Re‐arranging the urban: Forms, rhythms, politics

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 heuristic 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 dispositions 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.

Way‐finding agendas through Transactions

“…The intervention by Abdullah et al. (2023) exemplifies the transformative potential of collective scholarship for urban geographies, and this emphasis on dynamic collaboration resonates with Yandaarra with Gumbaynggirr Country et al. 's (2022) paper exploring how scholarship should be rooted in an ethical commitment to a wider array of actors.…”

“…This intervention (Abdullah et al., 2023), collectively written by 12 scholars primarily based in urban Asia, is an apt example of the kind of careful and collaborative scholarship that our recent editorial (Bailey et al., 2023) seeks to encourage. Acknowledging the diverse, complex, and rapidly shifting urban contexts within which each scholar is situated, operates, and writes, the intervention does not aim to arrive at easy answers or practical solutions to the intellectual agenda of urban geographies.…”