often a politics to how they operate and are constituted, especially in relation to how different forms of urban knowledge are coordinated, and in the potential of that coordination to facilitate more socially just – or indeed socially unjust – forms of urbanism. As Chapter 4 will argue, a key coordinating device in this respect is the urban forum – a particular type of centralized urban learning environment, explicitly geared towards learning beween different actors, including, for example, the state, donors, non-governmental organizations, local groups, researchers and activists. If such urban forums are often sites of exclusion, managerialism and control, they also embody the historical potential of learning between constituencies to develop not just more democratized urbanisms, but more socially just urbanisms.

Dwelling and Perception

Translation and coordination are concepts that provide an insight into how learning is produced and how it operates, but we have said relatively little so far about how learning is lived. It is in this context that I use the notion of dwelling to consider how learning emerges though relations between individual or group and the city. If dwelling has experienced some theoretical resurgence in geography (e.g. Elden 2001; Obrador-Pons 2003; Harrison 2007; Jacobs and Smith 2008; Kraftl and Adey 2008; McFarlane 2011a), there has been little attempt to connect dwelling to learning specifically. The work of anthropologist Tim Ingold, particularly in his (2000) book The Perception of Environment, is an importance exception here. Ingold (2000) examined learning in relation to skill and dwelling in the premise that people are always part of the process of coming-into-being of the world. From this perspective, a process like urban policy production occurs through attuning perception to sites, documents and events in a process of immersion. This immersion, which Ingold (2000: 154) called a ‘dwelling perspective’ inspired by Heidegger and phenomenology, insists that worlds are made, whether in imagination or ‘on the ground’, ‘within the current of their life activities’. One implication is that meaning, for instance in relation to an urban policy, is ‘immanent in the context of people’s pragmatic engagements’ with the document, environs, discourse or idea; meaning is located in the relational contexts of people’s ‘practical engagement with their lived-in environments’ (Ingold 2000: 154, 168). As Obrador-Pons (2003: 49) wrote of the Heideggerian dasein [‘being-there’], dasein: ‘is always already amidst-the-world. Our involvement, that is, our way of dwelling in the world is mainly practical not cognitive. Being-in-the-world is an everyday skilful, embodied coping or engagement with the environment.’ This means that people learn to perceive policy through a practised ability to notice and to respond to changing contexts: the ways in which we know, learn, coordinate, build and negotiate depend not just on the translation or coordination of knowledge, but on what Ingold called, after psychologist James Gibson, an ‘education of attention’ (Gibson 1979: 254; Ingold 2000: 166–7; Seamon 1993, 1998, 2000).

In this education of attention, learning through dwelling entails shifts in perception, a way of seeing that is haptic – sensed, embodied, practised – and which positions learning as a changing process of perceiving how to use the affordances of documents, objects and situations. What matters most about dwelling, as Heidegger (1971) suggested in relation to housing, is that people must learn to dwell. Perception creates knowledge that is practical because it is based on whatever activity the person is currently engaged in: ‘to perceive an object or event is to perceive what it affords’ (Ingold 2000: 166; emphasis in original). As Lingis (1996: 14, cited in Harrison, 2007: 631) argued through Heidegger: ‘To see something is to see what it is for; we see not shapes but possibilities.’ Or, as Hinchliffe et al. (2005: 648) wrote in relation to how their perception of the landscape shifted in their research in urban wildlife: ‘As Latour (2004) might say, we had started to learn to be affected. We were bodies in process, gaining new ways of looking, a new set of eyes (or newly conditioned retina), a slightly more wary nose, a different sensibility.’ Learning, then, involves not just technical competence, but developing forms of relatedness to objects. The world, argued Ingold (2008: 1797) in a later essay, is not just occupied by already existing things, but inhabited, i.e. ‘woven from the strands of their continual coming-into-being’. We might consider, for instance, how urban infrastructure comes to matter th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Learning Assemblages
• Chapter Two: Assembling the Everyday: Incremental Urbanism and Tactical Learning
• Chapter Three: Learning Social Movements: Tactics, Urbanism and Politics
• Chapter Four: Urban Learning Forums
• Chapter Five: Travelling Policies, Ideological Assemblages
• Chapter Six: A Critical Geography of Urban Learning
• Conclusion
• References
• Index