Fragments of the City: Making and Remaking Urban Worlds

The launching point for this intriguing book is the claim that the global urban landscape is inherently and pervasively fragmented. The fragmentation in question is not geopolitical or territorial. It is immediate, material, cultural, and even sensory in nature. Much of the ‘‘urban world,’’ geographer Colin McFarlane argues in Fragments of the City: Making and Remaking the Urban World, consists of a haphazard agglomeration of discarded bits of larger things and ideas. And this is particularly true of the large and growing part of this world that is composed of informal settlements and/or inhabited by marginalized and disempowered urban dwellers. Fragments of the City builds on this foundational observation in several directions at once. The book is simultaneously a treatise on the need to understand urban fragmentation and an example of how to do so. It is an intentionally fragmented text about a fragmented landscape: a concerted attempt to describe and explain, but one that seeks assiduously to avoid imposing an artificial unity or coherence. It is also, of course, a work of urban geography, and a fascinating one. It builds clearly on the work of Nigel Thrift, Doreen Massey, Stephen Graham, and others, and makes a valuable contribution to the field. McFarlane argues that the basic needs of the people who live ‘‘among the fragments,’’ as well as many of their more profound challenges and aspirations, have been invisible to the integrating visions of planners and theorists alike. McFarlane is politely indirect in this critique. With several exceptions, he does not name names. The protagonists of the ‘‘creed of wholism’’ (p. 115) remain vaguely in the background. But he carves a space for his argument by claiming that modern urbanists have tended to rely on convenient but flawed totalities and have thus overlooked the inherent brokenness and incompleteness of much of the urban realm, doing a form of epistemological violence to the lived experiences of those forced to struggle with this fragmentation on a daily basis. The implications of this argument, which is clearly inspired by the work of Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, and others, are simultaneously theoretical, empirical, and political. They impose a heavy burden. In this sense, the analogy to the flaneur’s avocation, strolling through the urban world without a strong sense of direction or purpose, is misleading. Walking through a city might be relatively easy (at least for a white, male, able-bodied urban geographer like McFarlane, who readily acknowledges his privilege). But making sense of what one finds, without relying on conceptual tools that impose a facile coherence and unity on a fractured world, is an ambitious and difficult undertaking. In order to appreciate an urban realm composed of fragments, McFarlane contends, we need to open our eyes to the partial, the reconstructed, or the recombined. This commitment to fragmentation as a sort of language of its own requires abandoning many of the conventions imposed by academic discipline and discourse. The method at the heart of the book consists of bringing together and connecting apparently disconnected examples, themselves ‘‘fragments’’ in McFarlane’s framework, and, through a sort of critical collage, juxtaposing and connecting them in a series of brief chapters or vignettes, each advancing a primary observation about the practice or politics of coming to grips with urban fragmentation itself. These Reviews 463