Urban Assemblages

How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies

Ignacio Farías, Thomas Bender, Ignacio Farías, Thomas Bender

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415486620
• eBook ISBN: 9781135202736
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book takes it as a given that the city is made of multiple partially localized assemblages built of heterogeneous networks, spaces, and practices. The past century of urban studies has focused on various aspects—space, culture, politics, economy—but these too often address each domain and the city itself as a bounded and cohesive entity. The multiple and overlapping enactments that constitute urban life require a commensurate method of analysis that encompasses the human and non-human aspects of cities—from nature to socio-technical networks, to hybrid collectivities, physical artefacts and historical legacies, and the virtual or imagined city.

This book proposes—and its various chapters offer demonstrations—importing into urban studies a body of theories, concepts, and perspectives developed in the field of science and technology studies (STS) and, more specifically, Actor-Network Theory (ANT). The essays examine artefacts, technical systems, architectures, place and eventful spaces, the persistence of history, imaginary and virtual elements of city life, and the politics and ethical challenges of a mode of analysis that incorporates multiple actors as hybrid chains of causation. The chapters are attentive to the multiple scales of both the object of analysis and the analysis itself. The aim is more ambitious than the mere transfer of a fashionable template. The authors embrace ANT critically, as much as a metaphor as a method of analysis, deploying it to think with, to ask new questions, to find the language to achieve more compelling descriptions of city life and of urban transformations. By greatly extending the chain or network of causation, proliferating heterogeneous agents, non-human as well as human, without limit as to their enrolment in urban assemblages, Actor-Network Theory offers a way of addressing the particular complexity and openness characteristic of cities.

By enabling an escape from the reification of the city so common in social theory, ANT's notion of hybrid assemblages offers richer framing of the reality of the city—of urban experience—that is responsive to contingency and complexity. Therefore Urban Assemblages is a pertinent book for students, practitioners and scholars as it aims to shift the parameters of urban studies and contribute a meaningful argument for the urban arena which will dominate the coming decades in government policies.

Part 1

Towards a flat ontology?

1 Gelleable spaces, eventful geographies

The case of Santiago’s experimental music scene

Manuel Tironi

INTRODUCTION: CLUSTERS, FIXITIES AND CULTURAL PRODUCTION

This chapter is about a relatively cohesive group of young individuals – college students, post office clerks, school teachers, unemployed freelancers – who are involved in doing (performing, promoting) avant-garde music in Santiago, Chile. It deals, in brief, with Santiago’s experimental music scene. And while music is at stake, the focus will not zoom in to music itself but to the urban spaces and the knowledge economies this scene performs. Or, more straightforwardly, this study focuses on the stability of the scene (Bijker 1997). The main question is: how can Santiago’s experimental music scene exist and, in addition, be productive and innovative?

The link between stability, urban spaces and knowledge hinges around the concept of cluster, an analytical construct that is at the eye of the storm in this study. So, another way to put it is that this chapter deals with the enactment of a creative cluster in Santiago. But the notion of ‘cluster’ needs to be quotation-marked, because this chapter, rather than utilizing this concept, deconstructs it, so to speak. Indeed, if one follows the conventional scholarship on economic agglomeration and localized economies, the applicability of the concept of ‘cluster’ to Santiago’s experimental music scene is not fully clear. The problem does not reside in the scene’s material precariousness (although critical), nor in its institutional weakness (certainly an obstacle), nor even in its market marginalization (indeed problematic): against all odds, as will be explained later on, Santiago’s experimental music scene behaves as a cluster. The scene is reported to have the key defining features of a cluster, such as value-added creation, economic spillovers and horizontal/vertical linkages.

The problem resides in the scene’s spatiality. Santiago’s experimental music scene defies a critical – perhaps the most important – assumption of cluster theory: the supposition of a bounded spatial ontology. A robust scholarship on the clustering of economic activity indicates that particular spatial orderings (of people, knowledge, firms, institutions, cultures and objects) create the best conditions for value-added and innovation-oriented economic production. These spatial orderings may stretch along regions or be circumscribed to neighborhoods, but they always refer to a definite and ontologically closed territory where the ‘being there’ (Gertler 2003), among people or firms, is enacted: the embeddedness of economic activity in a fixed space, both physical and social, is the condition of possibility for any localized economy, out of which emerges a vast array of Marshall-inspired analytical devices (district, milieu, quarter, cluster, etc.). But Santiago’s experimental music scene, in spite of its cluster-like functionality, does not conform to the expected cluster spatiality, as will be demonstrated in this chapter. Not only does the physical place of the scene not fit conventional cluster-like territories, but neither does the nature of the agents that create – and are shaped by – these spatialities.

Now we return to stability: if Santiago’s experimental music scene lacks the necessary spatiality to reach cluster status and if this spatiality is, in turn, the main source of permanence in cluster creation, then how can the scene reach stability? How can it exist without the proper spatial medium? Here we face a dilemma: should we (a) reject Santiago’s experimental music scene as a cluster case because it does not conform to its conventional socio-spatial syntax, or should we (b) reject the definition of space within conventional cluster theory for being unable to explain emergent and heterogeneous localized economies, such as Santiago’s experimental music scene?

Based on ethnographic data and drawing on science and technology studies, especially on actor-network theorists, I explore the second option. In doing so, I understand spatiality as the process by which both the object/agent and the space in which the former is embedded are mutually enacted. Thus the core challenge regarding Santiago’s experimental music scene is not simply to identify the physical place of the scene, but to reveal how this scene is ordered and organized, assuming that in this ordering and organizing spaces and agents are co-constitutive in a topological field (Law 2000; Law and Mol 1994, 2000). The main task, then, is to contest the univocal urbanism underlying cluster theory. Or, from a more politically charged perspective, the main goal is to question the contours of an urban ontology that reproduces, far too dangerously, the elements of Euro-American, modern urbanism of developed countries.

This chapter won’t tackle the above enterprise in its full complexity, but it will shed some light on one specific question: are there other ways to understand the spatiality of localized economic activities, particularly cultural industries in developing countries? More a descriptive exercise than an explanatory endeavor, this chapter will try to unveil the contradictions at work in the enactment of Santiago’s experimental music scene and to find an analytical device to make sense of the latter without reproducing a circumscribed, linear ontology of the urban.

One could be tempted here – as I indeed am – to let go of the term ‘cluster’: perhaps, in light of its distinctive features, Santiago’s experimental music scene is not a cluster but something else. Maybe we need a different analytical/semantic device to indicate – and define – the complexities of an urban production network in which its agglomeration pattern is more liquid/nomadic than solid/fixed. But one reason keeps me from taking that step: paraphrasing Gieryn (2002: 45), if the rigidities of the ‘cluster’ are to become more friendly for empirical analysis, then perhaps we need to look more closely at the ‘middle range’. More straightforwardly, to keep – for now – the notion of ‘cluster’ as the analytical reference enables us to fully scrutinize the ontological assumptions and empirical limitations of the term and therefore to better understand how exactly the notion of ‘cluster’ needs to be revisited.

The rest of the chapter, then, falls into four sections. The next section discusses the concept of cluster and revises the debate on localized cultural production, highlighting the problematic notion of ‘locality’ mobilized by this debate. I then describe Santiago’s experimental music scene as a cluster, arguing that functionally – its outputs and contours – the scene operates as a de facto cluster. In the fourth section, and based on ethnographic fieldwork, I demonstrate that the spatiality of Santiago’s experimental music scene contests conventional cluster theory. I argue that the nature of the geography of the actors that constitute – and are constituted by it – have to be understood in the light of a heterogeneous and non-linear definition of locality. To this end I outline, drawing on an ANT framework, two controversies that define the complex nature of the scene’s topology. Finally, I propose the concept of ‘gelleable mobile’ as the suited analytical tool for understanding Santiago’s experimental music scene.

LOCALITY, CULTURAL PRODUCTION AND THE CITY

Within the fields of economic geography, urban sociology and innovation studies, it has become a commonplace to situate the features of the local – shared worlds-of-life and co-presence – at the heart of contemporary economic development (Gertler 2003; Howells 2000). After a century of apocalyptic prognoses predicting the disappearance of locality, first by the hands of modernity and then by the homogenizing forces of globalization, locality proved to be alive and playing a key role in the new global economy (Amin and Thrift 2002; Savage et al. 2005; Smith 2000). The global city theory (Friedmann 1986; Sassen 1991; Taylor 2004) was one of the results of such a reviving.

Moreover, the so-called ‘knowledge economy’ put a premium on the ‘production, acquisition, absorption reproduction, and dissemination’ of tacit knowledge (Gertler 2003: 76). Indeed, economic geographers realized that the force of agglomeration remained strong even though transportation and communication costs continued to decline (Storper and Venables 2004). The answer was, they discovered, in the ‘buzz’ – that special something ‘in the air’ – produced by informal, dialogic, temporary and non-articulated interactions. After the seminal insight of Michael Polanyi (‘we can know more than we can tell’, 1966: 4), economic geography and management studies then recognized that the competitive base of firms did not rely solely on codified, formal and explicit knowledge, but also on tacit, experienced and practical knowledge:

The idea is that, in a competitive era in which success depends increasingly upon the ability to produce new or improved products and services, tacit knowledge constitutes the most important basis for innovation-based value creation … when everyone has relatively easy access to explicit/codified knowledge, the creation of unique capabilities and products depends on the production and use of tacit knowledge.

(Gertler 2003: 78–79)

Tacit knowledge, moreover, is intrinsically spatial: it has strong agglomerating effects. The scholarship on the subject has elaborated three interrelated arguments in this respect. First, since tacit knowledge defies codification and is acquired and produced in practice by interacting or doing (Howells 2000; Maskell and Malmberg 1999), it is difficult to exchange over a long distance: tacit knowledge is produced in co-presence. Second, tacit knowledge is spatially sticky, ‘since two parties can only exchange such knowledge effectively if they share a common social context … [and] important elements of this social context are defined locally’ (Gertler 2003: 78). And, third, innovation itself is increasingly supported by socially organized learning (Camagni and Maillat 2006; Gertler 2003; Lundvall and Johnson 1994), that is, on a network of interactions between economic entities, research institutions and public agencies operating locally or regionally (Morgan 1997). Locality – propinquity, interpersonal interactions and bounded spaces – became, in sum, the locus of innovation and economic development in the new global era.

This line of research grew in popularity. Alfred Marshall’s ideas about industrial districts and the industrial atmosphere’ were revived, originating a new breed of concepts – clusters, milieus, quarters, districts – thought to capture the benefits of ‘being there’ for innovation-driven firms and competitive regions. The success of place-specific knowledge-intensive economies such as Silicon Valley reinforced this new localism’ (Amin and Thrift 2002).

Experts on localized economies broadened their research spectrum to include non-conventional economic sectors, such as cultural and creative industries (Castillo and Haarich 2004). Cultural production became a fundamental sector in the knowledge economy for its economic importance (Kong 2000; Pratt 1997; Scott 2000), but also for its symbolic relevance as an image-making catalyst (Evans 2003). Accordingly, a number of scholars contested the Marxist political economy perspective of urban geographers who saw in creative districts mere gentrified enclaves proper to late capitalism’s mode of (urban) accumulation (Deutsche and Ryan 1984; Mele 2000; Podmore 1998; Shaw 2006; Zukin 1989). On the contrary, they understood urban cultural agglomerations as key innovation incubators in the knowledge economy.

A fundamental argument in this direction is that creative and cultural industries, like all knowledge-intensive sectors, have a notable tendency towards clustering (Kloosterman and Stegmeijer 2004; Scott 2000, 2004), because

[i]n the cultural industries, we typically find relatively small companies which are very dependent on extremely specific high-quality knowledge and which, in addition, have to deal with rapidly fluctuating demand [and on] the development of dedicated suppliers and the creation of an ‘atmosphere’.

(Kloosterman and Stegmeijer 2004: 2)

Moreover, it was argued, the locational logic of creative industries is highly sensible to urban features. For example, Florida (2002a, 2002b, 2005) suggests that the ‘creative class’ – the engine of the new creative economy – is attracted to bohemian, authentic and culturally dense places (Clark et al. 2002; Florida 2002b; Lloyd 2004, 2006; Markusen and Schrock 2006; Sabaté and Tironi 2008). Thus economic development thrives in cities gifted with artistic milieus and creative clusters. Indeed, Florida (2005) indicates that the locations of artists and high-tech industries are correlated in cities, while Markusen and King (2003) assert that artistic production expands the region’s export capacity, supports regional industries through its services in marketing, architecture and web design, and helps retain current business and residents by enhancing a place’s ‘lovability’.

The scholarship on localized cultural production, then, has reproduced (without contestation) an ontology of the local as a static, bounded and representational entity. The local appears as the site of informal and primary relations, use values and community; the local is the place of propinquity and parochial, face-to-face interactions. Not surprisingly, field research on creative industries has heavily focused on the (inner-city) ‘neighborhood’ as the primary object of study (see for example Crewe 1996; Crewe and Beaverstock 1998; Hutton 2006; Indergaard 2003; Sabaté and Tironi 2008). Paradoxically, then, artistic milieus, creative clusters and bohemian districts are simultaneously the epitomes of the new knowledge-driven, global-oriented economy and the last resorts of traditional localism.

It is necessary, then, to approach cultural production and its urban clustering recognizing the power of place, but acknowledging, as well, its heterogeneous, networked and liquid composition, especially when analyzing cities – and practices – that do not conform to conventional urban spatialities.

SANTIAGO’S EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC SCENE¹

Santiago’s experimental music scene (EMS) is marked by a paradox: on the one hand, it’s a highly innovative and productive cultural industry. On the other hand, its spatial organizing – including both the space and the actor-networks that create and populate it – does not conform to the conventional definitions of locality utilized by the mainstream research on urban cultural clusters, for, when analyzing the geography of the EMS and the ontological nature of its agents, there is nothing that can be nearly called a ‘cluster’ or a ‘district’. Analytically, there are two possible ways out. One solution is to reject the case for not fitting into the model (the EMS is either not innovative or it has – although it is hard to see – a district-like spatiality). The other solution is to reject the model for its incapacity to explain the case under scrutiny. The evidence gathered during one year of ethnographic field-work supports the second option.

Between January 2007 and March 2008, I conducted ethnographically based research to identify the organizing principles of the EMS. Santiago’s alternative music scene has grown significantly since the 1990s, but it was only in the early 2000s that an innovative and independent sub-scene emerged and expanded beyond Chile’s national borders. In contrast with the ‘mainstream’ alternative scene in Santiago, this sub-scene embraced more avant-garde paths of musical exploration (see Kruse 2003 and Thornton 1996 for the entanglemen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: decentring the object of urban studies
• Part 1 Towards a flat ontology?
• Part 2 A non-human urban ecology
• Part 3 The multiple city
• Postscript: reassembling the city: networks and urban imaginaries
• Index