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The right of Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2017 by Polity Press

Polity Press

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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6425-5 (hardback)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6426-2 (paperback)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Amin, Ash, author. | Thrift, N. J., author.

Title: Seeing like a city / Ash Amin, Nigel Thrift.

Description: Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Subjects: LCSH: Cities and towns. | Sociology, Urban. | Human geography.

Classification: LCC HT119 .A49 2016 (print) | LCC HT119 (ebook) | DDC 307.76–dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016017516

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Prologue

I want you to help me to find out what happened to us.

Ballantyne, 2013, p. 15

It takes satellite images and maps of flows to convey a sense of the world significance of cities. They light up and map out the densities of settlement, the traffic of inter-urban flow, and the dependencies of hinterlands near and far on cities. Meanwhile, less graphic scholarship reveals that a small number of urban titans now drive world economic prosperity and creativity, that their elites possess formidable national and transnational power, that states and militias increasingly target cities for geopolitical advantage, that human behaviour is shaped in the habits of metropolitan dwelling, and that the history of the Anthropocene is predominantly the history of urbanization. This research and scholarship presents cities as forcing houses: centres of creativity, competitive advantage and human fulfilment (Glaeser, 2011), as sites of democracy or revolution rekindled (Harvey, 2012; Merrifield, 2013; Douzinas, 2013), and as ‘worldling’ sites that set a standard (Roy, 2014). It finds the urban everywhere, the tentacles of cities sustaining a new era of ‘planetary urbanization’ (Brenner, 2014) and inter-urban networks and alliances driving global geopolitics and political economy (Taylor, 2013).

This book locates itself in this same genre of writing. But it is also a reconsideration to compensate for a tendency in this genre to erase the territorial in its keenness to emphasize urban globality, or to reduce the new urban centrality to foundational forces such as capital accumulation (Brenner, 2014; Brenner and Schmid, 2015), or the spatial agglomeration of firms, skills and institutions (Storper, 2013; Scott and Storper, 2015; Storper and Scott, 2016). Instead, as a counterweight, the book looks to the agency of another kind of urban assemblage – the effects of things massed together that furnish the world through closely jaxtaposed or interwoven concentrations of humans, technologies and infrastructures providing much of the push. Our argument is that more than just spatial concentration is involved. It is the coming together of overlapping sociotechnical systems that gives cities their world-making power.

Our aim is to get to the ‘citiness’ of cities; admittedly, a concept as elusive as the ‘humanness’ of humans, with many possible configurations and arrangements. Cities are spatial radiations that gather worlds of atoms, atmospheres, symbols, bodies, buildings, plants, animals, technologies, infrastructures, and institutions, each with its own mixes, moorings and motilities, each with its own means of trading living, and dying. What form of distillation is possible without violating the character of cities as ‘pluriverses’, to borrow William James's (1977) phrase? It certainly cannot be one that reduces these pluriverses to systemic imperatives or spatial essences.

Instead, the distillation has to get close to the combinational machinery itself, for example, the summative force of many entities, networks and sociotechnical networks intersecting and colliding with each other (Farias and Bender, 2011; McFarlane, 2011; Lancione 2014; Batty, 2013; Sennett, 2013). This is the kind of synthesis we attempt in this book, focusing in particular on the agency of sociotechnical systems. Building on our earlier book (Amin and Thrift, 2002), we see the city as a machine whose surge comes from the liveliness of various bodies, materials, symbols, and intelligences held in relation within specific networks of calculation and allocation, undergirded by diverse regimes and rituals of organization and operation. We distil ‘citiness’ down to the combined vitality and political economy of urban sociotechnical systems, which we believe define the modern city. Together, the arrangements of water, electricity, logistics, communication, circulation and the like, instantiate and sustain life within and beyond cities in all sorts of ways: allocating resource and reward, enabling collective action, shaping social dispositions and affects, marking time, space and map, maintaining order and discipline, sustaining transactions, moulding the environmental footprint. These arrangements are more than a mere ‘infrastructural’ background, the silent stage on which other powers perform. The mangle of sociotechnical systems in a city is formative in every respect, regardless of its state of sophistication. This, at least, is our thesis.

The project we want to begin in this book is to think again about urban vitality, but this time by understanding both its machinic qualities and the way in which it constantly creates new publics, publics that are new forms of here and there. So, for example, in addressing why and how some cities can be thought of as growth engines, we will decentre familiar accounts that privilege the presence of particular assets such as the concentration of skills and intelligence, firms and institutions, or untraded interdependencies, by focusing on supply infrastructures – the urban machinery that keeps stocks up and moving, capabilities replenished, and services flowing (Chapter 4). Similarly, we will explain the experience and mediation of mass poverty, ever more an urban phenomenon, as a problem of access to the means of survival, regulated by the terms of supply of basic public goods and by the very infrastructures of thought currently in place framing world urban poverty (Chapter 5). In turn, to explain urban social dispositions and affects, we will examine the formative power of hybrids of urban aesthetic, technological intelligence and human dwelling, reworking the meaning of human being (Chapter 3). Finally, we will argue that the energy budgets of city sociotechnical systems and the other metabolisms they sustain lie at the heart of the urban ecological footprint, and the stresses of the Anthropocene in general (Chapter 2).

The sociotechnical systems we wish to consider include first, the metabolic systems that service the city in ways without which collective life would be impossible – water, energy, sanitation, food and so on, each of which forms its own system of provisioning. Second, we want to consider the ways in which the city produces a sense of direction, both as a means of finding a way around an increasingly complex spatial order, and in the way that the city literally directs its inhabitants’ lives, allowing them access to, and egress from, some spaces, while simultaneously banning them from others. Third, we want to show how human identities and affects in the city are both coproduced and pumped around, with much of the work done by an urban landscape that has become increasingly sentient. Finally, we want to show how all of this infrastructural activity produces even larger effects. Over time, it mixes all manner of beings together in a way that can genuinely be regarded as evolutionary. The increasing evidence for an Anthropocene bears out the way in which humanity has stamped its footprints on the planet by constructing urban forms that act as carriers for life.

Most books on the city, except those that involve ethnography, tend to start from the outside in; that is, they want to see the city as a whole and map aspects of it, or they want to see the city as an expression of a larger force. In contrast, we want to see the city from the inside out, not because we are looking for a false sense of intimacy but because cities work from the ground up. No matter how open and stretched the city may be, the combination of elements in each city varies in ways that are themselves constitutive, with the many elements of ‘infrastructure’, without which a city does not exist, becoming not just incidental, but central to how and what cities are: a rough analogy might be that infrastructure is now the urban equivalent of the machinery of breathing. The ‘machinic’ quality of infrastructure, we wish to argue, drags in all manner of actors, only some of whom are what we might conventionally call human. Without an understanding of this ground-level hum, the city is shorn of a large part of its existence, and the central part of how it is able to reproduce itself as a place. Without this knowledge, we cannot understand the importance that cities have gained in our times, an importance that can only grow as infrastructure becomes ever more pervasive.

Acquiring this knowledge requires making sense of the collectives formed and maintained by sociotechnical networks. It involves following these networks, rather than forcing the variegations at ground level into the received categories of theory or discipline. Generalizations have to derive from the reconstruction of the visible and hidden machinery of urban metabolism and organization, while accepting that they can only be provisional, given that the sociotechnical networks are themselves constantly reworked by their in-built technical and human intelligences. Thinking about the city in this aggregative and experimental way requires intellectual honesty, as we argue in Chapter 1, so that plural methods, intelligences and sensibilities can all be indexed, with the sciences and arts, and designated and lay experts, allowed equal opportunity to narrate the facts and stories of the sociotechnical city. Reconstructing the city ground-up requires making visible its hidden-in-plain-sight infrastructures and disclosing their force and performativity.

This is an important political project. Why? First, because the mix of actors the infrastructure enables is itself an important part of human history, since it is through this mixing that different connections and possibilities become apparent, that different visibilities hove into view, and that different kinds of being can be invented. Second, because each of the tramlines of infrastructure contains its own peculiar forms of cruelty as well as promise. We use the word cruelty knowingly, since we are talking here about machines that legislate who and what lives and who and what dies, and who and what lives in what form. Of course, the city has many infrastructural components, and we will touch on only some of them in this book. But we need to be clear that, in the final analysis, cities are systems for directing and for provisioning life in ways that produce immense combinatorial power and immense constraint. We are convinced that each of these infrastructures has its own pinch points, which themselves constitute political arenas. In other words, the understudied republic that is the infrastructure of the modern city can become the main focus of political action. This is our core argument.

We are talking here about a politics of leverage, a politics of small interventions with large effects, a politics of locating pinch points, and a politics of urban life as a trickster assemblage of like and unlike. Matters of infrastructural tuning and adjustment turn out to be key, whatever the arena. We are talking about what we can make of the commons that we have built ourselves, but continue to reserve for just a few human and nonhuman elites (Heise 2008). In other words, we conclude in favour of an urban politics of fair access to infrastructure – and fair infrastructure – in this book. Other kinds of politics exist, of course, none of which we are devaluing. Instead, we attempt to set out a politics true to the machine that the city is, which is able to convert often quite small interventions into very large gains for the many, without necessarily touching on what some have come to regard as the only available levers of change, whether planning or political party or revolution. We believe that major shifts in life chance really can come from the proto-political stuff of infrastructure, when it is, however briefly, switched into being as a political force. The city is brimful of these moments of opportunity.