Learning the City E-Book

Colin McFarlane

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Serie: RGS-IBG Book Series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 472

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

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

Leseprobe

Contents

Series Editors’ Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Learning and Urban Change

Locating Urban Learning

Chapter One Learning Assemblages

Introduction

Translation: Distribution, Practice and Comparison

Coordinating Learning

Dwelling and Perception

Assemblage Space

Conclusion

Chapter Two Assembling the Everyday: Incremental Urbanism and Tactical Learning

Introduction

Incremental Urbanism

Learning the Unknown City: Street Children in Mumbai

Learning, Rhythm, Space

Tactical Learning

Conclusion

Chapter Three Learning Social Movements: Tactics, Urbanism and Politics

Introduction

Knowing Social Movements

Global Slumming

The Housing Assemblage: Materializing Learning

Learning and Representation: Counting the Poor

Entrepreneurial Learning

Conclusion

Chapter Four Urban Learning Forums

Introduction

Uncertain Forums

Dialogic Urban Forums

Translocalism and Translation

Conclusion

Chapter Five Travelling Policies, Ideological Assemblages

Introduction

Translating Policy

Comparative Learning: Translation and Colonial Urbanism

Ideology and Postwar Urban Planning

Neoliberal Urban Learning Assemblages

Ideology and Explanation: Beyond Diffusionist Story-Making

Conclusion

Chapter Six A Critical Geography of Urban Learning

Introduction

The Actual and the Possible

Agency and Critical Learning

Assemblage and the Critical Learning Imaginary

Postcolonial Urban Learning?

Conclusion

Conclusion

References

Index

RGS-IBG Book Series

Published

Domesticating Neo-Liberalism: Spaces of Economic Practice and Social Reproduction in Post-Socialist CitiesAlison Stenning, Adrian Smith, Alena Rochovská and Dariusz Świątek

Swept Up Lives? Re-envisioning the Homeless CityPaul Cloke, Jon May and Sarah Johnsen

Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, AffectsPeter Adey

Millionaire Migrants: Trans-Pacific Life LinesDavid Ley

State, Science and the Skies: Governmentalities of the British AtmosphereMark Whitehead

Complex Locations: Women’s geographical work in the UK 1850–1970Avril Maddrell

Value Chain Struggles: Institutions and Governance in the Plantation Districts of South IndiaJeff Neilson and Bill Pritchard

Queer Visibilities: Space, Identity and Interaction in Cape TownAndrew Tucker

Arsenic Pollution: A Global SynthesisPeter Ravenscroft, Hugh Brammer and Keith Richards

Resistance, Space and Political Identities: The Making of Counter-Global NetworksDavid Featherstone

Mental Health and Social Space: Towards Inclusionary Geographies?Hester Parr

Climate and Society in Colonial Mexico: A Study in VulnerabilityGeorgina H. Endfield

Geochemical Sediments and LandscapesEdited by David J. Nash and Sue J. McLaren

Driving Spaces: A Cultural-Historical Geography of England’s M1 MotorwayPeter Merriman

Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics and Urban PolicyMustafa Dikeç

Geomorphology of Upland Peat: Erosion, Form and Landscape ChangeMartin Evans and Jeff Warburton

Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban GovernmentalitiesStephen Legg

People/States/TerritoriesRhys Jones

Publics and the CityKurt Iveson

After the Three Italies: Wealth, Inequality and Industrial ChangeMick Dunford and Lidia Greco

Putting Workfare in PlacePeter Sunley, Ron Martin and Corinne Nativel

Domicile and DiasporaAlison Blunt

Geographies and MoralitiesEdited by Roger Lee and David M. Smith

Military GeographiesRachel Woodward

A New Deal for Transport?Edited by Iain Docherty and Jon Shaw

Geographies of British ModernityEdited by David Gilbert, David Matless and Brian Short

Lost Geographies of PowerJohn Allen

Globalizing South ChinaCarolyn L. Cartier

Geomorphological Processes and Landscape Change: Britain in the Last 1000 YearsEdited by David L. Higgitt and E. Mark Lee

Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal AssemblageColin McFarlane

Forthcoming

Globalizing Responsibility: The Political Rationalities of Ethical ConsumptionClive Barnett, Paul Cloke, Nick Clarke & Alice Malpass

Spatial Politics: Essays for Doreen MasseyEdited by David Featherstone and Joe Painter

The Improvised State: Sovereignty, Performance and Agency in Dayton BosniaAlex Jeffrey

In the Nature of Landscape: Cultural Geography on the Norfolk BroadsDavid Matless

Working Memories – Gender and Migration in Post-war Britain

Linda McDowell

Fashioning Globalization: New Zealand Design, Working Women and the ‘New Economy’Maureen Molloy and Wendy Larner

Dunes: Dynamics, Morphology and Geological HistoryAndrew Warren

This edition first published 2011© Colin McFarlane 2011

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

Registered OfficeJohn Wiley & Sons, Ltd., The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

Editorial Offices350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UKThe Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell.

The right of Colin McFarlane to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this book.

PB: 9781405192811HB: 9781405192828

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDF 9781444343403; Wiley Online Library 9781444343434; ePub 9781444343410; mobi 9781444343427

For Rachael and Keir

Series Editors’ Preface

The RGS-IBG Book Series only publishes work of the highest international standing. Its emphasis is on distinctive new developments in human and physical geography, although it is also open to contributions from cognate disciplines whose interests overlap with those of geographers. The Series places strong emphasis on theoretically-informed and empirically-strong texts. Reflecting the vibrant and diverse theoretical and empirical agendas that characterize the contemporary discipline, contributions are expected to inform, challenge and stimulate the reader. Overall, the RGS-IBG Book Series seeks to promote scholarly publications that leave an intellectual mark and change the way readers think about particular issues, methods or theories.

For details on how to submit a proposal please visit:

www.rgsbookseries.com

Neil CoeUniversity of Manchester, UK

Joanna BullardLoughborough University, UK

RGS-IBG Book Series Editors

Acknowledgements

The idea for this book has been bubbling away for a long time, but it took me a while to figure out how I wanted the book to take shape and how to delineate its scope and contribution. There are a great many people to thank for helping with this, and the list goes well beyond the scope of these acknowledgements. The areas of my research that have made their way into the final version were gathered through various stages, and through two in particular: while a postdoctoral fellow in geography at the Open University between 2004 and 2006, which included an extended field-trip to Mumbai, and during my PhD in geography at Durham University between 2000 and 2004. All of the writing was done following my return to geography at Durham as a lecturer in 2006. I am grateful to both institutions for the support they have offered, and to all those who dedicated time and helped me during fieldwork, particularly in Mumbai, and especially activists from the Federation of Tenants Association, the Mumbai Alliance, and Slum/Shack Dwellers International.

The book manuscript itself has benefited immensely from the critical and generous readings of two anonymous readers, and the insightful comments of Kevin Ward. Kevin has been an excellent editor: always supportive and helpful in his advice, insightful, and patient. Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria also read an entire draft and offered typically incisive and supportive comments. Throughout the process of writing, I have been very fortunate to benefit from an enabling research culture of debate and experimentation at Durham. The chats, advice and support of several friends in the department have aided the production of this book immensely, and here I am particularly grateful to Ben Anderson, Angharad Closs Stephens and Gordon MacLeod. Other friends at Durham have been extremely helpful in offering advice and support during the process, especially: Ash Amin, Harriet Bulkeley, Rachel Colls, Mike Crang, Stuart Elden, Paul Harrison, Adam Holden, Kathrin Hörschelmann, Cheryl McEwan, Joe Painter, Marcus Power and Jonathan Rigg.

Outside Durham, I would like to acknowledge advice, support, helpful discussion and comments on various bits and pieces of writing in the book from a variety of people, especially Alex Jeffrey, Alex Vasudevan, Tariq Jazeel, Steve Graham, Emma Mawdsley, Steve Legg, Dave Featherstone, Mustafa Dikeç and Jenny Robinson. I would like to acknowledge the support and conversations that helped the production of the book during a fellowship in the summer of 2009 with Berlin’s Irmgard Coninx Foundation, an organization with a rare commitment to genuinely international and interdisciplinary academic inquiry and debate. I am also grateful to Jacqueline Scott at Wiley-Blackwell for her gentle reminders on deadlines, and for her patience.

The biggest thank you is for Rachael, who probably found the last stages of the writing of this book more challenging than me! She has been, as ever, patient and supportive. We have had many conversations about the book’s various twists and turns, often while walking through the park, from which I have benefited more than she realizes. Keir in his own unique way helped me keep the book in perspective as the writing came to a finish, and in our almost nightly conversations over the (fantastic!) ‘City I Love’ poems, he helped me think about how cities are learnt.

Introduction

Learning is often neglected in work on urban politics and everyday life, marginalized as background noise to urban change and the urban experience. In this book, I aim to conceptualize learning as an important political and practical domain through which the city is assembled, lived and contested, and as a critical opportunity to develop a progressive urbanism. In doing so, I address five key interrelated questions in relation to learning the city. How might learning be conceptualized? How does learning take place on an everyday basis? How does learning occur translocally? How do different environments facilitate or inhibit learning? And how might we develop a critical geography of learning? I use the concept of assemblage as a spatial grammar of urban learning. Assemblage is used to emphasize the labour through which knowledge, resources, materials and histories become aligned and contested: it connotes the processual, generative and practice-based nature of urban learning, as well as its unequal, contested and potentially transformative character. I develop a conceptualization of ‘urban learning assemblages’ in order to understand the experience and contestation of learning in different contexts: residents of informal settlements, activists working on urban informality, urban forums involving state and civil society, and urban planners and policy-makers. I argue that attending to urban learning assemblages reveals important conceptual resources and empirical domains through which urbanism is produced, lived and contested.

Learning is, as Tim Ingold (2000: 155) has described it, a kind of ‘wayfinding’. This is not the clichéd populist notion of learning as ‘journey’, but instead learning as a process in which people ‘ “feel their way” through a world that is itself in motion, continually coming into being through the combined action of human and nonhuman agencies’ (Ingold 2000: 155). Here, knowing is an uncertain, embodied process that emerges inescapably through engagement with the world around us, as Ian Borden et al. (2001: 9) put it in relation to the city: ‘Knowing the city is ultimately a project of becoming, of unfolding events and struggles in time as well as in space.’ If this points towards a phenomenology of urban learning, a conception of learning as an emergent property of dwelling itself, Heidegger (1971) was certainly attuned to a sense of learning as the ‘plight’ of dwelling, as he wrote in Building Dwelling Thinking: ‘The real dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell.’ But Borden et al.’s statement also emphasizes knowing as struggle in time and space, and in doing so cautions against any conception that restricts learning to localized and individual ‘truth’ finding. If, as Richard Sennett (2008: 289) has argued in The Craftsmen, ‘people need to practise their relations with one another, learn the skills of anticipation and revision in order to improve these relations’, in cities that practice often takes the form of conflict and struggle, and occurs in contexts of radical inequality.

Critical urbanists like Henri Lefebvre, for example, would have likely had little patience with an account of urban learning that sought no more than thick description of how people learn to interact with one another. He was more likely to ask how urban ideologies shape and limit the prospects of urban learning and, as he now so influentially put it, of a socially just ‘rights to the city’: ‘Could urban life recover and strengthen its capacities of integration and participation of the city, which are almost entirely lost, and which cannot be stimulated either by authoritarian means or by administrative prescription, or by the intervention of specialists?’ (cited in Kofman and Lebas 1996: 146; emphasis in original). There is an implicit message for critical urbanists in Lefebvre’s question: that if we are interested in urban justice, then we cannot simply ask what specialist and expertise knowledge is and what it does, nor simply how learning takes place – we need alongside this to ask constantly who we learn from and with; that is, we need to attend to where critical urban knowledge comes from and how it is learnt. My focus in the book is on both the nature of learning the city and on developing a critical geography of urban learning. In doing so, one of my central concerns is with translocal learning: learning that is place-focused but not restricted to that place. Translocal learning involves an ongoing labour in forging and developing connections between different sources, routes and actors. My interest in translocal learning emerges in part from my desire to show how urban learning is not simply spatially bounded in local places, but is instead relationally produced, and due to the increasingly important role that translocal practices and connections play in the production of different forms of urban knowledge, notwithstanding the existence and generative influence of translocal connections in the past (Featherstone 2008; McCann and Ward 2011).

But what is learning? And how should it be differentiated from the notion of knowledge? While knowledge and learning are inextricably related processes, the focus of the book is more on learning than on knowledge. Knowledge is the sense that people make of information, which is anchored in practices, beliefs and discourses (Nonaka et al. 2000). This is not to subscribe to the traditional understanding of knowledge as something that people ‘possess’. Rather, knowledge is located in space and time and situated in particular contexts; it is mediated through language, technology, collaboration and control; and is constructed, provisional, and constantly developing (Amin and Cohendet 2004: 30). Most importantly, if knowledge is the sense that people make of information, that ‘sense’ is a practice that is distributed through relations between people, objects and environment, and is not simply the property of individuals or groups alone (ibid.). In debates in organizational learning, knowledge has traditionally been separated out into the ‘tacit’, i.e. a pre-cognitive competence to act that is ‘deeply rooted in action, procedures, routines, commitment, ideals, values and emotions’ (Nonaka et al. 2000: 7; Polanyi 1966; Gherardi and Nicolini 2000), conceived as tied to place and difficult to move around – and the codified or explicit, i.e. that which can be ‘expressed in formal and systematic language and shared in the form of data, scientific formulae, specifications, manuals and such like’ (Nonaka et al. 2000: 7). While the tacit-codified dualism has its heuristic merit, in practice, knowledge, as a distributed social practice cannot, as Amin and Cohendet (2004: 84) put it in relation to organizational knowledge, ‘be easily separated into bundles of tacit or codified knowledge or bundles of rational versus experiential knowledge’.

But what is the process of making, contesting and reproducing knowledge? This is where learning emerges. Learning is a name for the specific processes, practices and interactions through which knowledge is created, contested and transformed, and for how perception emerges and changes. The traditional conception of learning would imply a cognitive formal process of training or skill acquisition as a linear addition of knowledge, such as in learning a musical instrument or a scientific technique. In contrast, I conceive learning as a distributed assemblage of people, materials and space that is often neither formal nor simply individual. For example, people come to learn the local urban transport system, or where to buy the best fresh fruit in urban markets, or which parts of the city are safe or dangerous at particular times of day and night, not through formal training but through gradually developing a sense of how things work and change. Rather than being confined to the individual, learning as a process is distributed through relations between people–materials–environment. For example, urban transport is learnt through developing an understanding of timetables and routines, by the experience of riding on the bus or train in terms of the quality of materials or the numbers and behaviour of fellow passengers, by negotiating the contingencies of everyday interaction, and through shared stories and experiences of the nature and rhythm of transport networks. Learning here can be incremental or radical, and is as much about developing perceptions through engagement in the city as it is about creating knowledge.

Learning and Urban Change

If urban learning has been a neglected topic, it would be wrong, of course, to suggest that it has been entirely ignored in accounts of urban change. Learning has been discussed in debates on urban economies and, increasingly, in debates around travelling urban models or policies (e.g. UNDP 2003; Campbell 2008; McCann and Ward 2010, 2011; Peck and Theodore 2010). There has been a great deal of debate in economic geography, for example, about ‘learning regions’, ‘regional innovation’, ‘institutional thickness’, innovative ‘buzz’, skills development, the possibilities of knowledge mobility, and on the role of ‘clusters’, ‘quarters’, ‘creative economies’ and tacit knowledge (e.g. Glaeser 1999; Bunnell and Coe 2005; Florida 2002, 2005; Gertler and Wolfe 2002; Gertler 2003, 2004; Amin and Cohendet 2004; Cumbers and MacKinnon 2004, 2006; Scott 2006; Cumbers et al. 2008; MacKinnon 2008; Storper and Scott 2009). This work has critically engaged with, for example, the efforts of states and supranational bodies to identify and develop specialist clusters within cities and regions, often taking the form of research and development and venture capital initiatives ‘which attempt to inculcate a culture of innovation and learning’ and seek to ‘build and reinforce a sense of cluster identity amongst constituent firms and organisations’ (Cumbers and MacKinnon 2004: 959). There is a great deal of urban policy debate around, for instance, city cluster learning such as Agenda 21, or learning network formations from UN Habitat to Infocity.

As states and supranational institutions have increasingly focused on learning as central to competitive advantage within global economies, a key debate in relation to urban clusters has been around how to create linkages and networks through clustering in ways that facilitate learning through exchange and interaction. Here, proponents have advocated the importance of local links, face-to-face exchanges and ‘communities of practice’ (Wenger 1998; Contu and Willmott 2000; Harris and Shelswell 2005) for creating economically valuable tacit knowledge, while critics have questioned the extent to which knowledge creation is or should be ‘local’ rather than distanciated, and emphasize the role of external connections to and through particular organizations, the Internet, video-conferencing, exchanges across space through visits and conferences, and labour mobility (Amin and Cohendet, 2004). These debates, and their often close synergies with debates around organizational learning (e.g. Grabher 1993, 2004; Wenger 1998; Gherardi and Nicolini 2000; Nonaka et al. 2000; Amin and Cohendet, 2004), have informed the conception of learning put to work in the book. But as important as these debates have been, they have tended – not surprisingly given their economic focus – to restrict urban learning to questions of economic innovation, urban and regional competitiveness, and organizational learning, and have offered less in terms of critical engagement with power inequalities and exclusion, or on how learning operates as a coping mechanism or as a tactic of resistance.

The constitutive role of learning in processes of urban change and politics has been identified in debates on urban policy transfer, from Anthony Sutcliffe’s (1981) Towards the Planned City, Ian Masser and Richard Williams’s collection (1986) Learning from Other Countries: The Cross-National Dimension in Urban Policy-Making, and Anthony King’s (e.g. 2004) surveys of colonial urbanism, to Joe Nasr and Mercedes Volait’s (2003) collection Urbanism: Imported or Exported? and McCann and Ward’s (2011) collection, Mobile Urbanism. Emerging work on what Eugene McCann calls ‘urban policy mobilities’ (e.g. McCann 2008; McCann and Ward 2010) is one important example here. This disparate work has considered, for instance, how certain cities learn from particular policy discourses, such as discourses of ‘knowledge cities’, ‘creative cities’, or neoliberal, revanchist and punitive ideologies of urban development (e.g. Florida 2002, 2005; Peck 2005, 2006; Ward 2006; Hollands 2008; Wacquant 2008; McCann and Ward 2010; Bunnell and Das 2010; Peck and Theodore 2010). If travelling urbanism is a far from new phenomenon, urbanism is none the less increasingly assembled through a variety of sites, people, objects and processes: politicians, policy professionals, consultants, activists, publications and reports, the media, websites, blogs, contacts, conferences, peer exchanges, and so on. But despite this surge in critical literature on travelling urban knowledge and policy learning, there has been little attempt to consider how learning itself might be conceptualized.

More broadly, debates about the role of learning have a long history, particularly in relation to economic development, whether Schumpeter’s (1934) Theory of Economic Development, Hayek’s (1945) paper The use of knowledge in society, Machlup’s (1962) Production and Distribution of Knowledge, or contemporary debates on the ‘knowledge economy’ or the World Bank-led ‘knowledge for development’ initiatives (e.g. Leadbeater 2000; King and McGrath 2004; Leydesdorff 2006; McFarlane 2006a; Johnson and Wilson 2009). There is also, of course, a similarly complex history of debates on the nature, production, meaning and value of learning, with disparate influences from theories of epistemology (Polanyi 1966, 1969; Greco and Sosa 1999), genealogies of historical knowledge (Foucault 1980), science studies (Latour 1999; Callon et al. 2009), organizational studies (Wenger, 1998; Amin and Cohendet 2004), cognitive anthropology (Hutchins 1995; Ingold 2000), and critical education and pedagogy (Freire 1970; Fejes and Nicoll 2008). If these debates are varied and distinct, all of them contain one central claim or assumption about learning: that learning is a process of potential transformation. Learning, even where it is explicitly described as uncertain – as in, for instance, strands of organizational theory that emphasize creativity and invention – refers to a process involving 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, but is central to political strategies that seek to consolidate, challenge, alter and name new worlds.

Locating Urban Learning

My approach in the book is to offer a conception of learning and then to bring that conception to urbanism. My starting point is not to attempt to identify what it is about urbanism that involves learning; instead, my approach has been to begin with a conception of what learning is before we can locate it in the city. There are three rationales for this approach. Firstly, and pragmatically, it reflects my own intellectual biography – I first became interested in conceptualizing learning, and then interested in how that conception of learning might illuminate our understanding of urbanism. Secondly, the main alternative to my approach of identifying urban learning by working from a conceptual toolkit of what learning itself involves, would have been to attempt to identify urban learning by working from particular encounters people have with urban forms and processes. While this approach would have been entirely plausible, there is a risk here of operating under the pretence that we can pinpoint how we learn the city through specific urban causal moments, that is, to reduce the ways in which urbanism is learnt to urban encounters, forms and processes. As different groups of people – urban residents, activists or policy-makers for instance – learn cities, that learning is not only a product of the encounter with the city itself. It is not simply a product of, say, specific encounters with urban housing materials, or of street layouts and architecture, or of policy domains defined by, say, urban statistics on healthcare in different parts of the city. Rather, the learning that emerges is a combination of two broad constituent parts: the changing nature of urbanism itself, and individual and group experiences, perceptions, concerns, interests, agendas, memories, hopes, fears, and so on. Urban learning is no more dictated purely by the city itself any more than it is dictated purely by individual experiences and perceptions. Learning emerges through a relational co-constitution of city and individual, where the individual’s experiences, perceptions, memories, agendas and ways of inhabiting the city cannot be read as urban experiences alone.

Another way of putting this is to say that urban learning is not exhausted by the specificity of particular encounters with urban form or process, but is instead embedded in the current of people’s lifeworlds and is shaped relationally. I am not suggesting that it would be wrong to take the approach of identifying urban learning from specific urban forms, processes and encounters in the lives of particular people, and I am sure that it is possible to embark on such a project without losing sight of the relational nature of learning, but given the risks in pursuing this, my approach has been to develop a theory of learning itself and to then consider how it takes place and functions in various urban domains. Following this, the third reason for beginning with a general theory of learning and then using it to understand particular forms of urbanism is that the learning of cities does not have any pre-given geography. That is, urban learning does not necessarily take place ‘at large’ in the city, for example in the street or neighbourhood or public space – although as I will argue, it does take place in all of these places – but potentially in any number of places. For example, it may be that a key transformatory moment in how a particular person learns a city, urban form or process occurs not in the spaces of the city itself but through a conversation with a friend on a car journey, or on a rural holiday, or through a website or reading a book, or in a conference venue. Urban policy-makers, for instance, might learn the city in large part through databases and spreadsheets, past policy documents or conversations with policy-makers at conferences well away from the city they work in. Given that we cannot know the particular sites and sources of urban learning, given that we cannot identify the geography of urban learning in advance and go out and research it, my approach has been first to understand learning itself, and then to consider how it emerges and operates through particular urbanisms – for example, within informal settlements or in the work of urban policy-making – whilst recognizing that these are only particular sociospatial instances of urban learning for the individuals and groups in question.

I begin, then, with a theory of learning itself, and then consider how that theory operates in relational constitution with and through the city. This means, to take two examples, that while the nature of the ‘tactics’ I discuss in the book (Chapters 2 and 3), or the form of the issues explored through ‘forums’ (Chapter 4), may be specific to urban spaces, processes and concerns, it is equally plausible that the conception of learning developed here might be applicable to non-urban contexts. If specific forms of learning discussed in the book are particular to urbanism – for example, to the sociomateriality of informal settlements – the theory of learning that I develop could potentially be used to illuminate not just urban production, contestation and possibility, but other domains outside of urbanism (such as the state or the village). That said, cities – as spaces of encounter and rapid change, of concentrations of political, economic and cultural resources, and of often confusing illegibility – demand to be learnt and learnt again by different people and often for very different reasons, from coping mechanisms and personal advancement to policy-making and questions of contestation and justice.

In what sense does the city demand learning? What distinguishes cities is their density, changeability and complexity. They can be places of anchoring, security, ease and sociality, as much as equality, opportunity, struggle, conflict, exploitation and hardship. They are characterized increasingly by profound density – for instance in growing informal settlements, where one in three urbanites now live (Davis 2006) – as well as spatial extension in the form of sprawl or corridors of communication and economy. They can be extraordinarily diverse in their spatial experience, from city centres that transform between day and night, to patchworks of industrial and service areas, shopping centres, abandoned spaces, parks, and often radically varied architecture. They change with rhythms of commuters and tourists, schools and nightlife, and are often the locus of new politics, lifestyles, subcultures, imaginaries, and technologies. They are constituted, as David Harvey (1997: 229) has put it, by ‘conflictual heterogeneous processes which are producing spatio-temporalities as well as producing things, structures and permanencies in ways which constrain the nature of the social process’. The diverse and changing nature of the urban experience, the transformatory nature of many cities themselves, and the changing concerns, agendas and lives of those of us who live urban lives, means that our perception and knowledge of the city, whether in the shape of our city of residence or in relation to urbanism more generally, is altered over time, and that we inevitably learn and relearn the city, sometimes incrementally and sometimes radically.

This is not to say that people are constantly and actively attempting to formally learn the city in an explicit way – although sometimes this is what happens, for instance as we attempt to understand a new neighbourhood that we might be moving to or as we move through cities with a map, underground timetable or architectural guidebook – as if a fear of uncertainty drives people into a desire to have to know how the city is changing. This would be to misunderstand learning as a purely cognitive process of acquiring information in a linear way, when in practice it is often an implicit experiential process of incrementally changing how we inhabit or perceive urban space that occurs without our realizing it. Nor is it to say that everyone learns the city in the same kind of way or to the same sort of extent. But whether you are a resident, a visitor, a policy-maker or an activist, the changing nature of the city, of how it is experienced over time and space, and of the particular contexts, agendas and interests of different individuals and groups, inevitably alters knowledge and perception of it. This book is about some of the ways in which that takes place.

The book consists of six substantive chapters followed by a conclusion. In Chapter 1, I develop a conception of ‘urban learning assemblages’ that serves the rest of the book. Firstly, I conceptualize learning based on three closely interrelated processes: translation, coordination and dwelling. Translation refers to the relational and comparative distributions through which learning is produced as a sociomaterial epistemology of displacement and change; coordination refers to the construction of functional systems that enable learning as a means of coping with complexity, facilitating adaptation and organizing different domains of knowledge; and dwelling refers to the education of attention through which learning operates as a way of seeing and inhabiting the world. Each step in the argument focuses on the importance of appreciating learning as a distributed process that foregrounds materiality and spatial relationality. Secondly, I use assemblage to develop a spatial grammar of learning focused on relations of history and potential, on the making of spaces of learning through practice, and to highlight how spaces of learning are structured through unequal relations of knowledge, power and resource.

In Chapter 2, I examine how the city is learnt on an everyday basis, and consider practices as different as housing construction and maintenance within informal settlements and the lives of street children in Mumbai, to skateboarding, different forms of walking, and making a living. I offer two interrelated conceptualizations of how learning features in the production and contestation of everyday urban life: incremental urbanism and tactical learning. Incremental learning, as laborious and historical accretion of knowledge rather than linear addition, is central to learning through dwelling, and is common to a whole range of urban processes and forms. For example, everyday learning might involve shifts in the perception of what urban materials do as they are assembled through different relations and interactions. In this sense, ‘improvisation’ emerges not necessarily as a sudden change, but as a creative recasting of relations that results from everyday dwelling. If incremental learning connotes a gradual temporality of urban change, the chapter goes on to reflect upon the multiple spatiotemporal rhythms – from walking to longer-term temporalities like migration – that are negotiated in part through urban learning. The final part of the chapter focuses on tactical learning. While tactical learning can emerge from modes of urban dwelling such as incrementalism, it can also emerge through forms of resistance that stand apart from everyday dwelling. As we shall see in the example of the Federations of Tenants Association, based in Mumbai, tactical learning can originate in learning through coordination and translation, and can radically open the possibilities of urban dwelling. The chapter is based on fieldwork conducted in Mumbai between 2005 and 2006 and in São Paulo in 2008 on the production and maintenance of informal settlements.

In Chapter 3, I argue that in contrast to a tendency in debates on social movements to background processes of learning, learning is central to how activists in urban social movements develop forms of organization and political strategy. I examine the politics of urban learning in the work of Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI), especially in relation to its Indian chapter, known as the Alliance, and argue, firstly, that central to SDI’s work is a sociomaterial practice of learning in groups; secondly, that the nature of urban learning in SDI is key to the formation of political organization; and, thirdly, that this urban learning is critical to the construction of a particular political subjectivity of social change. I describe how urban learning assemblages are formed and function in SDI through the example of tactical learning in model house construction. I go on to examine the learning of political organization in SDI through, in particular, its tactic of enumeration, or self-census, of informal settlements. The chapter uses the notion of assemblage as an orientation towards the agency of materials – including self-census maps, charts, enumeration documents and model house materials – in the learning practices of SDI’s work, and shows the importance of documentary representations within urban learning assemblages as they travel through and give shape to multiple sites and practices. I end the chapter with a critical discussion of how SDI’s learning practices around house construction and enumeration relate to and construct particular political subjectivities and conceptions of social change. If Chapter 2 focuses more on dwelling than on the translation and coordination elements of urban learning assemblages, this chapter demonstrates the importance of translation and coordination.

The discussion of SDI draws on fieldwork conducted on SDI, especially on the Alliance, during several research visits to Mumbai, particularly two trips between October 2001 and March 2002 (during my PhD research), and November 2005 and June 2006. The data used in the chapter emerges from repeated interviews and meetings with over 30 members of the Alliance and other members of the SDI movement either based in or passing through cities in India, the UK, Brazil and Germany, as well as analysis of grey literature and observations of their work. SDI’s incredibly voluminous amounts of literature and online resources must, of course, be read with a degree of caution. Like many social movements, SDI’s writings are very much part of its political project of producing an image of itself as innovative, skilled, unique, and devoid of unequal relations of power, resource and knowledge, and as such should be approached with a critical eye.

In Chapter 4, I examine the sorts of environments that might give rise to progressive forms of urban learning by developing the idea of urban learning forums. The forum is a particular type of urban learning assemblage in that it signals the production of a centralized and organized environment specifically geared towards learning between different actors, including the state, donors, non-governmental organizations, local groups, researchers and activists. The forum is an example of learning through coordination in that it centralizes and translates multiple different forms of knowledge from different people and groups. I pick up on some high-profile examples of learning in participatory urban forums such as those in Brazil, and examine the role of different actors in these processes. The chapter argues that the success of participatory urban learning forums depends upon: firstly, and drawing on Callon et al.’s (2009) study of science and technology controversies, the intensity, openness and quality of these forums; secondly, the commitment of state authorities to the participation of the marginalized and the poor and to ceding decision-making powers to the forum; and thirdly, pressure from civil society. In the second part of the chapter, I consider whether urban learning forums that take place in the context of translocal urban learning assemblages across the global North–South divide face particular challenges that accompany that very global categorization. I develop this argument through the example of an exchange between the Indian Alliance previously discussed in Chapter 3, and a London-based homeless movement called Groundswell. As this and other examples show, urban learning forums that cut across the global North–South divide raise the spectre of this form of categorization. Categories like North and South, First and Third Worlds, developed and developing, can function to militate against the prospect of translocal urban learning forums.

While the obstacle to the success of translocal urban learning in this example is a particular kind of perception of the global North–South divide, the more general point at stake here is that the success of translocal urban learning experiments depends upon a commitment to learning through translation – i.e. through difference rather than in spite of it – rather than simply through an attempt to learn through cities which appear to be ‘similar’. The research for this discussion was conducted between 2001 and 2002 in the UK, both through interviewing activists at Groundswell in its networks and attending its exchanges, and through SDI meetings in the UK, especially those organized through the SDI-donor Homeless International based in Coventry, and follow-up interviews with SDI activists in Mumbai and with SDI supporters in London.

Chapter 5 attempts to build upon a recent upsurge of interest in travelling forms of urban policy and planning by considering how ideology shapes the nature of policy and planning learning. I aim to contribute to this literature in two main ways. Firstly, by offering a critical framework for conceptualizing urban policy mobilities, I highlight four key issues: firstly, the power at work in policy learning, i.e. the forms of power that promote, frame or structure particular kinds of learning; secondly, the object of learning, i.e. the epistemic problem-spaces that the mobility of policy and planning creates and addresses; thirdly, the form of learning, i.e. the organizational nature of learning; and fourthly, the imaginary at work in learning, i.e. the image of urban reassembling that learning seeks to accomplish. The aim of this framework is to examine critically the ideologies and inequities of mobile policy learning, as well as the role of the specific agents that constitute these urban learning assemblages.

Secondly, in developing this framework, I aim to unsettle the presentism of urban policy mobility scholarship. If the extent and speed of policy mobility has increased – driven by the growing amount of travel, conferences, study tours, policy networks, and use of the Internet – urban policy mobility is, of course, far from new. Planners, architects, policy-makers and consultants have always sought to learn from elsewhere in their attempts to assemble the city, so much so that the city is already a relational product of different agendas and strategies from other cities. In order to demonstrate different contexts, logics, and forms of mobile urbanism, I examine quite specific urban learning assemblages from three particular periods.

Firstly, I discuss learning as translation in the example of colonial urban learning. Focusing on urban planning in colonial Bombay (now Mumbai), I argue that comparison – as a central form of learning as translation (Chapter 1) – was central to how urban planners learnt the city, by exploring how urban planners formulated solutions for Bombay’s sanitation crisis through comparative learning with British cities. Secondly, I discuss mobile urban planning initiatives in the 1950s driven by Cold War ideologies of modernism and socialist realism, taking the example of the influential architect Constantinos Doxiadis and his plans for Baghdad, as well as deeply ideological planning initiatives for East Berlin during the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Doxiadis and his visual plans became a central actor in a translocal learning assemblage that combined scientific modernist planning with a capitalist vision of the city. In contrast, socialist realism explicitly opposed modernist planning, and in East Berlin sought to propagate a socialist vision of the city that combined local architectural traditions with Soviet monumentalism. As with colonial Bombay, these are sociomaterial conceptions of the city that sought to reassemble urbanism through an ideologically structured form of learning.

Thirdly, I consider the nature and implications of neoliberal ideology both for the kinds of urban policy that become mobile, and for ways in which learning is framed, translated and contested. I draw upon a variety of examples here that illustrate how ideologies of urban ‘development’, urban ‘recovery’, and of the ‘creative’ or ‘smart’ city, structure contemporary urban policy learning assemblages. Particular agents become important in framing these neoliberal forms of mobile urban policy, including institutions like the World Bank or the Manhattan Institute, or influential individual consultants like Richard Florida and William Bratton. In the three different periods that the chapter examines, I reveal how ideology can shape the nature of urban learning, and the very range of urbanisms examined is an attempt to show that the critical framework of reassembling policy urbanism that the chapter deploys is one that can be usefully deployed to grasp how learning from elsewhere plays an important role in how cities are reassembled. The research for this chapter took the form of archival research in Mumbai in 2006, during which I collected material on the development of sanitation debates and infrastructure in mid-nineteenth century Bombay as part of a larger research project on sanitation in Mumbai. This was a particularly important period for the roll-out of colonial sanitation infrastructures and debates, and I drew principally upon municipal corporation reports and newspaper coverage from the time.

Chapter 6 develops a critical geography of urban learning. It does so by first outlining a critical praxis of evaluating existing dominant forms of urban knowledge and learning (incorporating the framework developed in Chapter 5), democratizing the sorts of knowledges and groups that constitute how dominant urban knowledges are learnt (incorporating the discussion of urban learning forums in Chapter 4), and proposing alternative, more socially just forms of urban learning through this democratized learning. The chapter then seeks to deepen and extend this schema of evaluate–democratize–propose by, firstly, examining what the concept of assemblage offers critical urban learning and, secondly, considering how a critical geography of urban learning might respond to the translocal challenge of a postcolonial urban learning project. Assemblage offers three orientations to a critical geography of urban learning: firstly, a descriptive focus on learning as produced through relations of history and potential, or the actual and the possible; secondly, a reconsideration of the agency of learning, particularly in relation to distribution and critique; and thirdly, a particular critical imaginary through the register of cosmopolitan composition. Responding to the postcolonial challenge demands careful consideration of who is involved in the production of critical geographies of urban learning – the ‘democratize’ imperative of the evaluate–democratize–propose strategy. Here, I consider the important role of comparison in translocal urban learning first discussed in Chapter 1 and then in Chapters 4 and 5, and argue for a conception of comparison as a mode of thought produced through an ethico-politics of multiple theory cultures.

In examining these different forms and contexts of urban learning in the book, I am not suggesting that there are forms of learning that are somehow more ‘authentic’ or ‘real’. I do not argue, for instance, that the everyday learning examined in Chapter 2, or the learning of activists in SDI in Chapter 3, is more of an accurate reflection of urban reality than that of policy-makers (Chapter 5) or urban researchers (Chapter 6). Equally, I am not suggesting at all that SDI, for instance, offers a model or paradigmatic example of urban learning that researchers or indeed cities should privilege or adopt. For a start, SDI’s particular forms of learning, as we will see, are not without their critics, remarkable as those learning experiments may be. What I do argue for is a democratization of urban learning, and it is true to say that SDI provides elements of this in its commitment to placing the knowledge of the marginalized at the centre of urban development. As I argue in Chapter 4 on urban learning forums, there is a radical potential of socially just transformation inherent in the possibilities of urban participation, as long as that participation is meaningful, sustained, and has the capacity to make decisions, for instance around urban redistribution. This is why the example of participatory budgeting from Porto Alegre discussed in that chapter is of such crucial importance as a demonstration of what can be achieved. In Chapter 6, I expand on the sort of urban learning I advocate by outlining a critical geography of urban learning. It is this process of a critical geography of urban learning assemblages, and not a particular body of content or indeed a particular model, that I argue for through the book.

If Le Corbusier’s (1923) infamous injunction was that ‘a house is a machine for living in’, the provocation in this book is that the city is an assemblage for learning. The Swiss architect’s machine aesthetic, rhapsodically expressed in Towards a New Architecture, was to no small extent a thesis of unlearning architecture and relearning urbanism. Gone, he insisted, were the craft skills of carpentry, masonry and joinery; instead houses should be built ‘all of a piece’, made by machine tools in factories and assembled through Fordist production lines. With one cursory eye to history and the other firmly on the possibilities of mass production, he argued that new rules and standards of assembly had to be learnt in order to mass produce housing through principles of geometric and functionalist efficiency, housing as a construction form with more in common with lightweight car bodies than the material diversity of the past. Whatever the strengths and shortcomings of Le Corbusier’s claims and designs, the implicit but nonetheless crucial invocation of urban learning and relearning remains largely ignored in urban studies. My hope is that this book goes some way to addressing that.

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.