Debates sobre la ciudad y lo urbano

Within the field of urban social theory, debates still persist around the definition of two key concepts for the discipline: the city and the urban. Although this has not been a problem for the development of empirical research on cities, it is interesting to recover these divergences in order to problematize the way in which urban phenomena are defined and, consequently, interpreted. Thus, in this article I propose to deepen the epistemological debates on the city and the urban, based on the dialogue between critical urbanism and urbanism of assemblages. For this purpose, the exchanges carried out between Neil Brenner, Colin McFarlane and Ignacio Farías during 2009 and 2011 in different academic journals are recovered. The contribution of this article is to continue introducing to the debate on the city and the urban the proposal of urbanism of assemblages, which poses a challenge to the foundations of conventional urban criticism, introducing a conceptual framework that brings with it a significant epistemological shift for urban studies. The urbanism of urban assemblages proposed by Farias (2011b) is distinguished by its attention to the city as a continuous process of composition and recomposition, where multiple human and non-human actors interact and intertwine to shape complex and dynamic urban environments. While critical urban theory also refers to the city as product and production, and not as a finished object, assemblage urbanism radicalizes this reading by including the notion of composition, which opens up the range of actors and agencies involved in urban formations.