Seeing Like a City

by Ash Amin, Prof Nigel Thrift

Seeing like a city means recognizing that cities are living things made up of a tangle of networks, built up from the agency of countless actors. Cities must not be considered as expressions of larger paradigms or sites of human effort and organization alone. Within their density, size and sprawl can be found a world of symbols, bodies, buildings, technologies and infrastructures. It is the machine-like combination, interaction and confrontation of these different elements that make a city. Such a view locates urban outcomes and influences in the character of these networks, which together power urban life, allocating resources, shaping social opportunities, maintaining order and simply enabling life. More than the silent stage on which other powers perform, such networks represent the essence of the city. They also form an important political project, a politics of small interventions with large effects. The increasing evidence for an Anthropocene bears out the way in which humanity has stamped its footprint on the planet by constructing urban forms that act as systems for directing life in ways that create both immense power and immense constraint.

Genres: Geography, Theory

216 pages, Paperback

Published December 12, 2016

Reviews

[Alyssa · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a book written very much in the tradition of British Geography, this book felt like familiar ground to me. While not particularly groundbreaking, it was a tidy summary of the academic discourse on themes of urban infrastructure, multi-disciplinary approaches to urban networks, and an urban praxis that recognises the creative potentials and pitfalls of our 'thrown-togetherness' in the age of the Anthropocene. I particularly appreciated the sketches, which effectively illuminated the concepts discussed by throwing them into particular, situated contexts - an approach that best illustrated the authors' call for a research praxis that better captures the kaleidoscope of dynamics that constitute the urban differently for each being.

[Andrea Lampis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seeing like a city

The book is a philosophical and political reflection of city's agency as an hybridization of socio-technical assemblages. Just on those grounds planners still believing in their capacity to ''change'' destinies should read it and give up to their rationalizing and normative utopias.

[A. Alper Gültekin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great and scarily profound read. It worths every hour you would spend on, paragraphs you would read over and over again. A different and maybe avant-garde way of understanding the city.

[Jackson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fine translation of actor-network theory to the question of the object of urbanization in an age of “planetary urbanization.” The book is often aesthetically interesting, especially in its discussion of informational infrastructure (which has a seemingly unintentional cyberpunk tinge), but fails to sufficiently defend the assemblage approach from accusations of political paralysis engendered by its "flat ontology." Maybe I'm just overly invested in the critical approach over the ~inquisitive~ or non-empirical, but I found a lot of this book to be sheer description without very interesting treatment.