Expert answer:Green Assemblages
Answer & Explanation:ant and green city.pdf in the Green Assemblages article, do you think that the section on windmills and the concern with front-yard aesthetics (pages 15-16) symbolizes a larger issue about the way society views/understands sustainable practices?
ant_and_green_city.pdf
Unformatted Attachment Preview
Science & Technology Studies 1/2013
Urban Green Assemblages:
An ANT View on Sustainable City Building
Projects
Anders Blok
In this article, I sketch an STS-theoretical approach to world-wide growing concerns
with urban climate risks and sustainable urbanism more generally in terms of what I
call ‘urban green assemblages’. This approach draws inspiration from recent attempts
to bring actor-network theory (ANT) closer to urban studies, infusing urban political
economies with STS sensibility towards the contingencies of eco-socio-technical
design and transformation processes. ANT, I argue, offers a new ontology for the city,
allowing the study of those concrete and plural sites at which urban sustainability is
known, practiced, scaled, negotiated and contested, in heterogeneous and dynamic
assemblages of humans and non-humans. I explore the analytical potentials of this
ANT urban ontology through a case study of how architects, engineers, and urban
planners currently perform Nordhavn, one of Europe’s large-scale sustainable city
building projects, as a site of multiple matters of public-political concern with urban
natures.
Keywords: Actor-network theory; Assemblage urbanism; Sustainable city-building
Introduction: Bringing ANT
into Urban Ecology
Urban ecology may have once been the
province of community activists occupying
industrial waste-lands – but as public
concerns with environmental and climatic
risks have grown, ideas and practices
related to the greening of cities have
now entered the realm of urban truths
circulating among policy-makers and
planners world-wide (Jamison, 2008). On
the one hand, figures pointing to cities as
responsible for more than 70% of global
carbon emissions are now commonplace;
on the other, cities on all continents
actively re-position themselves as ‘living
laboratories’ for innovating and testing the
green technologies needed to move towards
a low- or zero-carbon transition (Evans
& Karvonen, 2010; Bulkeley, 2012; Blok,
2012a)1. Everything from low-energy houses
to bicycle infrastructures, from green roofs
to solar heating panels, the professional
worlds of architecture, engineering, and
urban planning are now called upon to redesign long-standing urban metabolisms.
Urban ecology, in short, is fast becoming an
important domain for observing the largescale reassembling of nature, technology
and society.
Science & Technology Studies, Vol. 26 (2013) No. 1, 5-24
5
Science & Technology Studies 1/2013
In this article, I argue that Science and
Technology Studies (STS) in general, and
actor-network theory (ANT) in particular,
help bring new insights to bear on urban
ecology, conceived broadly as relational
processes of city-based eco-socio-technical
change. At the same time, I deploy urban
ecology as an invitation to push STS and
ANT thinking in new directions, related
to questions of how sustainable urbanism
works as a particular mode of knowledgemaking and a specific format of contentious
(cosmo)political experimentation?
Developing these themes entails
positioning ANT at the intersection of
multiple on-going conversations on the
(un)sustainability of cities, sprawling
the hinterlands of STS, urban studies,
human geography, and political ecology.
Although STS concepts clearly figure in
these conversations (e.g. Hinchliffe et al.,
2005; Heynen et al., 2006), there is still
much work to be done, I suggest, in trying
to spell out the exact implications of ANT to
urban ecological politics, and, conversely,
in specifying the challenge of urban ecology
to ANT (and STS) theorizing. This, then, is
the task I pursue in this article, in terms of
developing the concept of ‘urban green
assemblages’ as an important ANT-derived
contribution to cross-cutting debates on
sustainable urbanism and urban political
ecology.
While thus motivated primarily by
theoretical concerns, I want here to pursue
this double challenge – of ANT in urban
ecology – by an on-going case study, which
looks at the dynamics of knowledge-making
and political contestation in one of Europe’s
large-scale sustainable city building projects.
In Copenhagen, capital of Denmark and
home to 1.5 million people, ambitious plans
are underway to rebuild the old industrial
harbor area known as Nordhavn (‘North
harbor’) into what the urban designers
confidently refer to as ‘the sustainable city
6
of the future’. By 2050, this 300 hectare area
by the water, to the north-east of city center,
aspires to house 40.000 new inhabitants in a
‘green’, carbon neutral, bicycle-friendly, and
renewable energy-based urban district. So
far, all of this exists mostly in architectural
models, engineering projections, planning
documents and local politics. In empirical
terms, my aim is to explore how urban
natures are mobilized in-between these
divergent modes of city engagement. How
and by whom are knowledges on (global)
ecological risks translated into situated
city-making practices, and what kinds
of inscription devices and coordination
practices does this work entail?2
My exploration of these questions
proceeds by way of bringing together,
conceptually and empirically, two promising
strands of ANT encounters with cities-inthe-making. First, I pick up the thread from
how ANT has recently been brought to bear
on the field of urban studies, in what has
become known as ‘assemblage urbanism’
(Farías, 2010; McFarlane, 2011). Pushing this
turn further, I develop the notion of urban
green assemblages as a means of bringing
ANT sensibilities to the study of how urban
green knowledge is produced, translated
and contested across specific urban sites,
scales and relations. Second, I bring this new
ontology of urban ecology together with STS
studies that deploy ANT to elucidate specific
building and architectural design projects as
complex ecologies of professional, juridical,
economic and cultural relations (Yaneva,
2009; Houdart, 2008). Using primary textual
material from the Nordhavn case to illustrate
both encounters, my discussion aims also
to contribute to a nascent STS interest in
practices of sustainable architecture and
design (e.g. Moore & Karvonen, 2008). Via
the notion of urban green assemblages,
however, I want to suggest that ANT
entails particular analytical (and ethical)
commitments to this agenda, pushing
Anders Blok
STS to study the implication of design in
(cosmo)political controversies over multiple
attachments to urban ‘greening’ (cf. Yaneva,
2012).
In what follows, I start by developing
the conceptual contours of urban green
assemblages. Informed by ANT sensibilities,
assemblage urbanism, I argue, brings a
new ontology of the city to urban ecology,
one that emphasize the need for situated
empirical inquiries into those practices of
knowledge-making, scaling, and material
intervention whereby urban actors
reassemble city-based natures. Next, I bring
this notion of urban green assemblages into
dialogue with STS work on architectural
practice, in order to suggest that sustainable
architecture works as a specific modality of
inscribing ecological concerns into urban
political life.
This leads into a more empirical
exploration of how architects (and
engineers) inscribe urban natures into
plans for the future of Nordhavn – and how
these inscriptions are in turn contested
in specific urban publics. In terms of
method, my analysis relies primarily on
access to primary textual architectural
and engineering design consultancy
material supplemented by media analysis,
interviews with key actors, and participant
observation at public hearings. In particular,
my analysis seeks to show how architectural
inscriptions of urban natures in Nordhavn
come in multiple overlapping forms, each
with different dynamics of knowledge and
politics. Importantly, this suggests that,
rather than facing a singular challenge of
rendering places more ‘environmentally
sustainable’3, architects are key actors in
juxtaposing and coordinating a multiplicity
of co-existing attachments to, and practices
of, urban ecology (cf. Mol, 2002).
These explorations lead me to
suggest, in conclusion, that ANT entails
a particular notion of urban political
ecology, one committed to place-based
collective experimentation and learning
around (global) ecological risks – and
one that orients urban design towards the
overarching question of cosmopolitics, the
politics of the common cosmos (McFarlane,
2011; Latour, 2007). In a world of multiplying
ecological risks, I suggest, this may prove an
important STS contribution to debating,
and rethinking, city-making as currently
practiced.
Urban Green Assemblages: A New
Ontology of City Metabolisms?
Compared to its substantial engagements
with
scientific
laboratories
and
technological development complexes,
it is fair to say that the field of STS has yet
to pay extensive attention to urban sites
and processes (Hommels, 2005; Coutard
& Guy, 2007). This is surprising, given
that – as Aibar and Bijker (1997) note in
their study on the planning of Barcelona
– cities may be treated as ‘enormous
socio-technical artifacts’, heterogeneously
engineered by a range of competing actors
and institutions. In the case of Barcelona,
Aibar and Bijker show how contrasting
visions of city extension among engineers,
architects, and local communities resulted
from different yet overlapping sociotechnical frames, encompassing such issues
as hygiene, mobility, social distinction,
and land ownership. In this contentious
process, closure around a final urban design
was achieved through situational microstruggles and compromises over the width
of streets, the depths of buildings, and
public access to facilities and parks. While
so far rather marginal, STS would indeed
seem well placed to study such politics of
urban design (Moore & Karvonen, 2008).
To understand this situation of relative
non-engagement, however, we should
note some intellectual particularities
7
Science & Technology Studies 1/2013
of that academic domain which claims
the city as its ‘truth-spot’ (Gieryn, 2006),
that is, urban studies. As Coutard and
Guy (2007) suggest, much contemporary
urban studies is marked by a universalized
imaginary of urban decline, splintering
and discrimination – an orientation at odds
with a widespread STS sensibility toward
the contingency and ambivalence of any
socio-technical transformation process.
Such divergence, no doubt, may be further
traced to the continuing influence within
urban studies by various branches of critical
theory, including post-Marxist urban
political economies of the 1970s (McFarlane,
2011). However internally diverse, urban
political economy approaches (e.g.
Harvey, Castells, Lefebvre, Sassen) tend to
understand cities primarily as local nodes in
wider global processes of capital circulation
and accumulation. This orientation, in turn,
downplays the need for such situated and
open-ended ethnographic explorations as
favored by STS scholars (Farías, 2011)4.
Recently, however, the terms of
engagement between STS and urban
studies appear to be changing, as various
critical urbanisms are increasingly being
challenged by theorists of ‘assemblage
urbanism’ (McFarlane, 2011). Importantly,
assemblage urbanism traces its genealogy
in large part to actor-network theory
(ANT), including the STS and Deleuzian
intersections of this theory, as an attempt to
‘test’ the contribution of ANT for rethinking
the city in urban studies (Farías, 2010).
In this vein, assemblage theorists seek to
delineate how ANT offers up “an alternative
ontology of the city” as a de-centered
object (Farías, 2010: 13). According to
Farías (2010: 2), then, cities are “relentlessly
being assembled at concrete sites of urban
practice”, as a “multiplicity of processes
of becoming, affixing socio-technical
networks, hybrid collectives and alternative
topologies”. Here, assemblage urbanism
8
resonates strongly with Bruno Latour’s
own ANT take on the composition of city
life through situated techniques and flows
(Latour & Hermant, 2006).
Assemblage urbanism has a number of
important consequences for rethinking
the city – all of which, I want to suggest,
will prove beneficial to our understanding
of urban ecology, in terms of what I dub
urban green assemblages. First, and most
literally, assemblage urbanism conceives
of cities as ensembles of heterogeneous
actors, giving analytical priority to the active
dynamics of arranging or fitting together
socio-material elements. Cities may be
assembled in multiple ways, depending on
how heterogeneous connections are forged
among objects, places, materials, machines,
bodies, symbols, natures, policies and so
on (Farías, 2010: 14). This is also the sense
in which, like ANT in general (Murdoch,
2001), assemblage urbanism may be said to
promote an inherently ecological view of the
city, one that stresses the agency of urban
materiality, natures and non-humans. In
the language of Isabelle Stengers (2005),
assemblage urbanism invites a view of cities
as overlapping ecologies of human and
non-human practices.
It is important to note, however, that
most urban ecologies – as shaped by
obdurate socio-material infrastructures of
electricity, water, housing, transportation
and waste – tend to remain unnoticed
backdrops to city life (Star, 1999; Hommels,
2005). Only under specific conditions,
similar to what Geoffrey Bowker (1995)
calls ‘infrastructural inversions’, are urban
socio-material relations articulated as
matters of (un)sustainability concern5.
In the Nordhavn case, for instance,
such articulations were explicitly built
into the architectural competition brief,
constraining designers to frame their placemaking visions in accordance with wider
environmental goals of the Copenhagen
Anders Blok
municipal government. As such, Nordhavn
emerges as an urban green assemblage,
in the sense that heterogeneous actors
here come to orient themselves towards
redesigning urban eco-socio-technical
relations in ‘green’ directions. I explore what
this means in more detail later on. So far, the
main analytical point is that, while urban
green assemblages may operate at different
scales, from the domestic (Marres, 2008)
to the global (Sassen, 2010), they will tend
to bring together particular constellations
of technologies, sites and actors, from
engineers and architects to developers,
regulators, civic associations and urban
residents.
This relates also to a second analytical
effect of assemblage urbanism in terms of
how it deals with issues of space, place, and
scale. The main point here is simple, but it
carries wide-ranging consequences: rather
than granting explanatory autonomy to
spatial categories like the city, assemblage
urbanism conceives the city as a plurality
of sites, the connections among which are
changing and contingent. In this sense,
there simply is no city as a whole, but
rather a multiplicity of sites and processes
assembling the city in different, sometimes
contradictory, ways (Farías, 2011: 369).
Importantly, urban sites are defined not
by geographical boundaries or scales, but
by types and lines of activity, whereby
spatialities emerge through the actornetworks that connect places (Latour, 2005;
Farías, 2010: 6). An urban green assemblage
like Nordhavn, for instance, gradually
emerge as connections are forged – through
such devices as the architectural competition
brief – among otherwise non-related places,
from the post-industrial landscape of an
old harbor area in Copenhagen, via local
government bureaucracies to architectural
and engineering offices. At all of these sites,
moreover, connections will be fanning out
to other scientific, political, economic and
cultural nodes, locally and trans-nationally
(cf. Yaneva, 2012).
This notion of spatiality as assembled
sites also entail a particular approach to
scale-making, in that ‘local’ and ‘global’
are not fixed geographical coordinates, but
rather denotes the variable end-products of
collective scale-making practices (Latour,
2005). In terms of urban green assemblages,
this is a crucial point, given that
contemporary urban ecology derive much of
its rationale and dynamics from urban sites
being selectively brought into contact with
(supposedly) ‘global’ environmental risks,
thereby setting in motion various re-scaling
trajectories (e.g. Sassen, 2010). Indeed, the
entire Nordhavn project might reasonably
be described in such terms, in that the
project re-scales climate change as being
in significant parts an urban (rather than,
say, national) challenge – while, at the same
time, re-scaling Nordhavn as an ‘eco-city’ of
potentially global significance (Blok, 2012a).
Still, assemblage urbanism invites us to
also be more specific, in terms of analyzing
how socio-geographical scales come into
being, in concrete cultural, political and
architectural practices, as actors stabilize
their connections of proximity and distance
(Slater & Ariztía, 2010). Hence, one key
question for the study of urban green
assemblages is how, by whom, and via what
kinds of inscription devices, knowledges on
‘global’ ecological risks are translated and
asserted within ‘local’ city-making practices,
such as Nordhavn?
Third and finally, assemblage urbanism
also carries far-reaching implications
for how to deal with issues of urban
asymmetries and power; and hence for
rethinking the political dimensions of urban
ecology. This is a difficult point, because
ANT is often misunderstood as promoting a
vision of flat (‘power-free’) social territories.
It is certainly true that, unlike (some) critical
urbanisms, assemblage urbanism refuses to
9
Science & Technology Studies 1/2013
imagine overarching and all-encompassing
power structures – such as ‘global neoliberal
capitalism’ – which would over-determine
city life and politics, including the politics
of sustainability. However, as always in ANT,
this analytical refusal is made precisely in
order to study those concrete and situated
practices of socio-material ordering,
whereby agency capacities, resources and
power end up being unequally distributed
within specific urban relations (Farías, 2011:
370). Inside an urban green assemblage like
Nordhavn, for instance, particular actors –
including developers, municipal planners,
and architects – clearly inhabit city-ordering
centers, or ‘oligopticons’, that allow them
to act as spokespersons of wider urban
constituencies (Latour, 2005). What is made
present and what is made absent at these
powerful urban sites, and hence which
concerns enter the city-building frames
and which overflows them (Callon, 1998),
are critical questions for urban assemblage
studies.
Embedded in this analytical approach
to the dynamic asymmetries of urban
ecologies, moreover, is a particular vision of
democratic city politics, helping to specify
the political project wedded with the notion
of urban green assemblages. By introducing
technologies, natures and non-humans
into urban politics, assemblage urbanism
amounts to what Latour (2004) calls a
‘cosmopolitics’, a politics of the common
cosmos. No longer a matter solely of human
(e.g. class) interests, urban cosmopolitics
involve conflicts over different city
‘cosmograms’, that is, ways of articulating
the elements of the city, the world, and
their mutual connections (Farías, 2011:
371). Understanding political ecology as
cosmopolitics means becoming attuned to
the way urban democratic publics (in the
plural) are dynamically constituted around
specific ecological situations and mattersof-concern, say, concerns with inner-city
10
wildlife (Hinchliffe et al., 2005). Moreover,
as I stress in this article, it also entails paying
special attention to the ways in which
architectural and other professional citymaking inscriptions may both constitute
and constrain such engagements. As
such, I suggest, the politics of urban green
assemblages arises mostly t …
Purchase answer to see full
attachment
How it works
- Paste your instructions in the instructions box. You can also attach an instructions file
- Select the writer category, deadline, education level and review the instructions
- Make a payment for the order to be assignment to a writer
- Download the paper after the writer uploads it
Will the writer plagiarize my essay?
You will get a plagiarism-free paper and you can get an originality report upon request.
Is this service safe?
All the personal information is confidential and we have 100% safe payment methods. We also guarantee good grades