Re‐arranging the urban: Forms, rhythms, politics

Abdullah, Adam; Cardoso, Ricardo; Dasgupta, Shreyashi; Pati, Sushmita; Plueckhahn, Rebekah; Shafique, Tanzil; Simone, Abdoumaliq; Teo, Shaun S K; Ye, Junjia; Zhao, Yimin; Urban Re-Arrangements Collective, The

Abstract

This intervention is by a collective of scholars working on various facets of urbanisation in Asia. Focusing on the notion of arrangements/re-arrangements, it seeks to extend the consideration of urban politics as a matter of surges, a provisional consolidation of intensities, inhabitants and their practices, affiliations and orientations that give rise to continuously mutating forms of sense, care, and collective action. Whereas the work and effects of institutions, with their genealogies, remits, and competencies, are to a large extent specifiable according to their operating norms and the various regulatory frameworks that govern their operations, the dispositions of arrangements-what they do, what they actually bring about-are not readily definable or clear, enacting a form of performative ambiguity. Involving workarounds, collaborations, exchanges, and agreements that exceed the familiar protocols of interaction among households , local authorities, markets, civil institutions, brokers, and service providers , arrangements entail the enactment of caring, provisioning, regulating, mapping, and steering as the purview of more provisional, incessantly mutating forms that fold in bits and pieces of discernible institutions. In this heuris-tic intervention we seek to further the 'urbanisation' of urban geography itself, in the sense of complexifying both the terrain and the methodological practices brought to bear. It attempts to open a way of speaking about urbanisation processes that exceed binary formulations, countervailing scales, or structural absences to encompass a broader range of processes at work in shaping disposi-tions that are materialised or simply potentiated. It proceeds from a process of collective composition whose objective is to diversify the working tools of urban analysis rather than simply offering new conceptual formulations.

Citation

Abdullah, A., Cardoso, R., Dasgupta, S., Pati, S., Plueckhahn, R., Shafique, T., Simone, A., Teo, S. S. K., Ye, J., Zhao, Y., & Urban Re-Arrangements Collective, T. (2023). Re‐arranging the urban: Forms, rhythms, politics. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 48(4), 718-744. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12604

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jan 29, 2023
• Online Publication Date: Feb 17, 2023
• Publication Date: 2023-12
• Deposit Date: Jul 22, 2024
• Journal: Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
• Print ISSN: 0020-2754
• Electronic ISSN: 1475-5661
• Publisher: Wiley
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 48
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 718-744
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12604
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/2609051