How global is global urbanism? Why we theorised from the North and South but forgot the East.

Over the past decade, global urbanism has seen a distinct move towards embracing cities outside the Global North for theory-building and comparative research. Postcolonial theory, often in the guise of ‘theorising from the South’, has been crucial in this development through critiquing the Eurocentric and universalist assumptions of urban theory. This paper welcomes this turn towards more inclusive theorizing, but shows that the literature on global urbanism still remains far from evenly encompassing cities around the globe. Instead, an uneven geographical imagination underlies global urbanism: there is an almost complete silence around what could be termed the Global East. The paper argues that this silence (and the geographical imagination that it arises from) can be attributed to two interlinked factors. The first is the conceptual (re)framing of global urbanism through the lenses of ‘theorising from the South’ and postcolonialism. These theories have limited reach and resonance in the ontologies of the Global East, where countries have been colonisers and colonies (and cities have been colonial centres and peripheries), sometimes both. The second factor is the mode of contemporary knowledge production on global urbanism, which relies to a large degree on circuits of Anglophone (and to a lesser degree Francophone) scholarship. The paper concludes that global urbanism must diversify its theoretical bases – but also its empirical commitments and tools – for its theorizing to become more global than it currently is.

Le « Trait d’Urbain » est un séminaire proposé par le groupe de recherche en Études urbaines afin de permettre aux chercheuses et chercheurs de présenter leurs travaux en cours.

L'entrée est libre.