Description
Todays’ urban challenges are highly complex, due to increased social, spatial, economic, and political fragmentation (McFarlane, 2020) and interdependency of diversified yet autonomous actors and networks (De Roo et al., 2020; Buijs et al., 2009). In this multiplicity, ‘city-makers’ stand out: social entrepreneurs and community activists who deploy professional skills for the benefit of their communities and environments (Franke et al., 2015). Working from non-hierarchical and non-institutional positions, they are renowned for setting up small-scale cross-boundary collaborations which involve – amongst others – civil, social, business, and public stakeholders.Ethnographic studies of city-makers in Rotterdam provide insight in skills deployed in weaving together urban fragments and developing solutions for wicked urban problems, especially the deployment of humor and affect – a skill often overlooked in governance literature. This paper theorizes humor and affect through the ontological lens of assemblage theory, which considers affect an agentic and productive power that, when intentionally and joyfully deployed, redirects power flows, loosens participants from seemingly intractable habits, establishes personal relations and engagement in collective re-imaginations, and weaves together bodies and actions into synthesis and change (Bennett, 2005; Dewsbury, 2011; Dovey, 2011; Müller & Schurr, 2016).
This paper relates these insights to boundary spanning literature (Van Meerkerk & Edelenbos, 2018), which underscores personal characteristics such as empathy and familiarity (Giaretta, 2013; Williams, 2002), but falls short in translating these into deployable skills. Moreover, boundary spanning literature often considers organizational boundaries as structural, stable, known (Baker, 2008) whereas in the complexity of urban governance, boundaries rapidly emerge, dissolve and change. This paper theoretically and empirically illustrates how assemblage study – through its inductive relational approach (Perrotta, 2021) – widens the study of governance towards skills that explicitly deal with the complexity, fragmentation, multiplicity and dynamisms of todays’ urban worlds, and enable urban actors to shape societal orders beyond formal institutional frames.
| Period | 7 Jun 2022 |
|---|---|
| Event title | EASST : Politics of Technoscientific Futures |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Madrid, SpainShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |