I1
The city, in contemporary times, has emerged as an eclectic space where neoliberalism, biopolitics, and subaltern countercultures have seamlessly woven into each other. A key concern among urban studies scholars from diverse disciplines (especially anthropology/ sociology, geography, architecture, political science, and the planning sciences) has been to examine how non-hegemonic spaces have shaped urban subjectivities. As opposed to spectacular scales of urbanisation being driven by the big players such as the state, real estate agents or the judiciary, much of the city also reproduces itself through ordinary and everyday practices of placemaking. Recent works on city infrastructures have not only investigated the socio-political implications of urban materialities (Anand 2017) but have also highlighted the role played by digital re-imaginations like Smart cities (Kitchin 2023), in shaping strategic-relational approaches (Smigiel 2018) that explore the topological spatiality of urban assemblages (McFarlane 2011). These practices often blur the lines between subversion and compliance, wherein ‘popular economies’ have appropriated and relaunched the mercantilist calculus of neoliberal reason (Gago 2018). Further, although these practices are mostly performed by citizens caught up in conditions of precarity (Vij 2019), they have emerged as ‘rhythms of endurance’ (Simone 2019) that eventually ‘auto-construct’ (Calderia 2017) complex state-resident relations and facilitate networked ties between disconnected immigrants (Aschauer 2021) through transversal logics of claim-making (Mohanty 2019). These works therefore, compel us to decode the city and see through its polyvalent sociologies which entangle, materialities, agencies and emotions. This fluidity challenges simple, spatio-temporal conceptualizations of the city and thereby signals the multiplicity of the urban imagination. In fact, following calls for the ‘more-than-human’ turn in disciplines like geography (Thrift 2008) and sociology (Franklin 2017), we argue that there is an increasing need to understand the city as an assemblage co-emerging between people, things, and infrastructure. At an academic level, it therefore requires a more open, interdisciplinary approach whereby only a ‘methodological pluralism’ (quantitative/ qualitative/ mixed methods) can overcome reductionist readings of the city. Neither should the city be merely read as a text for archival explorations nor be seen as a tapestry of power representations that can be dissected only through ethnographic nuancing, geo-spatial mapping, or regression analysis. Through a range of different relational frameworks, drawing on a diversity of theorists ranging from Bourdieu to Latour to Deleuze and Guattari to Wacquant, we expect papers to provide an empirical nudge, to what Million et al (2021) term as ‘kaleidoscopic perspectives on the refiguration of space’. This session aims to bring together academics with diverse methodological persuasions, who irrespective of the empirical groundings of their work in cities of the Global North or South, are vigilant about the interplay between affects, materiality, and the politics of the built environment. We invite papers that explicitly decode the material and affective side of the city from, say for instance, a planetary or postcolonial urban studies perspective or even focus on specific themes (housing, infrastructures, politics). In other words, suggestively, papers (both conceptual and empirical) should engage with one or more of the following four key themes: (i.) How does the city transform and create new assemblages? (ii.) How does the city co-generate affects and politics beyond architectural designs? (iii.) How does the city work through the unequal spaces of infrastructure? (iv.) How does the city through social movements and participatory governance models redefine territorial scalars like ward/ municipality/provincial/federal level(s) of governance?
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I2
Over the years, there has been a growing interest in thinking about how cities are positioned, assembled and even imagined. There are multiple criteria for how cities ought to be envisioned, structured and inhabited. These criteria are all evaluative and normative; they form the benchmarks against which cities are compared and judged. They construct powerful mental maps of the world of cities that, themselves, influence policy-making and city-making (McCann, Roy and Ward, 2013: 581). An assemblage is a fundamentally relational concept which sees a given phenomenon as composed of heterogeneous entities which can be seen as human and non-human, organic and inorganic, technical and natural (Anderson and McFarlane 2011: 126). Assemblage is a concept used to describe the practices of actors who assemble policies by engaging with various policy networks and communities, stretched across the globe, to learn, teach, and share knowledge about best practice models McCann et al. (2013: 583). Assemblage looks at the processes and practices through which urban life is produced; by foregrounding how the socio-materiality of cities shapes urban lives and inequalities; and by inspiring new critical urban imaginaries (Swanton, 2011). In urban studies, the assemblage can be perceived as a way of thinking to provide a theoretical lens for understanding the complexity of the city problems by emphasising the relations between sociality and spatiality at different scales (Kamalipour and Peimani, 2015). For Swanton (2011), contemporary urbanisation demands radically different ontological and methodological foundations. As highlighted in the foregoing, we welcome contributions from all disciplines dealing with urban spaces since the issue intends to propose an interdisciplinary dialogue about the methodological dilemmas in researching the assemblage of the city environments, that is, its meaning and also its processes of construction, interpretation, transformation and translation. The non-exhaustive list of themes for this includes: (1.) Urbanisation in the wake of epidemics; (2.) Environmental/ecological systems and the city; (3.) Urbanisation, Poverty and the marginalised; (4.) Re-assembling the city and migration; (5.) The complexities of land ownership; (6.) The city and decolonisation; (7.) Digital and futuristic cities; (8.) Digital heritage and smart cities; (9.) Natural disasters and urban assemblages; (10.) Contesting historical Statues and Monuments; (11.) Semiotics, Politics and Cultural Heritage in urban spaces; (12.) Designing Methods for the Semiotics of Cultural Memory in Urban Spaces; (13.) Cultural memory in urban spaces; (14.) Urban ‘history’ preservation and vandalisation; (15.) Media discursive representation of urban heritage (16.) Media practices, social actors and urban conflict.