The city as a setting for collaboration? Tracking the multiple scales of urban promises.

Abstract

What are the conditions for collaboration in the city and how can they be explained by the city as a promissory assemblage? My contribution aims at challenging the almost common sense understanding of “the promise of the city,” in relating it to everyday situations of collaboration. This framework helps to better understand the potential of the promise as an analytics for the quality of the social in or as cities as well as the disputed attractiveness of cities. Instead of reproducing the equation of the city and the promise and blaming its un-fulfillment, I propose to take a closer look at the workings of the promise, its ethical dimension and the place of collaboration in the setting that it offers. This chapter is based on three fields of research: first, collaboration as a recurrent topic in the perspective of an anthropology of knowledge; second, the unstable notion of the city that results from studying everyday transformation in Berlin since 1989 as an urban anthropologist; and third, a conceptual work on the city as “promissory assemblage.”