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"McFarlane, Colin"
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Urban navigations : politics, space and the city in South Asia
This volume provides an important account of how the city in South Asia is produced, lived and contested. It examines the diverse lived experiences of urban South Asia through a focus on contestations over urban space, resources and habitation, bringing together accounts from India, Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka.
Book
Navigating the city: dialectics of everyday urbanism
How might we conceptualise and research everyday urbanism? By examining the making of everyday life in a lowincome neighbourhood in Uganda, we argue that a dialectics of everyday urbanism is a useful approach for understanding urban poverty. This dialectical approach examines how marginalised urban dwellers navigate the city in the relative absence of formal infrastructure systems, service provision and state welfare, and in turn exceed those limitations through forging connections, capacities and opportunities. We reveal the 'social infrastructures' that people put together to sustain life, as well as the limits of and placed on these infrastructures, from the legacies of structural adjustment to ongoing forms of demolition and disinvestment. We identify a set of practices that operate alongside social infrastructure - 'coordination', 'consolidation' and 'speculation' - important in the composition of everyday urban life. In doing so, we reflect on how we might research the dialectics of everyday urbanism, and here a 'follow-along participant observation' (FAPO) methodology has significant potential. Our arguments emerge from research with residents in Kampala, but open out questions for how we conceive and research everyday life and urban infrastructure more generally.
Journal Article
Learning the city
\"Learning the City critically examines the relationship between knowledge, learning, and urbanism. It argues both for the centrality of learning for political strategies and for a resurgence of learning that represents a critical opportunity to develop a progressive international urbanism. The author combines the result of his fieldwork conducted in Mumbai and other regions with a synthesis of the most current theoretical research on knowledge, space, and materiality to show how learning should be viewed as central to the production and politics of cities. In doing so, he deploys the analytic of assemblage to explain the complex processes through which knowledge and learning enable and limit various forms of urbanism. This groundbreaking work examines learning as a practice, explores learning as tactics, and reveals how learning is intrinsic to the shape of political imaginaries, strategies, and contestations. A critical discussion of the types of learning environments that may facilitate more socially just urbanisms is also included. Provocative, timely, and fraught with scholarly rigor, Learning the City offers invaluable insights into the role of learning in urban developmental studies\"--
eBook
Thinking with and beyond the informal–formal relation in urban thought
This commentary to the special issue on ‘Transcending (in)formal urbanism’ reviews key threads common across the issue and opens up questions as to the work that the informal–formal dynamic does for urban studies. It points out the general agreement in that none of the papers rejects the utility of the category of informal and that the terms informal and formal still have value and utility. In doing so, the special issue articles offer three key contributions to demonstrate the ways in which the informal either composes or becomes a close partner to the formal, de-link informality from its more commonplace registers, and sketch how the formal and informal have always been blurred in practice. Centrally, this calls for a critical reflection on the structures of thought through which the informal–formal relation emerges. It advances an understanding of how informal and formal operate as a kind of ‘intellectual governmentality’ reiterating the same ways of seeing, carving up, and analysing the city, getting in the way of our ability to research urbanism differently. The appreciation of the informal–formal dynamic is situated as part of the challenge to build a more global urban studies that works with multiple ways of knowing and researching. To what extent does remaining within a structure of thought around the informal– formal relation enable or get in the way of that? Borrowing alternatives from movements to ‘provincialising’ that structure of thought, this commentary calls for a renewed interest in the potential, and limits, of the informal–formal inheritance in urban thought.
对“超越（非）正规城市化”特刊的评论回顾了整个特刊的共同关键线索，并提出了关于非正规-正规形态对城市研究的影响问题。它指出了普遍的一致意见，即没有一篇论文拒绝非正规类别的效用，非正规和正规的术语仍然具有价值和效用。籍此，特刊文章做出了三个关键的贡献，以展示非正规如何构成或成为正规的紧密伙伴，使非正规性与其更常见的登记册之间脱离关联，并描绘正规和非正规之间如何总是在实践中模糊不清。中心思想是，这要求对非正规-正规之间的关系所处的思想结构进行批判性反思。它促进了我们理解非正规-正规如何作为一种“知识治理”起作用，强调对城市进行观察、分割和分析的相同方式，妨碍了我们以不同方式研究城市化的能力。对非正规-正规形态的理解是构建更整全的城市研究所面临的挑战的一部分，因为整全的研究采用多种认识和研究方法。在这方面，停留在非正规-正规关系的思想结构中会在多大程度上带来促进或构成妨碍呢？借用将这种思想结构“地方化”的运动所提供的替代选项，本评论呼呼重新关注非正规-正规这一城市思想传统的潜力和局限性。
Journal Article
Assemblage and geography
In this introduction to the special section on 'Assemblage and geography', we reflect on the different routes and uses through which 'assemblage' is being put to work in contemporary geographical scholarship. The purpose of the collection is not to legislate a particular definition of assemblage, or to prioritise one tradition of assemblage thinking over others, but to reflect on the multiple ways in which assemblage is being encountered and used as a descriptor, an ethos and a concept. We identify a set of tensions and differences in how the term is used in the commentaries and more generally. These revolve around the difference assemblage thinking makes to relational thought in the context of a shared orientation to the composition of social-spatial formations.
Journal Article
The Entrepreneurial Slum
This paper explores the co-production of urban entrepreneurialism by examining the work of civil society groups in producing mobile models of slum entrepreneurialism. While slums and slum activists have been largely absent from accounts of urban entrepreneurialism, they increasingly play important roles in co-constituting mobile entrepreneurial models and in producing and valuing particular forms of entrepreneurial subjectivity. A focus on the co-production of entrepreneurialism requires attention to both the mobile models that constitute relations between different groups, from states and donors to activists and residents, and the local contexts and histories that shape, translate and differently enact entrepreneurialism. The paper concludes by highlighting three implications for research on urban entrepreneurialism.
Journal Article
The city as a machine for learning
Despite its centrality to urban politics, economies and life, learning remains a neglected and undertheorised domain in urban geography. In this paper, I address this by exploring a politics of learning through two key sites: tactical learning and urban learning forums. I offer a conception of learning based on three processes: translation, or the relational distributions through which learning is produced as a sociomaterial epistemology of displacement and change; coordination, or the construction of functional systems that enable learning as a means of linking different forms of knowledge, coping with complexity and facilitating adaptation; and dwelling, or the education of attention through which learning operates as a way of seeing and inhabiting the world. I then consider this conception of learning in relation to tactical learning, i.e. the resources marginal groups use to cope with, negotiate and resist in the city, and urban learning forums, i.e. the possibilities for progressive forms of learning between different constituencies in the city. I conclude with an outline of a critical urbanism of learning.
Journal Article
Thinking with assemblage
In this brief conclusion to the special section on 'Assemblage and Geography' we reflect on the promises and challenges of assemblage thinking in the context of contemporary geographical thought We draw out five issues for further discussion; ontological diversity, formation, the non-relational, newness and method.
Journal Article
Informal Urban Sanitation: Everyday Life, Poverty, and Comparison
The global sanitation crisis is rapidly urbanizing, but how is sanitation produced and sustained in informal settlements? Although there are data available on aggregate statistics, relatively little is known about how sanitation is created, maintained, threatened, and contested within informal settlements. Drawing on an ethnography of two very different informal settlements in Mumbai, this study identifies key ways in which informal sanitation is produced, rendered vulnerable, and politicized. In particular, four informal urban sanitation processes are examined: patronage, self-managed processes, solidarity and exclusion, and open defecation. The article also considers the implications for a research agenda around informal urban sanitation, emphasizing in particular the potential of a comparative approach, and examines the possibilities for better sanitation conditions in Mumbai and beyond.
Journal Article
Repenser l'informalité : la politique, les crises et la ville
If informality has been conventionally understood as a territorial formation or as a labour categorization, this paper offers an alternative conceptualization that conceives informality and formality as forms of practice. The paper examines how different relations of informal and formal practice enable urban planning, development and politics, and explores the changing relationship between informality and formality over time. To illustrate the political potential of conceiving informality and formality as practices, it highlights the fall-out from a particular urban crisis: the 2005 Mumbai monsoon floods. In the final section, the paper offers three conceptual frames for charting the changing relations of informal and formal practices: speculation, composition, and bricolage.
Journal Article