Assemblage theory’s most consequential claim is that the components of any formation retain a measure of autonomy: they can enter relations without being dissolved by them and, crucially, they can leave. This insistence on relations of exteriority refuses both the organic fantasy of a whole that defines its parts from within and the flattened network in which every element becomes interchangeable. Cities, knowledge systems, material practices and institutions appear instead as metastable arrangements whose temporary coherence is produced by specific articulations of bodies, discourses, techniques and affects, yet never secured against their own internal capacities for exit or recombination. The political force of the concept lies here. Stabilization—territorialization, coding, the provisional hardening of form—is always necessary for anything to function, yet it remains haunted by the possibility of deterritorialization, the line along which a component withdraws or a new alliance forms. In urban and architectural thought this tension is especially sharp: a building or a neighbourhood may appear solid, but its materials, users, regulations and atmospheres continue to hold capacities that exceed the current arrangement, capacities that can be activated under altered conditions. The risk is that the concept becomes merely descriptive, a flexible vocabulary that registers complexity without deciding anything; its value emerges only when the autonomy of components is treated as a practical and political question—what can still leave, what can still recombine, what remains possible once the current territorialization is no longer taken as final. Assemblage thinking therefore does not abolish structure; it keeps structure provisional, measured less by what an arrangement is than by what its parts can still do when the present configuration begins to loosen.
URBANISM MEETS ART