Learning the City

“Learning the City makes an exhaustive case for framing our studies of knowledge and power through the optic of the learning assemblage. Its revelatory power is arguably profound for McFarlane, it promises nothing short of understanding the power to forge a different kind of city.”  (Antipode, 1 September 2013)

“This book is a significant step in bringing learning to the core of urban study… This volume’s detailed fieldwork effectively supports its desire to see learning occupy a central place in the production of more socially just urbanisms.” (Area, 1 May 2013)

“Learning the Cityis a critical academic contribution useful for scholars of the field.  found it particularly useful for my research on policy circulation of Bus Rapid Transit concepts through the South African city . . . While Learning the Cityis probably too sophisticated for younger readers, it is sure to become indispensable for academics of the discipline.” (Geography Helvitica, 1 December  2012)

"Through Learning the City McFarlane has made a major contribution to our understandings of the urban. In its commitment to the diverse and lively practices through which the city is learned and known, in its engagement with the diverse forms of agency and political practices through which agency is assembled and re-assembled the book enlivens understandings of spatial politics. It is also a text that is animated by a powerful sense of hope that cities might come to bere-assembled in different ways that are more equitable and more open to different agentic forces and contributions." (Society and Space, 1 November 2012)

"There will certainly be a range of contributors that join in on the exciting task of making these links. In Learning the City, McFarlane successfully manages to open the black box of urban learning in widening the perspective to acknowledge diverse urban learning practices, which may even bear a transformative potential in certain contexts." (International Planning Studies, 23 October 2012)

“Urbanism, McFarlane believes, needs a theory of learning; throughout his book he builds a very sophisticated one…[he] brings us closer to the material stuff of urban life and politics…a kind of urbanism in motion, whereby what we come to term ‘knowledge’, ‘infrastructure’ and ‘resources’ are never simply ‘there’, but must be translated, distributed, coordinated, perceived and inhabited”. (International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Volume 38.1, January 2014).