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Transurbanism
Nigel Thrift
a
a
University of Oxford, Parks Road
Published online: 16 May 2013.
To cite this article: Nigel Thrift (2004) Transurbanism, Urban Geography, 25:8, 724-734, DOI:
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TRANSURBANISM
1
Nigel Thrift
2
Life and Environmental Sciences Division
University of Oxford, Parks Road
United Kingdom
Abstract: This essay on transurbanism seeks to get closer to the workings of the contem-
porary city without falling back on previous theoretical technologies. In particular it forgoes the
humanist impulse and thus rather than looking at meaning it looks at performance. Four aspects
of the transurban approach to cities are focused upon: the postsocial world, tinkering, politics,
and affect. This way of looking at the city has implications for how we define urban life and for
a new politics of the city. [Key words: cities, transurbanism, nonrepresentational theory, affect.]
INTRODUCTION
It is all too easy to get trapped by the mounds of words. Cities have been written about
so many times in so many ways that moving off the well-established tramlines of com-
mentary and saying something new about the urban can prove excruciatingly difficult.
3
There is already a whole series of established theoretical-cum-empirical territories, all of
which have enthusiastic proponents, only a few of whom see any reason to change their
point of view. Indeed, some would say that nothing new needs to be said: we just need to
keep pointing to the terrible inequities that scar so many cities until something serious
gets done about them.
But there are, I think, good reasons for not doing just this
4
reasons which arise out of
three different realizations. One of these realizations is that centered perceptions of
the city ought to be viewed with suspicion: a summative view is neither possible nor
desirable. After Benjamin, such an ambition seems either too ambitious or too stilted.
1
I would like to thank the respondents and the audience at the original AAG session at which this paper was
given, and the participants at a workshop on Perceptions of the City, held in St. Johns College, Cambridge,
who were also subjected to its contents, and especially David Midgley.
2
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Nigel Thrift, Life and Environmental Sciences
Division, University of Oxford, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PD, United Kingdom; e-mail:
nigel.thrift@admin.ox.ac.uk
3
Though I have tried. I have worked on the city in its many manifestations for a long time now, covering topics
as diverse as various time-geographical interventions (Parkes and Thrift, 1980), the history of urban clock time
(Glennie and Thrift, 2004), the footprints left on contemporary cities by international finance (Amin and Thrift,
1992)and by dance (Thrift, 2000), and the impact of war on Vietnamese cities (Thrift and Forbes, 1985).
However, in recent years, my endeavors have been oriented in three main directions. First, I have attempted to
characterize new forms of urban space and time (e.g., May and Thrift, 2001). In particular, I have wanted to
move away from standard accounts of urban space and time, often influenced by authors like Simmel and Ben-
jamin, that liken the experience of cities to one of shock. Second, I have tried to produce books whose form can
take in the splintered, oligoptic nature of cities (e.g., Pile and Thrift, 2000). Third, I have wanted to sense
new forms of urban theory and politics based on expanded definitions of life and new kinds of mobile energet-
ics (e.g., Amin et al., 1999; Amin and Thrift, 2002).
4
To fend off any misunderstandings, I am certainly not saying there is no need to continue doing this! See
Amin et al. (1999) and Graham (2003).
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TRANSURBANISM 725
Another realization is that too much weight has been placed on representation as the key
aspect of the city. But, increasingly, scholars are turning to the practical, nonrepresenta-
tional moments of the city as the key to how and why cities are, and how they are experi-
enced and imagined and rolled over. But the final realization is that we may be getting
increasingly close to a world which is summative and which worships at the altar of rep-
resentation: the world of 24-hour real-time surveillance of just about everything. Though
that world may not be panoptic (well, not yet anyway) it is certainly, in Bruno Latours
(1998) felicitous phrase, oligoptic. There are, in other words, some big political stakes
to play for in trying to produce vocabularies and practices which will live and let live.
Given this minimal scene-setting, how can we get closer to the workings of the con-
temporary city without falling back on to standard theoretical technologies which are not
so much outdated as incorporated as one of many means of description of places, rather
like brands and trademarks? In a recent book on cities, Ash Amin and I have argued that
this requires foregoing the humanist impulse that still motivates so much writing on
cities, an impulse which sits uncomfortably with a world of postsocial relations which
rely on performance rather than meaning and demand an adequate mimetic reflexivity
rather than a full and fulsome coherence. Our work was meant to provide a transurban
take on cities which would start to construct this new kind of sensibility, in the same way
that a number of other authors have been trying to do. Brouwer et al. (2002, p. 7) stated
the guiding vision rather well:
Cities are growing increasingly complex, increasingly rich in internal and external
linkages, increasingly comprehensive and concentrated, increasingly transparent
and yet incomprehensible. Thats obvious as soon as you abandon the post-
position and move on to a trans- attitudein other words, when you consciously
go along with the developments instead of frantically trying to maintain a position
outside them.
In this paper, I want to consider some of the key aspects of that approach. They do not
constitute a finished theory of the city, not least because the transurban approach is scep-
tical that such a theory is possible or, indeed, that a finished theory is what is necessary.
But they do suggest where more emphasis needs to be placed if we are to both satisfy our
own intellectual curiosity and meet a pressing series of political imperatives that are
unfolding as these aspects are made more of by many actors, some of them too rich and
too powerful. In the limited space I have, this means that I have necessarily had to be
selective and will miss much out. For example, one of the keynotes of the transurban
approach is its emphasis on mobility and flow. But much, perhaps too much, has already
been written on that topic and I cannot face the dubious pleasures of another exposition
(but see Cresswell [2001], Crang [2003] and Topic [2003] for excellent interventions) or
another rehearsal of the absurdities of invoking notions like scale in an attempt to domes-
ticate it. Similarly, the transurban approach is concerned to emphasize that process
involves a host of times and spaces whose interactions and interferences are not inciden-
tal but constitutive.
5
Again, much has been written on this issue and its consequences and
5
An exciting new tradition of architecture is working out the insights gained from theory in practice (e.g.,
Lynn, 1999; Wigley, 2000).
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726 NIGEL THRIFT
there seems little profit to be had from reprising it. Finally, I do not want to point to the
way in which the transurban approach tries to work across all communicative registers,
rather than just concentrating on the visual (cf. Finnegan, 2002). The turn to performance
has already underlined the paucity of too much current work on the citys signs of life and
the exciting horizons that are opened up when the city is acted out as an all-singing,
all-dancing phenomenon.
6
Instead, I want to concentrate on four aspects of the transurban approach which have
received less attention but which seem crucial to me as avatars. These aspects form the
main sections of the paper. The first is taking the nonhuman
7
aspect of cities much more
seriously. Cities keep getting loaded up with new thingsfrom new technologies to new
kinds of biotawhich can radically change the terms of trade between classes and gender
and ethnic groups and what have you just by forcing the relations between them into new
conjunctions and alignments (Buchli and Lucas, 2001; Whatmore, 2002). More funda-
mentally, they may presage new postsocial ways of being.
The second is the continual process of tinkering. Cities are objects which show better
than most the truth of Franois Jacobs dictum that evolution does not so much create as
tinker. Like biological systems, cities work with what is available, with odds and ends,
and so much of what cities produce consists of minor variations on existing structures.
Social scientists have been very good at spotting the big themes but these minor varia-
tions still seem to elude them, even though they use code words like everyday life to
articulate the uncomfortable feeling that something rather important is going on that they
are not quite getting at.
8
Novelists and other artists have been much better at giving voice
to this kind of low-key creativity, perhaps because they are themselves so often a part of
it (Blum, 2003).
The third aspect is the practice and content of politics. Cities are so diverse and so
awash with different claims that it is doubtful that there could ever be anything approach-
ing complete agreement about what cities are about or about what to do with them. At
various times in history they have also meant quite different things to quite different
groups of people as new political forms and functions and imaginaries have produced
their own footprints on the city. But this creatively agonistic to and fro of political
practice plays to some basic ground rules which are very rarely challenged at all (Brady,
2003).
The fourth aspect is affect. Cities are sources of numerous affective intensities which
surge through them in ways we do not really understand but which form a constantly
moving map that we can ill afford to ignore, especially in an age when the mass media are
6
Thus, for example, I have spent a good deal of time working on contemporary modes of urban performance,
and especially dance, for a number of reasons. One, because it provides an unparalleled archive of expressive
knowledges of the very small spaces and times I am primarily interested in. Two, because it relates to so many
of the theoretical themes which are currently in vogue (e.g., embodied practice) but does not just stop there.
Three, because it is replete with the powers of invention that I am interested in stimulating.
7
This is, of course, a problematic term, since it assumes an unproblematic divide between humans and nonhu-
mans which looks increasingly absurd.
8
See the wonderful paper by Jain (2002) on this aspect of cities, drawn against the backcloth of the gendered
use of mobile phones.
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TRANSURBANISM 727
able to act as a very effective means of dissemination and amplification (Blackman and
Walkerdine, 2001).
There is some evidence to suggest that these four aspects are currently changing in
lockstep. And as they do so they may be bringing about quite general changes in urban
perception and perception of the urban. Hence the current emphasis on iconic phrases like
time-space compression, mobility, and the like. But, though I think some quite significant
changes are afoot, I would want to distance myself from these kinds of characterizations.
Not only are they too easy but they seem to me to demand the kind of synchronization of
historical processes which, both as a convinced Tardean/Latourian and as someone who
has worked on the historical record of temporal practices, I find difficult to believe could
ever actually happen in practice. No, cities must be thought of as transductive entities in
which contingency or indeterminacy participates in the constitution of collectives
(Mackenzie, 2002, p. 3).
THE POSTSOCIAL WORLD
The first aspect of a transurban approach that I want to address is new things appearing
in the city which begin to reconfigure all its relations (as well, of course, as a corollary,
all the things that disappear) and which form a material culture which acts as a kind of
Petri dish for the orderings we doggedly continue to call the social. There are so many of
these material interventions now, interventions which by their very ubiquity are changing
our perception of what perception is, that some writers would have it that we live in a
postsocial world in which social principles and relations are emptying out and being
replaced by other cultural elements and relationships, and most notably objects.
Postsocial theory analyses the phenomenon of a disintegrating traditional social
universe, the reasons for this disintegration and the direction of changes. It attempts
to conceptualize postsocial relations as forms of sociality which challenge core
concepts of human interaction and solidarity, but which nonetheless constitute
forms of binding self and other. The changes also affect human sociality in ways
which warrant a detailed analysis in their own right (Knorr Cetina, 2001, p. 520).
Certainly, there is some evidence to back this point of view up. One example is the
screen. Screens have become a quintessential urban experience, inhabiting all corners of
urban life, from shop windows to check-outs, from doctors surgeries to airports, from
bars to homes, as Anna McCarthys excellent (2001) book and Karin Knorr-Cetinas
work on financial markets both showed so well. Another example is software (Thrift and
French, 2002). All around us an extraordinary new underlay of mechanical writing is
coming in to existence, namely the line upon line of code to be found in objects as mun-
dane as an electric toothbrush (with its 3,000 lines of code) or as vital as the automobile
(with its millions of lines of code). Cities now possess a genuine faerie realm which
ghosts almost every human activity and which is even changing what we can regard as its
material surfaces. This realm makes more and more of what we used to regard as our
decisions and continually pushes human bodies here and there.
Screens and software form a large part of the paratextual dimension of cities, frames
which form a banal background to the activation of urban life rather than the activities
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728 NIGEL THRIFT
themselves, the tramlines or relays of perception if you like. Within and born out of
those frames we can currently see a new track and trace spatial imaginary being born,
an imaginary which relies on a standardization of space which follows on from the stan-
dardization of time in the late 19th century but which has only begun to take place very
recently. This standardization consists of a whole series of conventions concerning the
make-up of space embodied in technologies like global positioning systems, geographical
information systems and various kinds of local-global wireless devices like radio
frequency identifier tags which, when put together, make everything in the city, at least
in principle, continuously locatable. In turn, these technologies not only allow space to be
used in quite different ways but will also make certain classic urban experiences (like
getting lost) very difficult to achieve (so much for drives!) as they generate a new kind
of urban background (Thrift, 2003b).
TINKERING
The second aspect of the transurban approach is its focus on opportunities for tinkering
which I will approach through the issue of consumption. There is a tendency in many
writings on the city to set up a complaint that cities are being evacuated of all creative
impulse by the forces of capitalism: there is a kind of commercial laying waste of urban
culture going on, usually illustrated by icons of consumer capitalism like the shopping
mall and the rehabilitated city center. I have always been deeply skeptical of these
accounts and not just because they are historically dubious (e.g., Orlin, 2000), misrecog-
nize the incredible diversity of the practices of what we call consumption, and in
general try to obtain a purity of critique which I think is delusory (cf. Miller et al., 1998).
While not meaning to be uncritical of all kinds of ugly manifestations of commercial
cultures, it seems to me that cities are still brimful of creative vernacular tinkerings with
mass consumer products. Take the case of music. I always think here of Ruth Finnegans
(1989) wonderfully ahead-of-its-time book, The Hidden Musicians, which managed to
find all kinds of musical activity going on even in the unlikely setting of 1970s Milton
Keynes. I think there is no reason to believe that things have got worse since and a lot of
reason to believe that things have got better, mainly because music has become much
easier to create and record as a result of the rise of technologies and databases which
make it much easier to access and produce music.
I can illustrate the same point in a different way this through an urban art form which
has been neglected by so many, namely domestic gardening. Gardening just doesnt
arrive on the radar screen of most urban commentators: it is seen as irredeemably petit
bourgeois, culturally stereotypical and as simply an embroidery of the hard facts of con-
sumer property with none of the consolations of collective goods like city parks. But I
agree with Daniels (2000, p. 32) that in a country like Britain domestic gardening is an
important urban art formBritains most creative contribution to the visual arts
which has been unjustly neglected because it bears none of the signs of artistic life. But
for many ordinary British people, gardening provides an important expressive outlet,
for at least four reasons. One is that it requires a wide range of aesthetic skills, though
these are often born out of active bodily engagement rather than contemplation and appli-
cation. The second is that it requires an evolutionary sense: how things will look as they
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TRANSURBANISM 729
grow in to each other in the future.
9
Third, it requires a sensitivity to the environment and
a certain amount of desire to care for it. And, fourth, it is as beset by style wars as any
other artistic project. In Britain, certainly, domestic gardening is currently undergoing
something of a renaissance, in part precisely because a rampant commercialization has
made its delights and frustrations open to a wider audience (Lee, 2002).
POLITICS
The third aspect of transurbanism that I want to take up is its sense of the political
stakes that are at issue. I think we are beginning to understand certain aspects of cities
spatial grammar of powerand the kinds of politics that are possible in citieswhich
have often remained opaque up until now. When I want to talk about urban politics I
usually fall back on John Deweys (1927/1991) book The Public and its Problems. Part
of Deweys mission in this book was to make war on pre-formed notions of what consti-
tuted political arenas replete with their own causal forces (like the state or the community;
see Joseph, 2002) in favor of notions of different publics more or less constantly forming
themselves. Thus, for Dewey political democracy has emerged as a kind of net conse-
quence of a vast multitude of responsive adjustments to a vast number of situations, no
two of which were alike, but which tended to converge to a common outcome (p. 84).
Given this piecemeal history, political democracy can be made up of many different
strands of political history which can give different places quite different political styles
and notions of political rectitude (Czarniawska, 2002; McCleod et al., 2003), styles and
notions which can be changed if the political will can be constructed.
Take just one example: the realization that a spatial grammar of power intrudes upon
the modern British city system in ways which have really not changed all that much over
many hundreds of years: I refer here to the spatial structure of political talk (Amin et al.,
2003). In Britain, this structure took its model from the monarchy and it has changed very
little with the advent of democracy: British cities uncomplainingly echo its form and
channel its centralizing imperatives. Take the example of the all but colonial relationship
between London and the other cities of Britain. There we can see how it is accepted as a
political fact of life that a very small part of London should have the right to talk the
political agenda of the rest of Britain into existence. This small area has within it all of the
chief political institutions: Whitehall, party headquarters, press offices and consultancies,
bars and restaurants, and so on through which a constant round of talk circulates. But it
would be foolish to reduce all the talk generated by this interpretive machine to simply
the mobilization of the interconnections between its constituent parts. It is much more
than this, for it consists of a series of descriptions and re-descriptions of the world which
have their own force and liveliness. It is a metropolitan talk machine which assumes that
its interests are those of everyone else, that the world can only be seen from this small
space, a self-fulfilling prophecy if there ever was one, and one that has proved very
9
I have read a lot of the theoretical works of Paul Klee recently (cf. Harrison et al., 2004) and it is surprising
just how many of the tenets of modern art that he lists would be able to be laid claim to by many domestic
gardens.
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730 NIGEL THRIFT
damaging to the practice of democracy in Britain. But it is only now that serious thought
is being given to how to combat this kind of discursive exclusion.
AFFECT
By way of moving toward a conclusion, what, I think, links these three urban manifes-
tations is affect.
10
And what I believe to be one of the most compelling problems now
facing those studying the city is how to take affect into our urban accounts. Whether it be
the happy shouts of children at play, the muffled screams of domestic violence, the glee
as house prices rise, the oceanic roar of a football crowd, the ugly confrontations of road
rage (Katz, 1999), the dolour of a funeral, the passion of an anti-war march, or the highs
of clubbing (Malbon, 1999), to take just a very few examples, cities are shot through with
and continually generate affect. Yet, only recently have we begun to think of cities in this
way or to consider how affect is mobilized: how and in what ways new technologies
stimulate new affective investments, why music and gardening can have such strong
emotional resonances, how political backgrounds can generate affects like indifference,
and so on. But one thing we do know. Space is a crucial element of this mobilization: it
is one of the chief means by which intensity is constructed and maintained and that pro-
cess has important political resonances which we need to examine both theoretically and
empirically, most especially in the construction of very small spaces and times which can
have very large consequences (Thrift, 2004).
Such a task is only underlined by the fact that urban space and time are being more
explicitly designed to invoke affective responses according to the practical and theoreti-
cal knowledges of affect that have been derived from a host of sources. It could be
claimed that this has always been the case from monuments to triumphal processions,
from stadiums to masques, and I would have to agree. But what is different now is both
the gathering together of knowledges of affect (whether from formal theoretical back-
10
There are, of course, many different definitions of affect (see Thrift, 2003a). The one I prefer is
quasi-Deleuzian:
Affects are virtual synesthetic perspectives anchored in (functionally limited by) the actually existing, par-
ticular things that embody them. The autonomy of affect is its openness. Affect is autonomous to the degree to
which it escapes confinement in the particular body whose vitality, or potential for interaction, it is. Formed,
qualified, situated perceptions and cognitions fulfilling functions of actual connection or blockage are the cap-
ture and closure of affect. Emotion is the most intense (most contracted) expression of that capture and of the
fact that something has always and again escaped. Something remains unactualized, inseparable from but
unassimalable to any particular, functionally anchored perspective. That is why all emotion is more or less
disorienting, and why it is classically described as being outside of oneself, at the very point at which one is
most intimately and unshareably in contact with oneself and ones vitality. . Actually existing, structured things
live in and through why escapes them. Their autonomy is the autonomy of affect.
The escape of affect cannot but be perceived, alongside the perceptions that are its capture. This side-percep-
tion may be punctual, localized in an event. When it is punctual, it is usually described in negative terms, as a
form of shock (the sudden interruption of functions of connection). But it is also continuous, like a background
perception that accompanies every event, however quotidian. When the continuity of affective escape is put
into words, it tends to take on positive connotations. For it is nothing less than the perception of ones own
vitality, ones sense of aliveness, of changeability (often described as freedom. Ones sense of aliveness is
a continuous nonconscious self-perception (unconscious self-reflection or self-referentiality). It is the percep-
tion of this self-perception, its naming and making conscious, that allows affect to be effectively analyzedas
long as a vocabulary can be found for that which is imperceptible but whose escape from perception cannot but
be perceived, as long as one is alive (Massumi, 2002, pp. 233234).
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TRANSURBANISM 731
grounds like psychoanalysis or practical theoretical backgrounds like performance) and
the sheer weight of available cues in the shape of the profusion of images and other signs
and the more general designs of events that have become available. Though many of
these knowledges have not made their way in to the gaze of the formal academic sphere,
they are of increasing importance in framing how we live (e.g., design, event manage-
ment, logistics, music). They bear the means of constructing affective response, often out
of very little at all, and have become a fertile new field of persuasion and manipulation
of attention.
These developments in the generation and manipulation of affect are beginning to
inspire a number of new kinds of political project (Thrift, 2003a). One such project has as
its motto Nietzsches (1968, p. 263) phrase Between two thoughts all kinds of affects
play their game; but their motions are too fast, therefore we fail to recognize them. But
today the dense series of counterloops among cinema, TV, philosophy, neurophysiology
and everyday life mean that we do recognize the realm between thinking and affects and
are beginning to outline a neuropolitics (Connolly, 2002) that might work with them. It
is a politics that recognizes that political concepts and beliefs can never be reduced to
disembodied tokens of argumentation. Culture has multiple layers, with each layer
marked by distinctive speeds, capacities and levels of linguistic complexity (Connolly,
2002, p. 45). Take difference and identity as one example of this geology of thinking. The
political literature in this area has tended to foreground signification at the expense of
affect and has therefore enacted culture as a flat world of concepts and beliefs which can
be changed simply by engraining other new concepts and beliefs. It might be possible to
point to (and domesticate) the vagaries of thinking in everyday life via a concept like
habitus but that is about it. But difference and identity isnt like that. It operates on several
registers, each with their own organizations and complexities. So,
on one register it is a defined minority that deviates from the majority practice. On
a second, it is a minority that varies from other constituencies in a setting where
there is no definitive majority. On a third, it is that in an identity (subjective or
intersubjective) that is obscured, suppressed, or remaindered by its own dominant
tendencies ... as in the way devout Christians may be inhabited by fugitive forget-
fulness and doubts not brought up for review in daily conversations or in church, or
in the way that militant atheists may tacitly project life forward after death when not
concentrating on the belief that consciousness stops with the death of the body. The
third register of difference fades into a fourth, in which surpluses, traces, noises,
and charges in and around the beliefs of embodied agents express proto-thoughts
and judgements too crude to be conceptualized in a refined way but still intensive
and effective enough to make a difference to the selective way judgements are
formed, porous arguments are received, and alternatives are weighted. And in a
layered, textured culture, cultural argument is always porous. Some of the elements
in such a fugitive fund might be indicated, but not of course represented, by those
noises, stutters, gestures, looks, accents, exclamations, gurgles, bursts of laughter,
gestures and rhythmic or irrhythmic movements that inhabit, punctuate, inflect and
help to move the world of concepts and beliefs. (Connolly, 2002, p. 4344)
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732 NIGEL THRIFT
So we require a micropolitics of the subliminal, much of which operates in the
half-second delay between action and cognition, a micropolitics which understands the
kind of biological-cum-cultural gymnastics that takes place in this realm which is increas-
ingly susceptible to new and sometimes threatening knowledges and technologies that
operate upon it in ways that produce effective outcomes, even when the exact reasons
may be opaque, a micropolitics which understands the insufficiency of argument to polit-
ical life without, however, denying its pertinence (Thrift, 2000). That micropolitics might
be thought to be composed of three main and closely related components. One is
quasi-Foucauldian and consists of attention to the arts of the self of the kind already sig-
nalled. The second is an ethic of cultivation, an ethico-political perspective which
attempts to instill generosity toward the world by utilizing some of the infrasensible
knowledges that we have already encountered on a whole series of registers (Connolly,
2002). The third involves paying much greater attention to how new forms of space and
time are being constituted. In an era in which several new forms of time and space have
been born (e.g., cinematic time and the movement image, standardized space and the
ability to track and trace) this latter component seems particularly pressing.
CONCLUSIONS
There is, of course, much more I could write on the transurban approach. But what I
want to underline is the fact that currently we are very gradually starting to tackle whole
dimensions of the collective and eventful life of the city that until recently were regarded
as out of court. As we do so we are also having to redefine what we regard as urban life,
accepting that urban life might be both less and more than we have hitherto imagined and
attempting to locate what I call a politics of generosity that can add lightness to how we
go about that task of redefinition (Sennett, 2003). None of this is meant to suggest that
older styles of politics do not continue to be important or worthy or, indeed, vital, but it
is to suggest that new kinds of politics are being born in contemporary cities which we
would be foolish and shortsighted to ignore.
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