How do I implement the Deep Cities Approach? Deep Cities Theory: Urban transformation as a source of heritage valuesUrban Assemblage Theory

Urban Assemblage Theory

Taking the Critical Urban Theory one step further, we found a sound methodological approach in Urban Assemblage Theory for making a conceptual framework for understanding what the drivers, processes and dynamic relations in urban placemaking would be when involving the uses of heritage.

Assemblage urbanism seeks, from empirical, methodological and ontological levels of knowledge, to combine urban trajectories on human and non-human interfaces, networked interdependencies and the production of socio‐material infrastructures, as well as human agency and social forces, in the processes of social transformation.

Assemblage urbanism gives us a conceptual map for understanding the variables of structures and processes at play in placemaking by the uses of heritage. In other words, the complex driving forces at play in urban placemaking, from overall ‘planetary urbanization processes, e.g., in gentrification processes worldwide, to local drivers and dynamic processes of formal (heritage management, planners etc.) vs informal processes (people-centred approaches), and places that are more fixed (in their ‘being’) or more open for change (as in its ‘becoming’).

Urban Assemblage Theory would be a valuable methodological tool in the developing of a conceptual map in early planning situations for understanding statues que and for future scenario and prediction modelling calculating the structures and structural changes, dynamic relationships and processes at play in placemaking by the uses of heritage.

 

^{Assemblage thinking point to the dynamic relationships in placemaking where there is a crisscrossing of tensions between 'formal' and 'informal' as well as between 'being' and 'becoming' in urban transformation processes. This includes the historicity of place and the variable actions and intentions in placemaking for creating sustainable urban environments. Placemaking is an open system affected by various drivers of change, depending on two sets of interrelated design concepts: assemblage and disassembly (and thereby as a process affected by reassembled placemaking).}

 

Urban Assemblage Theory gives access to a critically reflexive approach for defining good vs bad (heritage-led) urban development projects / placemaking. By pinpointing the conceptual framework based on Urban Assemblage Theory we learned about how complex processes of placemaking work, and what does not work. By including the temporality - the shifting character of urban placemaking over time - and the structural and dynamic drivers that defines the complexity of urban assemblages in heritage-based placemaking urban stakeholders and developers would be able to enable heritage and evaluate the function of heritage in social sustainable urban development.