Ash Amin and the relational city: what holds a city together

The relational city is the idea, developed by the geographer Ash Amin, that a city is not a collection of buildings inside an administrative boundary but a fabric of relations between people, objects, infrastructure, flows and feelings that is made and unmade every day. Amin, a professor of geography at the University of Cambridge, has spent three decades proposing that we look at cities this way, and his underlying question is easy to ask and hard to answer: what holds a city together when almost nothing that makes it up stays still?

A city made of networks, not pieces

In Cities: Reimagining the Urban (2002), written with Nigel Thrift, Amin proposed abandoning the image of the city as an organism with a centre and a periphery. He described it instead as a set of networks running through it and connecting it to distant places: an office in central London may have more daily contact with New York than with the next district. The city appears as a knot in many networks at once, and its character depends on how those networks cross in a particular place.

The second feature of the approach is refusing to separate the social from the material. A bus station is concrete, shelters, screens and timetables, but also rules, expectations, fears and habits, and all of it acts at once on whoever is waiting. Infrastructure does not determine behaviour, and society does not happen on a passive stage. In his work on Brazilian favelas, Amin described lively infrastructure: pipes, cables and stairways that residents build, repair and negotiate, and that sustain forms of belonging as much as services.

Living among strangers without demanding sameness

The political consequence appears in Land of Strangers (2012). Amin argues that contemporary cities do not hold together because their inhabitants share an identity or know each other, but because they share infrastructure, services and spaces in which strangers live side by side. Coexistence does not require harmony: an encounter can produce cooperation, indifference or conflict. What makes it possible is a well-maintained common ground, from transport to the library, that lets very different people meet without having to become alike.

From there comes his critique of the opposition between local and global. A food stall on one particular street may depend on suppliers on another continent, on family remittances and on a delivery app headquartered in another country. Is it local or global? For Amin the question is badly posed: the global takes shape in concrete everyday situations, and the local depends on connections that spill beyond the neighbourhood. Place still matters, not as a closed container but as the point where relations of very different reach intersect.

Seeing like a city, not like a state

In Seeing Like a City (2017), again with Thrift, the title answers James Scott's Seeing Like a State. Where the state simplifies in order to govern, the city works as a machine of relations nobody fully controls, and that calls for a different kind of government, attentive to maintenance and repair rather than grand plans. The most serious objection is that spreading agency across so many elements makes power look diluted, when in an urban network some actors decide far more than others. Amin's answer is that this is exactly why we must ask who maintains and who controls shared infrastructure.