What can STS contribute to understandings of urban transformation? Cities are, above all, places where the built environment mediates human experience to such a degree that it is impossible to ignore. STS offers a way of analyzing the materiality of the built environment that situates it on the same plane as social relationships, rather than treating it as a vessel holding the content of urban society. While there was a time in STS when theorizing was caught up in debates over technological determinism vs. social constructivism, the current wave of STS scholarship as represented in this volume has taken its cue from actor-network theory and charted a different path. It repatriates the “missing masses” (Latour 1992) of things–and even other species–to the field of social analysis, but it does so without “black boxing” (Latour 1987) them or seeking to make them subordinate to a sociological master-term, such as Society, Economy, Capitalism, or Neoliberalism. By taking seriously the agency and “propensity” (Jullien 1995) of things, it profoundly decenters the various modalities of anthropocentrism that commonly undergird urban studies. The overall effect of this can be akin to an ontological shift, revealing cities as complex agglomerations of humans, buildings, vehicles, plants, water, concrete, microplastics, chemical compounds, and so on. As shown in this volume, these agglomerations are not static but are in continual motion, with their constituent elements forming more or less enduring assemblages at various scales, some of which connect elements within the city to one another or to the city’s rural hinterlands, and others of which connect it transnationally to other regions and cities.
