Advisory Center for Affordable Settlements & Housing

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Placing Planetary Urbanization in Other Fields of Vision

Urbanization has unquestionably become one of the most pressing issues of the 21st century (Parnell, 2016). Marked by economic and environmental crises, challenges of global warming, mass migration, and forced displacement, the stakes of urban knowledge production are high. Far from producing consensus on the relationship between urbanization and capitalism, the first two decades of the 21st century have been characterized by politically divergent strands of urban knowledge production in academia and have brought an intense focus on epistemological and methodological framings. Within critical urban studies, there has been a revived analytical appreciation of how we study the urban, whether, for example, through the postcolonial concern with “ordinary” cities (Robinson, 2006) and the repudiation of western cities as the exemplars of urban development (Roy, 2009; Roy and Ong, 2011; Simone, 2011) or through a turn to comparative analysis (McFarlane, 2010; Robinson, 2011, 2016; Ward, 2010). Amid this surge of interest in all things urban.

 

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