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Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift: Cities Reimagining the Urban. Polity Press, London 2002. Vii+184 pages.

Reimagining the Urban

(jfr) Cities: Reimagining the Urban is a short, densely written book. The authors are leading theoretical geographers from the U.K., and this joint work is the result of the six months they spent in 1999 as Fellows in residence at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences in Uppsala. The book is an up-to-the-minute theorization of what the authors refer to as the urban. Their writing is clear, but reading this text is nevertheless difficult, as their language, as is the case with so many postmodern authors, hovers fashionably between social science and poetics. One example of the sort of thing I have in mind appears on page 95: [] for the vitality of the virtual to be found in everydayness can be equated with [] Deleuzes notion of the lived as a set of virtualities, events, and singularities, endlessly making waves, the fiery line of the worlds breathing. The authors trace their philosophical lineage from Spinoza to Whitehead, Bergson, Lefebvre, Foucault, Deleuze, and Latour. They might have begun earlier, with Heraclitus. Essentially, theirs is a vitalist philosophy of becoming, of process, of constant change in which there are no longer fixed entities, only emergents. Nevertheless, their writing has a curiously structuralist character to the extent that, except for the last chapter on the political city, human agency all but disappears from view. We are confronted instead with terms such as machinic cities, diagrams of power, the transhuman, the transpersonal. It reminds one of Althussers history without acting subjects. Take diagrams of power, for example (pp. 106119), a term borrowed from Foucault via Deleuze. The Foucaudian idea

of a diagram is understood as an impulse without determinate goals, a functioning abstracted from any obstacle [] or function [which] must be detached from any specific use (p. 106). Four of these diagrams into which we are herded (the authors prefer to say selected) are the bureaucracy, production, sensuality, and imagination. In each case, the diagram provides an important map of a particular social field, illustrates its productive and passionate possibilities as a formation of power, and also points to new problems (pp. 107108). Quoting Gilles Deleuze they explain: There is no diagram that does not also include, besides the points which it connects up, certain relatively free and unbound points, points of creativity, change and resistance (p. 108). How sensuality and imagination come to function as diagrams of power is not altogether clear. The sensual is illustrated with reference to Charles Fouriers Harmony, and imagination is said to have two moments: dreams and play. But Fouriers Harmony was an urban utopia, and utopias at the beginning of the present century are under threat (p. 116). What we have instead, say Amin and Thrift, are media imaginings which activate and boost the imagination but also channel and limit it, precisely through the spread and utilization of the media in everyday life (ibid.). From here it is only a short jump (one page, in fact) to a discussion of the therapeutic model of the self, which is a continuous self (!) or body which can be narrated into existence at any time. This model (also referred to as an ethos) has three core elements. Citing the authority of Daniel Bells The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), they include: the notion of an emancipated self which becomes the touchstone of cultural judgement, an emotivist ethic in which the truth is grasped through sentiment or feeling, and the emergence of new elites skilled in articulating the demands and pathologies of the self (p.117). According to the authors, in the cities of many countries, key indicators such as the rise of therapy, and of judgements based on the pathologies produced by therapy (sic) are on a marked upturn. In other words, what is increasingly being practiced is a New Harmony based on a state and a citizenry united in their desire to institutionalize the therapeutic ethos []. The city therefore becomes a repository for all kinds of projects on and of the self (ibid.). I have cited from the section on diagrams of power at some length because I think the passage illustrates the authors peculiar form of argumentation. Had they identified the media, along with bureaucracy and production

as a diagram of power, their meaning would perhaps have been easier to follow. But the notion of the therapeutic self (and society!) is located under the general rubric of imagination as one of the four diagrams of power. And then, in a blizzard of references and quotes, we are suddenly treated to the likes of Anthony Giddens, Nicolas Rose, Michel Foucault, J. Nolan, and Daniel Bell a few of whose ideas are somehow collaged into an argument that runs for a mere paragraph, less than a page long. The discussion on diagrams of power concludes with the thought that the new practices of mimesis may be part of a more general and more major sea change in modern societies, a move away from a society based on systems of tight discipline [] towards societies based on performance and performativity which perform new kinds of value and new kinds of dominance [] (p.118). These practices presage new post-personal strategies and normativities which have not been available before, which depend on decentred subjectivities and highly unstable object fields (p.118). What any of this might mean leaves at least this reader in doubt. There is no question that this is a trendy book that toys with all of the latest terms, particularly those borrowed from the new field of cultural studies, the current favourite of avant garde geographers. But what are we to make of this as a theorization of the city? The authors are at pains to tell us that the city is not a container. In fact, they say, the city is inherently unknowable. It is both proximate and far, it is a set of flows that somehow come together at certain sites and then disperse again to other sites half-way around the world. Much of life is now experienced only virtually, on the computer screen. We are both here and there, we are in-between. Territory has become irrelevant; it is a form of cultural lag. It is firms, not cities that create urban dynamics. In a long argument contra Allen Scott and Michael Storper, the authors assert, first, that cities are sites of circulation, not forcing houses of competitiveness, nor the ground on which economic inputs and outputs combine (p. 52). Rather, they are sites of sociability that help to cement economic transactions. Second, if there is any grounding of the economy in cities, it is through the routinization of site practices. This might be, they suggest, through the density of informal institutions such as meeting places, or formal institutions offering business services and know-how (ibid.). Third, we must recover the role of demand: the city (or, alternatively, the urban) is primordially a site of consumption rather than production (pp. 5253).

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There is an inherent difficulty in reviewing a book of this sort. Where and how is one to disagree with this narrative? The pace is breathless, ideas follow each other in a dazzling display as though they were fireworks lighting up the night sky. It is even difficult to summarize the several linked essays, since each of them are condensations of ideas that are themselves, in many cases, speculative. Rather than attempting the impossible, and also to bring this review to a close, I want to pose the question of what this book has to offer to planners. And here, I think, I can be brief and succinct. Planning literature is barely mentioned, except for approving nods in the direction of Leonie Sandercock and Bent Flyvbjerg. Fair enough; the authors, one could argue, are, after all, geographers who are primarily concerned (contra Marx) with understanding the city, not with changing it. But that is not actually the case. Chapter 6 is all about the political city, albeit about a nonterritorial politics of citizens loosely modelled on the Progressive City movement in the early part of the 20th century in the United States. This is a strange chapter whose main purpose appears to be to reintroduce the human subject as an actor into the narrative of the machinic city and the everyday life lived in its microscopic spaces as a succession of orderly (and ordered) routines. But again, the authors are at pains to point out that the politics they have in mind is a politics without borders, a citizenship struggling to assert its universal right to the unbounded city and its spaces and sites. Towards the beginning of their study, Amin and Thrift refer to Walter Benjamins view of the phantasmagoric city, half fevered dream, half nightmare. Now, eighty years later, this reader emerged from Reimagining the Urban with a sense of having experienced just such a phantasmagoria. We are offered metaphors, images, neologisms in profusion, but its hard to hold on to anything concrete. The cover of the book has a lovely, colourful painting of San Francisco. It is a reassuring image of a physical reality, and is the kind of reality that remains when all the ghosts and spirits of postmodern theory have departed from my dream. Prof. Dr. John Friedmann, Vancouver