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Revisiting the urban cosmos—an intervention into the politics of urban assemblages

C an urban assemblages be political in their own right? Almost five years after this journal featured a debate on the contribution of ‘assemblage urbanism’ to critical theory (City 2011a, 2011b), Anders Blok and Ignacio Farı́as open their volume with a clear positioning. In attesting critical theorists’ incapacity ‘to imagine object-centered politics’ (6), they prepare an argument for re-theorizing the urban cosmos. The editors’ call for conceptualizing the city as ‘multiple object space’ (2; original emphasis) not only opposes common critical—namely, political economic—frameworks. It also distances itself from assemblage approaches to the urban that have stressed its heuristic value (McFarlane 2011a, 208), its function as ‘sensitizing device’ (Anderson and Harrison 2010, 13) and ‘thinking tool’ (Frichot, Gabrielsson, and Metzger 2016, 6), thus opening the debate for a possible combination of assemblage and critical urban thought. Moving away from the question about the added value of actor network theory (ANT) for urban studies (Farı́as and Bender 2009), Blok and Farı́as now make a strong claim for taking the ontological groundings of urban assemblages serious in order to generate new problematizations of the urban (2). The political problem posed by cosmopolitics, in this understanding, draws attention to the contested composition of urban common worlds. Of interest here is not the Kantian conceptualization of a unitary, predetermined cosmos. Drawing from Bruno Latour (2004) and Isabelle Stengers (2005), the authors instead call for exploring potential modes of coexistence for a highly heterogeneous set of actors. By studying the multiple ontologies that enact specific urban realities, the authors claim to open a black box left untouched by recent accounts on ‘planetary urbanization’ (Brenner and Schmid 2015). Questioning what an urban planet is, in addition to pointing out how it could be differently, is presented here as a promising theoretical endeavor for revealing which entities are excluded from its making. The choice of cosmopolitics as conceptual basis for analyzing ‘how shared urban realities are made and remade’ (7; original emphasis) resonates with Colin McFarlane’s (2011a) invocation of ‘the cosmopolitan city’ as progressive political outcome of assemblage as ‘critical imaginary’ (219, 220). McFarlane situates cosmopolitics on the plane of ontology and distinguishes assemblage as ‘imaginary’ from its other, heuristic or conceptual uses. Benders’ and Farı́as’ concentration on ontologies, in turn, prompts them to look into three additional concepts when it comes to organizing the empirical questions