Colin McFarlane, Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage, Wiley Blackwell, 2011, 232 pages, $39.95 paper, ISBN 9781405192811.

See David Featherstone's other contributions to Society & Space: Review: In the Space of Theory: Postfoundational Geographies of the Nation State and Skills for Heterogeneous Associations: The Whiteboys, Collective Experimentation, and Subaltern Political Ecologies

In Learning the City Colin McFarlane retells a story about the political strategies employed by activists involved in the Mumbai Slum Dwellers Federation (MDSF). Jockin Arputham, the founder of MDSF, narrates how the organization discovered that they could use the public phone for free by “inserting a railway ticket into the receiver”. Such technical savvy was not, however, just a strategy used to keep the organization’s phone bill down. It also proved to be a powerful political tool. Arputham notes that they learnt how to “block the phones of ministers” with just a “simple wire and two stones” with the effect that they made the phone sound as if it was permanently engaged. As a result they “could block all 30 ministers” phones at the same time by “simply knowing where they were and shorting out their connections” (Arputham cited by McFarlane, page 161).

Attention to such heterogeneous political practices animates McFarlane’s account of the city. His text evokes the lively practices through which urban politics is assembled and re-assembled. For McFarlane these practices are central to the diverse agentic forces constructed through urban politics. Such a recasting of the political is now familiar and will not be necessarily seen as a significant departure to those versed in the work of theorists such as Jane Bennett, Manuel De Landa, and Bruno Latour. What is novel, I think, is the key problematic to which McFarlane applies such an approach; that is, the translocal spaces through which the city is learned and known. McFarlane’s sense of learning is in no way constrained to formal educational spaces, and he engages as much with the vibrant ‘street cosmopolitanism’ of homeless children in Mumbai as with the formal lexicons of city planners.

The book opens with a discussion of what McFarlane terms learning assemblages. Chapter 2 considers the tactical learning strategies used to assemble and negotiate everyday urban interactions and is driven by some vivid ethnographic accounts of Mumbai street children. Chapter 3 develops a useful focus on the learning strategies mobilized by social movements, opening up a significant set of conversations around the knowledges generated through organising. Chapter 4 engages with attempts to institutionalize particular forms and relations of urban learning through ‘urban learning forums’ in Brazil. In Chapter 5 McFarlane intervenes in debates around travelling policies. Through an ambitious engagement which links both debates on colonial urbanism with work on post war urbanism in Berlin, he seeks to “provide a framework for conceptualizing the politics of urban policy mobility” (page 113). The final substantive chapter, “A Critical geography of urban learning”, draws together the key theoretical insights of the book. A structurally innovative move this allows the theoretical insights to partly emerge out of the diverse empirical work and interventions in the previous chapters.

McFarlane argues from the outset that learning “emerges through a relational co-constitution of city and individual, where the individual’s experiences, perceptions, memories, agendas and ways of inhabiting the city cannot be read as urban experiences alone” (page 7, emphasis in original). This situates learning not as a singular process of the acquisition of knowledge but as part of an ongoing activity intervening in and generating the composition of different relations. This approach yields important insights on the processes through which urban politics and social movements are constituted. It also allows a sense of the inventiveness and worldliness of subaltern groups such as street children who might have been rendered as ‘bare life’ in different accounts. This foregrounds the diverse ways through which relations are composed and generated and has useful resources for recovering the agency shaped through forms of subaltern cosmopolitanism. Indeed McFarlane usefully reworks learning as “compositional translocal cosmopolitanism across difference” in ways that positions cosmopolitanism as generated through “the mobile relational sense of ‘becoming together’” rather than as a “fixed ‘being together’” (page 164).

This approach inaugurates a set of conversations about the relations generated through different learning practices and both asks and raises significant questions. Foremost among these is the extent to which conceptual languages of assemblage enable a sense of traction on particular processes. While it is clear, as suggested above, that this approach produces a lively animated sense of the urban, a concern here is with the way that processes can sometimes dissolve into their constituent parts. Particular urban formations are recounted in ways that clearly signal the different elements that they are assembled and re-assembled from, but it becomes unclear exactly how such practices are constituted. McFarlane argues suggestively for an appreciation of “the agentic force of materials for how we learn urbanism” (page 163), but I find that the specific dynamics through which such agentic power is constituted and on what terms at times prove rather elusive. Elsewhere I have argued that it useful to think about the relations between practices of articulation and assemblage in ways that can potentially probe the specificity and political efficacy of the ways that particular trajectories are combined and assembled (Featherstone, 2011). In this regard Andy Davies’s insistence on anaylsing the specific practices through which different relations are composed and reworked is also apposite (Davies, 2012).

The ways in which such assemblage work deals with the relational contexts through which learning encounters/ practices are constituted could also have been interrogated in more depth. A pronounced neo-liberal back beat determining the account would clearly have been problematic. It would nonetheless have been useful to have had more sense of the pressures exerted on forms of organizing and on the constitution of urban spaces by the way that Mumbai, for example, has emerged as a profoundly neo-liberal city and embodies the tensions of India’s new economic policy. Some of the tensions that flow from this position become apparent in McFarlane’s concluding section in Chapter 4’s discussion of Urban Learning Forums. Thus he argues that such learning experiments have the potential for the “emergence of a different kind of city” provided “that the state cedes decision-making power to the forum” (page 112). Considering how learning spaces are articulated politically, however, can be as much about generating the terms on which spaces are constructed and crucially bringing existing power relations into contestation (see Crossan, 2012). This isn’t about a process where by the state might ‘benevolently’ cede such decision making power, but rather speaks to a much more fraught, fissiparous, volatile and power-laden set of processes.

In this regard I thought a deeper engagement with Partha Chatterjee’s account of the “politics of the governed”, his influential account of the terms on which ‘post-colonial democracy’ is experienced, and the various critical debates it has spawned might have been productive (Chatterjee, 2011: xi). McFarlane invokes Chatterjee’s account in relation to the practices through which slum dwellers generate reciprocal connections with “other groups in similar situations” and with “more privileged and influential groups, with government functionaries, perhaps with political parties and leaders” (Chatterjee, 2004, pages 40-41, see also 2011). Pushing this engagement further could have usefully honed a sense of some of the relationalities through which the politics of groups such as slum dwellers are constituted. This might also have had the useful byproduct of nuancing Chatterjee’s account through more serious reflection on the spatialities through which such relations are crafted.

Through Learning the City McFarlane has made a major contribution to our understandings of the urban. In its commitment to the diverse and lively practices through which the city is learned and known, in its engagement with the diverse forms of agency and political practices through which agency is assembled and re-assembled, the book enlivens understandings of spatial politics. It is also a text that is animated by a powerful sense of hope that cities might come to be re-assembled in different ways that are more equitable and more open to different agentic forces and contributions. 

References

Chatterjee P (2011) Lineages of Political Society. New York: Columbia University Press.

Chatterjee P (2004) The Politics of the Governed. New York: Columbia University Press.

Crossan J (2011) ‘This Land is Your Land, This Land is my Land: The Struggle for Glasgow's Commons', paper presented at annual conference of the Association of American Geographers, New York, 12-17 April.

Davies AD (2012) Assemblage and Social Movements: Tibet Support Groups and the Spatialities of Political Organisation. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37(2): 273-286.

Featherstone DJ (2011) On Assemblage and Articulation. Area 43(2): 139-142.