Worlding cities and comparative urbanism

Laura Cesafsky, Kate Derickson

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapter

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

We have reached, as we are often reminded, a geographic tipping point in which the majority of people live in cities for the first time in human history. How is urban theory coming to terms with this new, apparently ‘global’ urban condition? Some have argued the new ‘urban age’ is an expression of ‘planetary urbanization’, or the ‘complete urbanization of society’ that Henri Lefebvre predicted in the 1970s. For yet other urbanists, the political possibilities of city life lie not at the cosmic scale of the planetary but in embodied and everyday practices of urban social reproduction and livelihood strategies. After a brief review of the literature, we show how comparative urbanism and worlding cities, as postcolonial approaches, seek to side-step totalizing narratives of universal capitalist globalization by deploying ethnographic and collaborative methods to generate alternative 'transurban' threads and solidarities that do – or potentially could – hold disparate urban worlds together.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationHandbook of Urban Geography
PublisherEdward Elgar Publishing Ltd.
Pages19-32
Number of pages14
ISBN (Electronic)9781785364600
ISBN (Print)9781785364594
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 1 2019

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© Tim Schwanen and Ronald van Kempen 2019.

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