added more reflections

Author: lilydemet

reading.html

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                 <a href="#racial-feralization">>"Racial Feralization" (Valayden 2016) </a>
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+                <a href="#productive-tensions">>"Productive tensions?" (Martinez et al. 2021) </a>
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                     <b> Amin, Ash, and N. J. Thrift. 2017. <i>Seeing like a City</i>. Polity Press.</b>
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+                    <p>
+                        <i>Seeing Like A City</i> extolled the primacy/importance of infrastructure, arguing for the necessity of attention to and investment in urban infrastructure as a commons meant to benefit all.
+                        <span class="brmedium"></span>
+                        Amin and Thrift variously frame the city as a "machine" (), "as a sum of assemblages" (22), and "an infrastructural entanglement with considerable formative agency" (). They refer to "citiness" as "the combined vitality and political economy of urban sociotechnical systems" (3), where the sociotechnical systems considered are 1. urban metabolic systems, 2. mutual access choreographed by the navigation systems and infrastructure, and 3. human identity and affect as influenced by the (vital) urban landscape (4). "We want to see the city from the inside out" (4), they claim, and narrate citiness from the ground up. However, while the reader is assured "city never becomes City" (60), I found the book to rather imply city = City. I wished a specific city were explored, or attention payed to what specificity gives us and what it does not.
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+                        Opening with the core argument that "the infrastructure of the modern city can become the main focus of political action" (6), they conclude with a politics of infrastructure. A politics of infrastructure, they conclude, requires 1. visibilizing repair and maintenance work (recollecting artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles who Luke told me about) (84); 2. redesigning institutions which are no longer fit for purpose; 3. making intercessors for infrastructure (87); 4. changing infrastructures from tramlines to something that offers a sense of possibility (89); 5. a new vision of the world where all things form a constituency (90); and 6. injecting these into the interactions of everyday life.   
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+                        Though their drawing from assemblage theory and some ATP gives space for the city to be more than the sum of its flows and infrastructure, again and again I got the sense that infrastructure, as ultimately the target of an exigent policy redesign, was something concrete, mediating the urban experience of space (51). "Infrastructure is a structure of contact that also defines what shows up as real at any juncture... It is the gross material of materiality" (). Additionally, though infrastructure is political as well as procedural (89), there were moments where I thought an urban political ecology analytic was in contrast—for example, the "natural sound" (52) of birds and such was contrasted to the mechanical noises of the urban milieu, and cities rendered as an "artificial environment" (43). 
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+                    <p>
+                        Planetary urbanization, mentioned once only and on the 1st page, is implicitly eschewed in favor of a more relational approach. Though not in the index, they appear to espouse the "urban age" thesis, indeed beginning "with an audit of the world significance of cities" (11). 
+                        <br>
+                        <span style="padding-left:30px;"> I actually read the Martinez et al. (2021) paper on the productive tensions across planetary urbanization and urban age theses midway through writing this reflection, as it was really unclear to me how Amin and Thrift were approaching cities. I do believe it's more in an urban age vein, though the way they think about dynamicity even as they forward a policy agenda might portend the melding of the two. </span>
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+                        However, Amin and Thrift <i>do</i> emphasize the extensive and intensive nature of urban infrastructure, framing the history of anthropocene as history of urbanization (1) and dedicating an entire chapter to how "cities are one of the main products and producers of the Anthropocene" (). 
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+                    <p> I noticed actually that multiple turns of phrase or conceptual framings articulated in <i>Seeing Like A City</i> (2017) were taken up and extended by <i>Lively Cities</i>' "minor ecology of infrastructure": the focal shift from matter to materials (82), the idea of "meshwork" (116-119) and the idea of a lively city. 
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+                        Overall, the Amin and Thrift clearly enjoyed writing this book, and the illustrations were beautiful. It was a breeze to read, but theoretically fell short for me. I also thought the way they used their citations held them back a sense. For example, in discussing how cities think through eliciting and parsing feedback, they are quick to clarify that cities do not think in the same way as people. More so they demonstrate the "noncorrelational thought" of, you guessed it, autistics. Then, and I kid you not, two sentences later they literally cite Erin Manning's <i>Always More Than One</i>—a lesser hyped but in my opinion beautifully sparse, in comparison to later books, account of the more-than, choreography, and autistic perception. But how do they use it? To mark the multiplicity of "'scales and registers of life, both organic and inorganic' (Manning, 2013, p. 226), that resonate together in all manner of dispositional ways" (82-83). It just felt like they were not moved by their references the way Barua was.
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+                <a name="productive-tensions" id="productive-tensions"></a>
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+                    <b> Martinez, Ricardo, Tim Bunnell, and Michele Acuto. 2021. “Productive Tensions? The ‘City’ across Geographies of Planetary Urbanization and the Urban Age.” <i>Urban Geography</i> 42 (7): 1011–22.</b>
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+                        I read this in order to clarify my reading response for <i>Seeing Like A City</i> (2017), as it seems Amin and Thrift eschew planetary urbanization for a more relational approach, but then cite the urban age. So, my question is, are planetary urbanization and the urban age the same thesis? 
+                        <!-- I have not yet read intensively on planetary urbanization (which I will just as soon as I finish my reading summaries from <i>On This Patch of Grass</i> to "Racial Feralizations"), but from my understanding  -->
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+                       To answer: definitely not! The urban age thesis emerged in 2007 half the global population were deemed to be living in areas defined as urbanized. While urban age discourses collapse the urban and the city by emphasizing the latter as a political and economic driver, planetary urbanization (as I knew already) de-centers "the city" as a discreet and bounded place, shifting focus instead to the "relentless modification of the socio-spatial conditions of the planet under late capitalism" (1013). Planetary urbanization recognizes urbanization processes as multiscalar and extensive, enrolling areas not discreetly urban. Thus, "By transcending the urban/rural dualism - a key assumption underlying the partitioning of urban and rural areas that sustains the urban age thesis - capital accumulation, state regulation, common resources privatization, or socio-environmental degradation are conceptualized as constitutive processes of the planetary urban condition, rather than socio-spatial qualities ascribed to specific types of settlements" (1016). Attention to areas outside city limits enrolled in processes of urbanization is required lest we fall into methodological cityism. Whereas the urban age framing persists in multilateral policy practice, planetary urbanization is increasingly a commonplace framework in academic theorizing.   
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+                        Citing limited exchange between the two theses, this paper seeks to bring them into conversation. Planetary urbanization's transcendence of dualisms, the authors argue, risks missing local practices when the city is approached as a political community. Finally, they suggest two pathways for "more-than-academic intervention" through "critical and strategic deployment of the city as a concept" (1018) or "heuristic" (1017). First, 
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+                        <span class="block-quote">
+                            "recognition of significant work that has been done to insert the experiences of Southern cities into global policy agendas, and the possibilities that this holds for further critical diversification of what is understood by 'urban' challenges in those agendas. Deeper appreciation of the diverse forms, trajectories and capacities of cities in the majority world (among academics as well as multilateral agency actors) is an important corrective in its own right to inherited, normative conceptions of 'the city' based on historical experiences in the North...Southern urbanism could infuse global urban policy with more critical accounts of contemporary urban conditions, including those associated with planetary urbanization."
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+                        And second, "foreground[ing] human dimensions of various geographies of urban transformation" (1019), re-valuing the city as a site of local political communities where the right to the city is, at a policy level, disentangled from the city-centric logics of provisioning markets and privatizing public assets (2017). 
+                        This work, of "disentangl[ing] the legitimation of specific urban normative imaginaries within the very discursive space that has engendered them", the authors suggest are "scholarly efforts" (1017). Does this reiterate an academic-policy divide, where the latter taking up theories of the former will 'get it wrong' without scholarly intervention?  
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+                        Anyway, probably written more than enough for this paper but it did absolutely answer my question and is a good point of reference. I'll likely understand more once I've read & metabolized the planetary urbanization readings for my comps. </p>
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