Assembling Urban Regeneration? Resourcing Critical Generative Accounts of Urban Regeneration through Assemblage.

McGuirk, Pauline M; Mee, Kathleen; Ruming, Kristian

doi:10.1111/gec3.12255

Cited by 37 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…Money from corporate development in Woolwich largely financed the recent redesign of the case study site. We suggest that while critical urban studies have correctly revealed the destructive and unjust effects of neoliberal urbanism (Peck et al., ) especially as austerity policies intensified (Peck, ), possible temporary advantages of certain aspects of urban regeneration to existing residents have been missed (McGuirk et al, ), exemplifying a disjuncture between overarching, rhetorical metanarratives and more grounded experiences of change (Linebaugh, ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Sitting outside: Conviviality, self‐care and the design of benches in urban public space

Rishbeth

Rogaly

2017

Trans Inst British Geog

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The urban bench has been romanticised as a location of intimacy and benign social serendipity, and problematised with regard to perceptions of unwelcome loitering. In this paper we explore embodied practices of sitting on benches within an urban context characterised by corporate‐led regeneration and impacted by austerity urbanism, imperial history and ongoing racisms. Our schizocartographic methodology enables us to attend to the differentiated and shifting subjectivities and temporalities of bench users, and to emerging counter histories of space. The research is based on the case study of a central square in Woolwich, south‐east London. This involved an eclectic combination of methods, including film‐making, ethnography and interviews, and a cross‐sectoral team of activists, academics and an artist. The paper starts by conceptualising public space with respect to lived experiences of marginalisation, arguing that architectural design is intrinsic to understanding micro‐geographies of conviviality and care. The case study material is used first to provide a visual sketch of sitting and watching others in the square and then to address conviviality and the value of visibility and relative proximity in framing a mostly un‐panicked multiculture. Third, we discuss agentic, yet critically aware, acts of self‐care. Finally, our focus shifts to the design of the benches and the “touching experiences” of bodies sat in various ways, impacted by structural inequalities, yet differentiated by the particularities of individual or collective priorities. In conclusion we argue that attending to the precision of sitting on a bench can illuminate multiple temporalities of urban change in relation to both individual subjectivities and hegemonic structures. Further, the counter histories that emerge can inform policy and practice for inclusive urban design.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Sitting outside: Conviviality, self‐care and the design of benches in urban public space

Rishbeth

Rogaly

2017

Trans Inst British Geog

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“…Assemblage urbanism provides important resources for expanding urban political geography to consider the generative capacity of linked socio-material systems (McFarlane, 2008). It has done much to render more visible the diverse actors, technologies, and materials drawn into uncertain urban processes (McGuirk et al, 2016). Yet, it is the ontological malleability of the material, rather than the diversity of elements per se, that Deleuze and Guattari (1987) draw our attention to.…”

Section: Assemblage and Ontological Diversitymentioning

confidence: 99%

More‐than‐human planning: the agency of buildings and bodies in the post‐political city

Cook

2018

Geographical Research

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Through a comparative study of political activism in Millers Point, Dawes Point, and The Rocks in Sydney from 1971 to 1974 and from 2014 to 2017, this paper examines the more‐than‐human force of bodies and buildings in redemocratising cities. The paper brings theoretical insights from urban assemblage and Deleuzian scholarship into dialogue with post‐political theory. In doing so, it shifts the focus in urban political geography from a concern with diverse social groups to the political potential in more‐than‐human assemblages. Through a re‐reading of Sydney's Green Bans in Millers Point, Dawes Point, and The Rocks, the paper first shows how the withdrawal of labour and stilled building sites comprise informal pathways of planning rejection that centralise social and ecological concerns in decision‐making in urban development. That first case is then contrasted with the contemporary case of privatisation and displacement at the same sites, showing how aged bodies can energise latent deliberative spaces across diverse (if repressed) institutions in liberal democracies. Given the capacities of materials and bodies to produce planning outcomes, the paper conceptualises planning as a more‐than‐human process enhanced by immersion in the experimental materialism of political movements—and this materialism is inherently geographical. The paper concludes with my reflecting on whether the proximity of workers and residents to the materials of the built environment in social movement activism of the 1970s intensified the reach of the event compared with the uncertain struggle over Millers Point today.

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“…While assemblage thinking thus neglected social macro levels and focused on local levels instead--for example, urban development and its logic (see McGuirk et al, 2016)--it nevertheless did not advance much into the details of social and material practices. For instance, the level of individual neighbourhoods has been addressed only reluctantly.…”

Section: The Concept Of Assemblage: Imagining Urban Practicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assemblages of Urban Leisure Culture in Inner‐City Bucharest

Bürkner¹,

Totelecan²

2018

Int J Urban Regional Res

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Inner‐city redevelopment in the south‐eastern European metropolis of Bucharest has been an intriguing object of analysis. Having been neglected for a long time by its inhabitants, urban politics and the local economy, the historical inner city recently experienced tremendous development of its evening/night‐time economy and leisure culture, as though it had received fresh impulses from European integration. However, there is no single cause which effected this unexpected proliferation. Therefore, this article traces the contingent ways in which the inner city has been affected, mainly through an empirical reconstruction of socio‐material assemblages of inner‐city leisure culture. A typology of (partial) assemblages is developed, which illustrates the heterogeneity, contingency and changeability of emerging temporary relations between various social, material and ideational elements. We demonstrate how localism and internal replication of limited business concepts have triggered the selective adaptation of various symbols of modernization. Against this background we argue that post‐transformational urbanity involves contingent social self‐referencing and socio‐material assemblage, rather than the adoption of prevailing translocal models of urban development. A critical reassessment of assemblage theory, as applied to this particular urban context, leads to final considerations concerning possible theoretical readjustments.

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Assembling Urban Regeneration? Resourcing Critical Generative Accounts of Urban Regeneration through Assemblage.

Cited by 37 publications

References 53 publications

Sitting outside: Conviviality, self‐care and the design of benches in urban public space

Sitting outside: Conviviality, self‐care and the design of benches in urban public space

More‐than‐human planning: the agency of buildings and bodies in the post‐political city

Assemblages of Urban Leisure Culture in Inner‐City Bucharest

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