A bus stop brings together strangers, a screen, cables, vehicles, noise and expectations for a few minutes. None of these elements works completely alone. Ash Amin begins from a similar perspective and raises a central question: what really holds a city together? His answer does not begin with isolated buildings or administrative boundaries. The city appears as a relational and sociomaterial assemblage. This means people, objects, technologies, infrastructures, affects and networks take shape through relationships. Affects are shared feelings and dispositions circulating between people and places. For Amin, understanding urban life requires examining these connections. The city is not a collection of finished pieces. It is a multiplicity sustained through relationships that continually change.
The mechanism begins when different elements enter relationships and change what others are able to do. Infrastructure organizes movement. Technology connects information. People interpret these systems and use them in different ways. At the same time, feelings and expectations can change how a place is experienced. Amin therefore questions a rigid separation between material and immaterial life. A station contains concrete, doors and routes, but it also contains norms, expectations and feelings. Everything participates in urban experience. This can be read as a sociomaterial approach. Society does not simply happen on top of passive infrastructure. Infrastructure does not determine behavior by itself either. People and objects acquire capacities through relationships that form, endure and sometimes break apart.
Consider a first case. A public square connects benches, pavement, lighting, phones, nearby transport and people with different trajectories. The example is hypothetical and adds no outside facts. If we examine each component separately, we lose part of what makes the place work. A bench enables sitting, but its use also depends on who shares the space. Lighting changes material conditions and can alter perception. A digital connection adds another layer to the experience. According to Amin, cities can be understood through these heterogeneous relationships. Our interpretation is that public space emerges from their combination. No single element completely controls the outcome. Urban life appears through continuing interaction between bodies, objects, technologies and expectations.
A second case challenges the opposition between local and global. Imagine an activity located on one particular street but connected through networks with distant people and processes. Should we call it local or global? Amin’s approach suggests that this distinction may be too simple. Urban relationships cross scales and connect different places. The global can take material form through objects, technologies or links present in everyday situations. The local, in turn, may depend on networks extending far beyond the immediate environment. This can be read as a relational geography. Place still matters, but it does not operate as a closed container. Its character emerges partly through connections arriving from elsewhere and mixing with relationships already present there.
The third case introduces coexistence with difference. People with different experiences and positions meet inside shared infrastructure. They do not need to become a homogeneous group before using it together. Amin emphasizes precisely this multiplicity and urban coexistence. Difference remains while practical relationships form between heterogeneous people. This does not guarantee harmony. An encounter can produce cooperation, indifference or tension. Yet sharing systems and spaces creates possibilities for common urban life. The supplied facts show Amin connecting this heterogeneity with the possibility of building commons. Commons can be understood as resources and capacities sustained through shared relationships. The political question is how these shared arrangements can endure without requiring everyone involved to become the same.
There is a strong counterargument. Talking about assemblages and relationships can make power appear too dispersed. It may also become difficult to distinguish which actors have greater capacity to transform a situation. This objection deserves a fair presentation. An urban network does not automatically imply balanced relationships. Some components may organize possibilities more strongly than others. The supplied material does not provide a specific theory of those inequalities, so we should not invent one. It does allow us to say that Amin questions explanations based on simple oppositions. Our interpretation is that a relational approach becomes more precise when it studies concrete connections without treating them as automatic equivalences. Recognizing interdependence does not mean
