The City as Assemblage: Dwelling and Urban Space

Abstract

IntroductionIn an afternoon in August 2008 I accompanied Gabriella, a social worker, as she visited projects sites in Sa¬ o Paulo's large favela, Paraiso¨polis. Paraiso¨polis is a settlement of some 70 000 people located on the steep hills of southern Sa¬ o Paulo. Adjacent to the settlement is Morumbi, an elite gated suburb that towers above the red brick neighbourhood (Caldeira, 2000). Late in the afternoon Gabriella took a detour to show me what she described as an entirely unique house. She was not exaggerating. The man who came to the spectacular arched doorway knew Gabriella and narrated the story of how he built the house through amalgamating coloured stone and just about any object that came to hand, constructing the house from the sea of everyday life. The roof was made up, amongst other things, of discarded pieces of plastic, old shoes, an iron, children's toys, mugs, kitchen utensils, and all manner of other materials, cemented into an intricate arrangement of decorative, coloured stones. He patted the walls and ceiling proudly and gestured over his shoulder, revealing an interior that was even more impressive than the exterioröa rabbit warren of smoothed and angular stones and archways assembled through a wide range of materials, generating a prism of light and dark as the sun shone here and there. On the roof is a garden used by his children that continues the theme. The house was in constant construction, he said, and the project had taken years so far. Figures 1 and 2 show some of this complex assortment.I should say at this point that I do not wish to romanticise this house. The house, creative as it is, is nonetheless situated within a poor, precarious neighbourhood where people struggle to make a safe and sustainable livelihood and are sometimes victims of appalling abuse and violence. I want to use this example as a heuristic that opens a wider ontological argument about the city: the city as assemblage. If this remarkable house offers a vivid and particular example of sociomaterial assembly, it nonetheless prompts the question of what a more general conception of the city as assemblage might afford, of what these practices of gathering, composition, alignment, and reuse might bring to how urbanism is conceived. What might such a conceptualisation Abstract. In this paper I consider what`assemblage' might offer a conception of the city. Although assemblage is gaining currency in geography and beyond, there has been little effort to consider how it might be conceptualised and what its specificity might be. In offering a conceptualisation of assemblage, I bring assemblage into conversation with particular debates around dwelling and argue, first, that assemblage provides a useful basis for thinking of the city as a dwelling process and, second, that it is particularly useful for conceiving the spatiality of the city as processual, relational, mobile, and unequal. Despite their distinct intellectual histories, I suggest there is a productive debate to be had by bringing assemblage and dwelling into ...

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