Cities: Reimagining the Urban by Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift

Cities: Reimagining the Urban (2002) is the book in which the British geographers Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift proposed a new way of thinking the city, one that no longer fitted either the concentric model of the Chicago School or the fragmented collage of the Los Angeles School. Their thesis is that the contemporary city has neither a centre nor a form that sums it up, but is made of flows, rhythms and everyday practices that cross it and connect it with the world. Reimagining it requires abandoning the idea of the city as a bounded object and studying it as a set of processes in motion, with a vocabulary the authors build from ordinary life rather than from the plan.

Transitivity, rhythms and footprints: three metaphors for the city

Amin and Thrift propose three metaphors to capture that city. Transitivity: the city is porous, a place of passage where people, goods, information and capital come and go without cease, so that its boundaries are always provisional and its life depends on distant connections. Rhythms: the city has times, those of night-shift workers, of markets, of traffic lights, of the seasons, and understanding it means understanding how those rhythms overlap and collide. And footprints: the city accumulates traces of what it was, in buildings, habits, memories and conflicts, that keep acting on the present.

Everyday practices, urban machinery and encounters between strangers

The book adopts the non-representational theory Thrift was then developing: what makes the city work is not plans and discourses but embodied practices, walking, waiting, shopping, caring, that people perform without thinking and that produce urban order from below. Amin and Thrift attend to what they call the machinery of the city, the infrastructures, software, procedures and routines that keep it running almost automatically, and to the encounters between strangers that occur within it, often wordless, which sustain a sociability no community in the strong sense could replace.

A politics of the city beyond community and technocracy

In its political part, the book defends a politics of the city that starts from that reality. Against nostalgia for community and against technocratic government, the authors propose cultivating the spaces and practices where strangers coexist, recognising the city as a place of multiple belongings and working on the everyday infrastructures that make coexistence possible. That line, which Amin would later develop in Land of Strangers and Thrift in his work on affect and technology, anticipates the infrastructural turn in urban studies and the attention to maintenance and repair.

Criticism and continuation in Seeing Like a City

Cities was criticised for its dense, theoretical language and for an attention to flows that seemed to leave structures of power, class, property, the state, in the background, which other geographers such as David Harvey placed at the centre. Amin and Thrift replied that they did not deny those structures but saw them acting through concrete practices and rhythms, and in Seeing Like a City (2017) they returned to the argument with more attention to inequality and to the systems that distribute access to the city.

The contribution of Cities: Reimagining the Urban is a shift of perspective that is now common: understanding the city as process rather than thing, attending to the rhythms and infrastructures of daily life, and looking for urban politics in ordinary encounters as much as in plans. For anyone studying or governing a global city, the book is a reminder that its life depends on connections it does not control and practices it did not design, and that governing it well begins with seeing them.