Encountering, describing and transforming urbanism

In this paper, I present some concluding reflections on the ‘Assemblage and Critical Urban Praxis’ debate that has taken place in the last few issues of City. Prompted by the eight insightful commentaries in the debate, I consider just three sets of contributions and limitations that assemblage thinking brings to making sense of and developing alternatives to contemporary urbanism: on encountering urban life, on the limits of description and on the possibilities for a radical urban commons. I argue that assemblage thinking provides a set of useful perspectives for conceptualising and intervening in urbanism, and that its potential can only be realised in conjunction with different urban critical, activist and marginalised knowledges.