Qual Sociol (2010) 33:583589

DOI 10.1007/s11133-010-9167-8
SPECIAL ISSUE ON KNOWLEDGE IN PRACTICE

Urban ANTs: A Review Essay

Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies.
Ignacio Faras and Thomas Bender (Eds.). New York: Routledge. 2010.
ISBN 0415486629. 333 pages, $150.00 (cloth)
David J. Madden

Published online: 17 June 2010

# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010

The field of urban studies is not only an observer of the city but also a participant in its struggles.
By framing the city as essentially distinct from the suburb or the village; by making the city
knowable as a territory that can be acted upon in particular ways; by intervening in debates
about urban policy; or by legitimizing controversial political projectsin myriad ways, urban
studies contributes to shaping the object of its research gaze. One of the tasks for urban studies,
then, should be able to account for how urban practice and urban knowledge bring each other
into being. This task is particularly urgent during this period when urbanists are, once again,
speaking of the fields crisis, confusion, and fragmentation (May and Perry 2005; Amin 2007).
Hence the topic of Urban Assemblages is an important and timely one. It is an inquiry into
(and a demonstration of) how the field of urban studies is changed by actor-network theory, a
type of sociology developed through the study of science, technology and knowledge.
In Urban Assemblages, Ignacio Faras and Thomas Bender have collected a number of
articles that probe the city using analytical tools developed by actor-network theory (often
referenced by its initials, ANT). The volume also includes interviews with three
geographers and sociologistsNigel Thrift, Stephen Graham and Rob Shieldswho have
brought ideas from ANT into the study of the urban. The book presents some of the major
ideas of a discourse that is already an influential and growing resource for urban sociology
and other nearby fields like geography, urban design and architecture. So Urban
Assemblages is a vital, even necessary, contribution. Yet when it comes down to it, ANT
changes urban studies in many ways and not all of them are improvements. ANT does have
something original to add to urban studies, but its role should probably be limited. Urban
Assemblages is not uncritical in its adoption of ANT for urban studies, but it does not go far
enough in working through the potential problems raised by the actor-network portrayal of
the city. Some well-known sticking points within ANT become even sharper when it is
brought into urban sociology; some necessary urban questions are impossible to ask using
ANT alone. A little ANT can help urbanists see the city anew; a lot of ANT would leave
urban studies intellectually and politically impoverished.

D. J. Madden (*)
Sociology Program, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000, USA
e-mail: dmadden@bard.edu

584

Qual Sociol (2010) 33:583589

Very briefly: ANT, the sociology of associations or sociology of translation, sees all
things as networks of actors. Networks are working alliances of multifarious composition.
Actors, or actants, are, as the name implies, things that actanything that resists, impacts
or translates other things. Actants in ANT, famously, are human as well as non-human,
animate as well as inanimate, material as well as ideational, large and small, those things
called natural, cultural, and social. As Bruno Latour puts it in an early programmatic
statement, ANT starts from the ideas of irreducibility and infinite combinability: Nothing
can be reduced to anything else, nothing can be deduced from anything else, everything
may be allied to everything else (Latour 1993, p. 163). Despite the word theory in its
name, ANT is not a theory. It is a method for framing field sites and research objects. It is
an argument for what sociology should and should not be. And it is an account of what
exists and a linked set of claims about how to generate valid knowledge about the world;
along these lines, Harman (2009) refers to ANTs metaphysics. Staunchly opposed to
essentialism of any sort, ANT sees the world as immanent, contingent, absolutely
heterogeneous, and as ontologically flat, disclosing no other levels, final explanations or
hidden core. ANT is thoroughly constructivist, although it has a number of smart criticisms
to make of the language of social construction (Latour 2003). Whereas social construction
says, that which appears natural is actually social, ANT sees the society/nature division
itself as an effect that needs to be analyzed and completely rejects the stability of the
social or the natural as categories. It claims, in contrast: that which appears to be one
thing is actually a temporary negotiated settlement between many different things while
refusing to take an a priori position on the status of these things.
The prime ANT injunction is to follow the actors themselves (Latour 2005b,
p. 12). This should be done while staying true to the principle of generalized symmetry
(Callon 1986), which holds that human and nonhuman actors should be described using
common concepts. It is impossible to point to a set of findings or conclusions to be drawn
from actor-network studies, although certain network tendencies have been noted. Studies
in this tradition often uncover the heterogeneity and multiplicity of ostensibly wellintegrated networks. Actants often attempt to make themselves obligatory passage
points which are necessary for the continued success of the network. When all is running
correctly, networks often manage to black box themselves, hiding their artificiality
under the illusion of integrality. This black boxing only becomes apparent when networks
fall apart due to quasi-entropic decay, strategic missteps or intentional refusal on the part
of one or another actant.
Arguably ANTs encounter with urban studies is not a new introduction so much as a
reunion. ANTs attention to the interrelationships between humans and nonhumans; its
attraction to the mechanic and the technical; its curiosity about what happens behind the
closed doors of the laboratory or the trading floor; its focus on infrastructure, linkage and
decayin a variety of ways, ANT could be considered a twin, or even a mutant outgrowth,
of urban studies itself. Since the beginning of the 20th century if not longer, urbanists were
describing society as an agglomeration of networks, and not only when talking about linked
technological systems. The urbanist idea of the production of space entails a critique of
abstract knowledge, essentialism and boundedness that is not disharmonious with some
ANT tenets, and it foregrounds considerations of materiality in ways that are in accordance
with ANT. The intercourse between the putatively natural and the putatively social is an old
topic in urban geography. Some versions of urban studies independently evolved many of
ANTs characteristic traits; Latour (2005b, p. 11) has called William Cronons (1992)
Natures Metropolis a masterpiece of ANT even though Cronon wrote his history before
encountering that literature.

Qual Sociol (2010) 33:583589

585

Urban studies and the actor-network perspective have an undeniable affinity. If ANTs
philo-scientism endears it to the technocratic wing of urban studies, ANTs aesthetic avantgardism appeals to urbanologys counterculture. Indeed, part of ANTs brilliance is its
modernistic literary styling. Latours semi-fictional Aramis, or the Love of Technology
(1996), written in multiple voices including that of a public transport system, is a work of
sociological cubism. As a genre, it specializes in the surrealistic juxtaposition of
incongruous things: scallops make decisions, microbes make Louis Pasteur, scientific
instruments and office supplies have agency alongside protest movements and government
programs. The ANT imaginary is filled with hybrids, cyborgs and monsters. It is no wonder
that ANTs marriage of data and Dada has found a following within urban studies, which
has long been attracted to the new wave, the futuristic, and the ultramodern and also long
been fascinated with the arcane, the eccentric, and the uncanny. And some qualities of cities
themselves might make urban studies particularly fertile territory for ANT. Where subway
lines can be shut down by distant signal failures and architects take into account the
behavioral tendencies of rats, the idea of nonhuman agency is intuitively plausible.
In the spirit of an experiment and proposed as a way out of a scholarly urban
impasse (p. 1), Urban Assemblages explores the new insights into the city that can be
gained if one dares to engage in urban studies with the theoretical tools of contemporary
social science (pp. 12). In his introductory essay, Ignacio Faras argues that there is
something Heideggerian about this venture, for it is the question itself that is primarily at
stake (p. 2). ANT takes aim directly at a perennial issue in urban studies: what, exactly, are
we studying when we study the urbanthe city? Urbanization? Space? ANT handles this
by thinking the city as an improbable ontological achievement (p. 2). Urban studies la
ANT sees the city as a bundle of networks; the task of the urban researcher is thus to
examine the bundling process itself. As Bender puts it:
The metropolis...is made up of networkshuman networks, infrastructural networks,
architectural networks, security networks; the list could be almost infinite, and they
are not confined by a circumferential boundary....Networks agglomerate into
assemblages, perhaps a neighborhood, or a crowd at a street festival, or a financial
center like Wall Street in New York City. The metropolis, then, is an assemblage of
assemblages. (p. 316)
ANT asks: how is it that these urban assemblages come to be assembled as they are?
This approach is most successful when drawing sociological attention to new research
objects or to the contingency and fragility of interaction. In their contribution, Don Slater
and Tomas Arizta analyze some of the institutions, actors and knowledges that perform
cultural globalization in Aviles, a city in northern Spain. The meaning of and the interface
between the global and the local were very different for a fancy cultural institute than
for students in area schools. Slater and Arizta were fascinated by such a clear case of the
performance of locals and globals....What we believed ourselves to be observing was the
process of mapping, and acting upon maps, that appealed to entities (e.g. Asturian culture,
global culture) which were brought into existence by that very appeal: pure performativity
(p. 91). The modifier pure might be overstated; it is implausible that none of the relevant
entities were brought into existence in temporalities and spaces beyond the immediate
performance. But their overall point is well taken. Dealing more explicitly with the issue of
how networks persist through time and space, Anique Hommels, via an analysis of
Highway 75 in Maastricht, describes how elements of the cityscape get so deeply entwined
with other phenomena that they become obdurate, immovable facts on the ground. The
highway, entangled with various professions, places, ideas and laws, activates some

586

Qual Sociol (2010) 33:583589

questions and forecloses others. And Israel Rodrguez Giralt, Daniel Lpez Gmez and
Noel Garca Lpez provide a mesmerizing study of the use of sound in May Day
demonstrations in Barcelona. Counterposing the civilized, rationalized silent city with
the struggle to be heard, the authors interpret the loudspeaker and the public soundsystem
as political instruments that are capable of mobilizing distinct sorts of collectivities. They
conclude that [a]ll sonorous practices...turn out to be technopolitical practices, as they set
up a specific spatiality and collectivity that participates in a sonorous-based political
struggle to define the city (p. 191).
The concept of an assemblage, then, can push towards a redefinition of what it means to
be an urban participant. It focuses sociological attention not just on human interaction but
also on the various technologies, categories and materials that make up the city. Faras cites
Peter Marcuse, who argues that the idea of the city as an actor is perhaps the most
politically loaded...[of] usages, for it implies a harmony of interests within the city; whats
good for one (generally the business community) is good for all (p. 10). ANT, it seems,
opens a new perspective from which to criticize this way of assembling of the city into one
unified, business-friendly actor.
But whereas Marcuse-style critical urban theory expressly engages with politics, ANT
pointedly sticks to an apolitical, ironic stance. Thisand not the yoking together of the
human and nonhumanis where things start to go awry. ANT is unable, fully and
sincerely, to explain why sociologists should venture down its particular path without
resorting to question-begging about what proper sociology should do. Actor-network
theorists are the first to dispute the claim that sociology should strive to become a science
in the traditional disinterested sense of a gaze directed to a world outside, recognizing that
any study of any group by any social scientist is part and parcel of what makes the group
exist, last, decay, or disappear (Latour 2005b, p. 33). Yet ANTharshly disparaging of
critical sociologyinsists upon skeptical, value-free inquiry, lamenting that the political
agenda of many social theorists has taken over their libido sciendi and complaining that an
infatuation with emancipation politics leads sociologists to produce bad science (Latour
2005b, p. 49, 52). ANT is thus a weird hybrid indeed: ontological boundary-pushing is
grafted onto epistemological boundary-policing. It verges towards something like a postsocial, reconstituted positivism. It also might amount to bad faith, because in practice
especially when applied to topics beyond the laboratoryANT is often mixed with
Foucauldian biopolitics or governmentality studies, Left Heideggerianism, radical democracy, or some other intensely political, critical idiom. In these cases it can be seen implicitly
legitimizing itself with a patina of radical politics, although it disavows the idea of political
and social critique.
Whatever the consequences in science studies, when applied to urban questions, ANTs
self-inflicted political fatuousness becomes impossible to ignore. Faras writes that ANTs
radicality is a result of its desire to extend relationality beyond language...beyond
culture...and beyond communication...to all entities (p. 3). But the very category of
radicalof getting to the root of thingsis completely alien to the actor-network
worldview. ANTs supposed radicality undermines itself. Its version of relationality, far
from being radical, is so broad and undifferentiated as to blur the many diverse ways that
things interact, rather than bringing relational difference into sharper focus. Unable to detect
exclusion, negation, or antagonism, ANT, unaided by other sociological sensitivities, has a
hard time dealing with some of the most obvious and horrific aspects of contemporary
urban life. While it registers that networks decay and break down, this is an insufficient way
to think conflict and inequality. As a consequence, most actor-network studies of cities tend
to eschew analyzing exclusion, domination, elitism, racism, patriarchy, exploitation,

Qual Sociol (2010) 33:583589

587

segregation or any other variety of ubiquitous, quotidian urban violence the denial of which
renders any urban studies paradigm useless at best.
It is one of the virtues of Urban Assemblages that, rather than shying away from these
questions, it explicitly faces them. Stephen Graham observes about ANT-inspired
perspectives that theres a danger in that tradition that you become preoccupied with
minute, minute details which can be very elegant and very enlightening, but which make it
a struggle to bring out the political and politicized nature of technological assemblages
(p. 204). Nigel Thrift thinks that it is difficult to deny that ANT works best in strongly
defined situations (p. 112). Faras wonders if it is not an implicit critique of ANT and its
possible contribution to urban studies when Rob Shields insists that urban studies should
not be an apolitical, philosophical game (p. 298). Offering the most sustained
consideration of ANTs urban limitations, Thomas Bender worries that ANT seems to
remove ethics and politics from social analysis (p. 305) and predicts, If Latour continues
to explore the city, it is likely that he will be forced to expand and enrich ANT in order to
capture institutional power (p. 314). Forced by whom or what? It probably should be
unnecessary to make the point that we ought not...to presume the social to be always flat
and ahistorical (p. 312). Bender finally asks whether a weak ANT, used analogically
might be more useful in urban studies than the orthodox version (p. 317). As valuable as
these more sober considerations are, they only appear in the interviews and framing essays
and do not make it into the volumes main chapters. The case studies that do examine
politics and inequality do so by drawing upon theoretical languages beyond that of actors
and networks.
A number of papers in Urban Assemblages illustrate the quandaries of urban actornetwork theory. In their aforementioned study of Aviles, Slater and Arizta cannot explain
why the city would pursue a strategy of regeneration through creative and cultural
industries (p. 94) without gesturing towards political-economic developments beyond the
language of networks; the authors, notably, do not actually affirm ANT in any serious way.
In his article on transportation systems in Bogot, Andrs Valderrama Pineda addresses the
question of how we co-produce urban transport systems and the city (p. 123). The plural
agent of co-production is composed of planners (politicians, engineers, economists,
lawyers, communication experts, journalists, consultants, sociologists, historians), citizens,
operators, investors and non-human actors and the author of this text among many other
analysts (ibid.). To include all of these groups in the same category is to obscure very
important differences regarding how they produce transportation and the city. Pineda
recognizes this and notes that the process of production is contested, but does not explore
this contestation. Furthermorein this list of co-production agents, why not include, say,
janitors who work in the planners office buildings? Or those who would like to work as
janitors but are unemployed? Or those Bogot residents who demand access to public
transportation but do not succeed because of various goals pursued by politicians, planners,
or sociologists? Given the scale of ANTs theoretical aspirations, these actors should be
included. The actor-network literature is filled with lists of this sort; they often appear
completely arbitrary. In his chapter, Manuel Tironi asks how can Santiagos experimental
music scene exist and, in addition, be productive and innovative? (p. 27). His rich
ethnographic data describe tactics for dealing with marginality and maintaining artistic
distinction, against the backdrop of a municipality that seeks to promote only certain types
of culture: a field of ambition, struggle and differentiation, a distinction between
mainstream and fringe, which belies the image of a fluid, gelleable creative city.
So in some cases, ANT militates against the non-actor-network arguments that coexist
with it uneasily. In other cases, it seems to lead urbanists down blind alleys, as with its

588

Qual Sociol (2010) 33:583589

curious campaign against the concept of scale. Richard G. Smith, for example, asserts that
scale is a prefabricated structure, an unquestionable framework from which one can
subsequently begin to account for what is happening in a given situation (p. 75). Alan
Latham and Derek P. McCormack argue that after eliminating the concept of scale, other
forms of association and assemblage come into view (p. 65). But oddly both of these
pieces also seem to acknowledge that it is precisely the point of critical conceptions of scale
to argue against the idea that scale is a fixed feature, which obviates their critique. These
authors miss the chance to learn from the literature on scale and globalization about how
scale and globality are assembledwhile being willfully nave about the obvious myopia
of a flat ontology.
Urban Assemblages performs a true service by showing how ANT can indeed contribute
to urban studies, as well as by raising important questions about that contribution. But it
does not fully process or contextualize the issues that it raiseswhich is a missed
opportunity. As much as an actor-networked urbanism highlights the problems surrounding
ANTs methodological politics, so too does ANT bring out some of the aporias in urban
studies; the book could have made a stronger statement here. As well, it might have
weighed in on the unfinished discussion about what is at stake between ANT and
competing, related discourses like Urban Political Ecology (Heynen et al. 2006; Keil 2005;
Castree 2002).
ANT is antithetical to critical sociologyto ethics and politicsby design and not by
accident. For that reason, surely Latour, Callon, and company are tired of hearing this
particular line of criticism. Despite its protestations to the contrary, something about ANT
suggests, to many, that it could or should be a vehicle for sociological critique. But
fundamentally, its unorthodox ontology clashes with its disengaged neo-positivism. Like
the return of the repressed, the question of ANTs politics constantly reappears, not quieted
by antic fantasias like Dingpolitik (Latour 2005a).
Elsewhere, Graham and Marvin more successfully conjure a critical networked
urbanism that seeks to move towards urban democratization in its fullest sense and in
all urban contexts (Graham and Marvin 2001, p. 407). Couldnt ANT, in its own way,
become a networked critical urban theory (Brenner 2009)? Couldnt ANT provide a
decentered-but-still-critical urban sociology of associations, with a lot of interesting case
studies? It seems unlikely. If there is anything left to Horkheimers idea that critical inquiry
means getting to the human bottom of nonhuman things (Horkheimer 1972, p. 143), then
a critical ANTcall it CANTis impossible and mutually unwanted. Some actor-network
theory can help urbanists critically rethink the nature of urban phenomena, as Urban
Assemblages demonstrates. But with too much ANT, critical urban studies would be
impossible.

References
Amin, A. (2007). Re-thinking the urban social. City, 11, 100114.
Brenner, N. (2009). What is critical urban theory? City, 13, 198207.
Callon, M. (1986). Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the scallops and the
fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay. In J. Law (Ed.), Power, action and belief: A new sociology of knowledge?
(pp. 196223). London: Routledge.
Castree, N. (2002). False antitheses? Marxism, nature and actor-networks. Antipode, 34, 111146.
Cronon, W. (1992). Natures metropolis: Chicago and the great West. New York: Norton.
Graham, S., & Marvin, S. (2001). Splintering urbanism: Networks infrastructures, technological mobilities
and the urban condition. New York: Routledge.

Qual Sociol (2010) 33:583589

589

Harman, G. (2009). Prince of networks: Bruno Latour and metaphysics. Melbourne: re.press.
Heynen, N., Kaika, M., & Swyngedouw, E. (Eds.). (2006). In the nature of cities: Urban political ecology
and the politics of urban metabolism. New York: Routledge.
Horkheimer, M. (1972). Critical theory: Selected essays. New York: Continuum.
Keil, R. (2005). Progress reportUrban political ecology. Urban Geography, 26, 640651.
Latour, B. (1993). The pasteurization of France. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. (1996). Aramis, or the love of technology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. (2003). The promises of constructivism. In D. Idhe & E. Selinger (Eds.), Chasing technoscience:
Matrix for materiality (pp. 2746). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Latour, B. (2005a). From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik: Or, how to make things public. In B. Latour & P. Weibel
(Eds.), Making things public: Atmospheres of democracy (pp. 431). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Latour, B. (2005b). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network theory. New York: Oxford
University Press.
May, T., & Perry, B. (Eds.). (2005). The future of urban sociology. Sociology, 39, 343370.
David J. Madden is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at Bard College in Annandale-onHudson, NY. His research interests include urban studies, political sociology, and social theory.