Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T14:48:59.407Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Re-assembling Actor-Network Theory and urban history

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 April 2016

BERT DE MUNCK
BERT DE MUNCK*
Affiliation:
Centre for Urban History, University of Antwerp, Prinsstraat 13, Antwerp 2000, Belgium
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Few theories have left their mark on urban studies to the extent that Actor-Network Theory (ANT) has in the last few decades. Its background in Science and Technology Studies (STS), its critique of the explanatory value of such abstractions as ‘class’ and ‘society’ and its efforts to transcend society/nature and local/global binarisms inevitably challenged conventional views on cities, urbanization and urban phenomena. Economic and Marxist approaches to the city in particular have been challenged, at least to the extent that they invoke the explanatory force of the economy or capitalism as a global social system and, thus, fall back upon the binarisms under attack from ANT. The network approach questioned architectonic explanatory models (substructure vs. superstructure) and deepened our understanding of actors and agency (both emerging from networks of humans and non-humans). However, ANT has always been subject to criticism too.

Type
Special Section on urban agency
Information
Urban History , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , February 2017 , pp. 111 - 122
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 An overview in Farías, I. and Bender, T. (eds.), Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies (London and New York, 2010)Google Scholar. For an introduction, see Latour, B., Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford, 2005)Google Scholar. An instructive epistemological analysis is Harman, G., Prince of Networks. Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (Melbourne, 2009)Google Scholar.

2 See, e.g., Lee, N. and Brown, S., ‘Otherness and the actor network. The undiscovered continent’, American Behavioral Scientist, 36 (1994), 772–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Laurier, E. and Philo, C., ‘X-morphising: review essay of Bruno Latour's Aramis, or the Love of Technology ’, Environment and Planning A, 31 (1999), 1047–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hartwick, E.R., ‘Towards a geographical politics of consumption’, Environment and Planning A, 32 (2000), 1177–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 E.g. Murdoch, J., ‘Inhuman/nonhuman/human: Actor-Network Theory and the prospects for a nondualistic and symmetrical perspective on nature and society’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 15 (1997), 731–56, at 750CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Cf. Clark, P., European Cities and Towns, 400–2000 (Oxford, 2009)Google Scholar; Clark, P (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Cities in World History (Oxford, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 A recent synthesis is Pinol, J.-L. (ed.), Histoire de l'Europe urbaine, vol. I: De l'Antiquité au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 2003)Google Scholar.

6 See, e.g., Castree, N., ‘False antitheses? Marxism, nature and actor-networks’, Antipode, 34 (2002), 111–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Perkins, H.E., ‘Ecologies of actor-networks and (non)social labor within the urban political economies of nature’, Geoforum, 38 (2007), 1152–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 See, e.g., Simmel, G., ‘Die Grosstädte und das Geistesleben’, in Th. Von Petermann (ed.), Die Grossstadt. Vorträge und Aufsätze zur Städteausstellung, Jahrbuch der Gehe-Stiftung, Band 9 (Dresden, 1903), 185–206 Google Scholar; Park, R.E., ‘The city: suggestions for the investigation of behavior in the city environment’, American Journal of Sociology, 20 (1915), 579–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wirth, L., ‘Urbanism as a way of life: the city and contemporary civilization’, American Journal of Sociology, 44 (1938), 1–24 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hershberg, T., ‘The new urban history: toward an interdisciplinary history of the city’, Journal of Urban History, 5 (1978), 3–40 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 E.g. Malmberg, A. and Maskell, P., ‘Towards an explanation of regional specialization and industry agglomeration’, European Planning Studies, 5 (1997), 25–41 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Maskell, P. et al., Competitiveness, Localised Learning and Regional Development: Specialization and Prosperity in Small Open Economies (London, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Whitley, R.D., Divergent Capitalisms: The Social Structuring and Change of Business Systems (Oxford, 1999)Google Scholar; Bochma, R.A. and Kloosterman, R.C. (eds.), Learning from Clusters: A Critical Assessment from an Economic-Geographical Perspective (Dordrecht, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Lefebvre, H., La production de l'espace (Paris, 1974)Google Scholar.

10 Harvey, D., Social Justice and the City (Baltimore, 1973)Google Scholar, and idem, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Oxford, 1996); Swyngedouw, E., with Moulaert, F. and Rodriguez, A. (eds.), The Globalized City – Economic Restructuring and Social Polarization in European Cities (Oxford, 2003)Google Scholar; Swyngedouw, E., Designing the Post-Political City and the Insurgent Polis, Civic City Cahier 5 (London, 2011)Google Scholar.

11 See Swyngedouw, E., Social Power and the Urbanization of Water – Flows of Power (Oxford, 2004)Google Scholar; Heynen, N., Kaika, M. and Swyngedouw, E., In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism (London and New York, 2005)Google Scholar.

12 See, e.g., Le Goff, J., The Town as an Agent of Civilisation c. 1200–c. 1500 (London, 1971)Google Scholar.

13 See, e.g., Savage, M., Warde, A. and Ward, K., Urban Sociology, Capitalism and Modernity (Basingstoke, 2003) esp. ch. 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Cf. Saunders, P., Social Theory and the Urban Question (London, 1981)Google Scholar.

15 Christaller, W., Die zentralen Orte in Süddeutschland (Jena, 1933)Google Scholar; Mollenkopf, J.H. and Castells, M., Dual City: Restructuring New York (New York, 1991)Google Scholar; Fainstein, S.S., Gordon, I. and Harloe, M., Divided Cities: New York and London in the Contemporary World (Oxford, 1992)Google Scholar.

16 I. Farías, ‘Introduction: decentering the object of urban studies’, in Farías and Bender (eds.), Urban Assemblages, 1–24.

17 E.g. Bhambra, G.K., Rethinking Modernity. Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination (New York, 2007)Google Scholar.

18 Among others, see Graham, S. and Marvin, S., Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition (London, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Amin, A. and Thrift, N., Cities: Re-Imagining the Urban (Cambridge, 2002)Google Scholar.

19 See, e.g., Joyce, P., ‘The end of social history?’, Social History, 20 (1995), 73–91 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gunn, S., ‘From hegemony to governmentality: changing conceptions of power in social history’, Journal of Social History, 39 (2006), 705–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 My introduction to the concept of governmentality is based on Gordon, C., ‘Governmental rationality: an introduction’, in Burchell, G., Gordon, C. and Miller, P. (eds.), The Foucault Effect. Studies in Governmentality (Chicago, 1991), 1–52 Google Scholar. See also Barry, A., Osborne, T. and Rose, N. (eds.), Foucault and Political Reason. Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism, and Rationalities of Government (London, 1996)Google Scholar; Dean, M., Governmentality. Power and Rule in Modern Society (London, 1999)Google Scholar; Bröckling, U., Krasmann, S. and Lemke, T. (eds.), Gouvernementalität der Gegenwart. Studien zur Ökonomisierung des Sozialen (Frankfurt, 2000)Google Scholar; Bratich, J.Z., Packer, J. and McCarthy, C. (eds.), Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality (New York, 2003)Google Scholar.

21 An English translation of the crucial lectures: Foucault, M., Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collège de France (1978–1979) (Basingstoke, 2007)Google Scholar; Foucault, M., The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the College de France (1978–1979) (Basingstoke, 2008)Google Scholar.

22 Joyce, P., The Rule of Freedom. Liberalism and the Modern City (London, 2003)Google Scholar.

23 Otter, C., The Victorian Eye. A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910 (Chicago and London, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 See, e.g., Callon, M., ‘Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay’, in Law, John (ed.), Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge (London, 1986), 196–233 Google Scholar.

25 For an early introduction, see Callon, M. and Latour, B., ‘Unscrewing the big Leviathan: how actors macrostructure reality and how sociologists help them to do so’, in Knorr-Cetina, K. and Cicourel, A.V. (eds.), Advances in Social Theory and Methodology. Toward an Integration of Micro- and Macro-Sociologies (Boston, MA, 1981), 277–303 Google Scholar.

26 See n. 2. Also Swyngedouw, E., ‘The antinomies of the postpolitical city: in search of a democratic politics of environmental production’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 33 (2009), 601–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Latour, B., ‘Where are the missing masses? The sociology of a few mundane artifacts’, in Bijker, W.E. and Law, J. (eds.), Shaping Technology / Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 225–58Google Scholar.

28 For further discussions, see Callon, M. (ed.), The Laws of Markets (Oxford, 1998)Google Scholar; MacKenzie, D., Muniesa, F. and Siu, L. (eds.), Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics (Princeton, 2007)Google Scholar.

29 For an attempt to extend these ideas, see Amin and Thrift, Cities, esp. chs. 2 and 4.

30 Latour, B. and Woolgar, S., Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (Los Angeles, 1979)Google Scholar.

31 Latour, B., Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA, 1999)Google Scholar; Harman, Prince of Networks, esp. ch. 4.

32 One example is Latour, B., The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge, MA, 1988)Google Scholar.

33 Callon, (ed.), The Laws, and idem, ‘Why virtualism paves the way to political impotence’, Economic Sociology – the European Electronic Newsletter, 6 (2005), 3–20 Google Scholar.

34 Mitchell, T., Rule of Experts. Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, 2002)Google Scholar.

35 Latour, B., Nous n'avons jamais été modernes. Essai d'anthropologie symétrique (Paris, 1991)Google Scholar. In English: We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA, 1993).

36 A pioneering historical account of the so-called scientific revolution in this vein is Shapin, S. and Schaffer, S., Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, 1985)Google Scholar.