Making Urban Theory

Learning and Unlearning through Southern Cities

Mary Lawhon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781032238852
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000767957
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book facilitates more careful engagement with the production, politics and geography of knowledge as scholars create space for the inclusion of southern cities in urban theory.

Making Urban Theory addresses debates of the past fifty years regarding whether and why scholars should conceptualize southern cities as different and argues for the continued importance of unlearning existing theory. With examples from the urban question to environmental justice, urban infrastructure to basic income, this volume highlights the limitations of existing explanations as well as how thinking from the south entails more than collecting data in new places. Throughout the book, instances of juxtapositions, unease, unlearning and learning anew emphasize how theory-making from southern cases can open avenues to more creative possibilities. The book pulls theories apart, examining distinct components to better understand the universality and provinciality of empirical phenomena, causality and norms, including questions of what a city is and ought to be.

This book delivers a clearer articulation of ongoing debates and future possibilities for southern urban scholarship, and it will thus be relevant for both scholars and students of Urban Studies, Urban Theory, Urban Geography, Research Methods in Geography, Postcolonial/Southern Cities and Global Cities at graduate and post-graduate levels.

1  Postcolonialism and urban studies

Shifting the gaze from the city to the academy

It is by now well-established that urban theory has been developed from a limited number of urban cases in the north, and that this has problematically resulted in a tendency towards universalizing theory that fails to adequately explain urban diversity and specifically cities in the global south. This is not to say there is no long history to the study of southern cities (see Myers, 2003; King, 2006), but these studies have largely been seen as sitting on the margins of urban studies. Further, scholars of southern cities participating in “international” conversations in urban studies have been required to frame their analyses through this northern-based literature (and often explained as exceptions to the northern norm), rather than develop new points of entry (Sanders, 1992; Myers, 1994; Robinson, 2006; Sheppard et al., 2013; Robinson and Roy, 2016). In contrast to earlier studies of postcolonial cities (e.g., Jacobs, 1996; Yeoh, 2001), my focus in this book is a specific intellectual move that turns the postcolonial critique back onto the academy and focuses on the conditions of the production of knowledge about cities (e.g., Robinson, 2006; Sheppard, et al., 2013; Roy, 2016). Mindful that there has been a conflation between the study of southern cities and this specific line of argumentation¹, I use the phrase “the southern urban critique” to describe this analytical focus on the process of urban research and theory-making (Lawhon and Truelove, 2020).

Not all scholars articulating and building on what I call the southern urban critique use the term “global south.” As with any category, this term has a history, multiple usages and plenty of limitations. Older works use phrases such as “Third World” or “developing world,” and many of the scholars discussed deploy continental-scaled regional frames (i.e., Asian, African, Latin American cities). To provide some measure of consistency in this text, I typically use the term “south” even in discussing this longer history. As with all regional geographies, it both has useful (if partial) explanatory power and, if reified, provides a deeply flawed understanding of the construction of spaces and places. The global south is not a neutral spatial category: it and its predecessors bear the long weight of fraught construction. And yet, recognizing the limitations of any category, there is analytical utility in naming this imperfect concept (Roy, 2014). Here, then, I use this term not to denote an essentialist spatially bounded unit but to identify a dynamic, constructed concept (Dados and Connell, 2012; Wa Ngugi, 2012). Like all categories, the utility of “the south” will change; we can already see its declining salience as “middle-income” countries such as India and China push at the edges of its utility for understanding our contemporary world. For now, it is an at-hand term with its limitations; my belief is that, at present, the term retains tactical analytical and political utility in the project of critiquing and changing knowledge production. Equally, throughout the book I use the term “northern theory” mindful of its limitations and with the recognition that most scholars, even those based in and studying northern cities, are at least somewhat influenced by spatially plural ideas, people and places.

In this chapter, I seek to provide a longer history for the southern urban critique. Having recently published a piece in Urban Studies which simply notes a longer history because of the limits of space, here I take advantage of the luxury of a monograph to delve a little deeper into the roots of this concern. I am interested in understanding the different arguments that emerge from different authors as an entry point into the next chapter which seeks to disambiguate the southern urban critique. As described in the introduction, I also attend here to the intellectual politics of who can and ought to write about southern cities.

The emergence of the southern urban critique

Scholars of postcolonialism have long examined the production of cultural knowledge as well as the production of scholarly ideas (e.g., Said, 1978; Godlewska and Smith, 1994), including consideration of the relationship between researcher and subject (Spivak, 1999; Sidaway, 2000; Noxolo, 2009). In the early 1990s, as postcolonial theory was becoming part of the lexicon of development geography (Gilmartin and Berg, 2007; Sharp, 2009; Jazeel, 2019a), a small number of geographers sought to relate postcolonial ideas to the construction of knowledge about cities in the global south. As is true for any intellectual conversation, there was surely more interaction between various scholars than is apparent in the written published record; here I review a few publications mindful that the emerging dialogue was happening through and beyond such texts.

In 1991, in a Presidential address to the Canadian Association of Geographers, McGee drew on decades of work in Asian cities to reiterate the need to think differently about southern cities, not to transpose established perspectives onto the dynamic sites of urban change in the global south. While he adopts postcolonial vocabulary in his identification of Eurocentricism in this piece, the essence of McGee's argument long predates postcolonial theory in geography; the preface to his 1971 book – no, that is not a typo – says, “The theme of the essays in the first section is my growing disillusionment with the application of the theories that have emerged from the study of the urbanization process in the West” (McGee, 1971: 9). Similarly, Slater (1992) argues against the use of northern theories in his examination of Eurocentricism, arguing that the south is different and therefore requires new theories. He specifically thought through the relevance of Lefebvre and urban geographical ideas that build on his work. As I develop further in Chapter 2, these arguments are part of a broader narrative that positions the south as empirically different, and calls for theoretical approaches that account for this difference.

Around this same time, Sanders (1992) published a piece in the “Debates” section of Antipode called “Eurocentric bias in the study of African urbanization: a provocation to debate.” Like McGee (1991), she points to specific urban theories and their limitations in explaining southern cities (in his case, Asian; in hers, African). For both, ideas generated from EuroAmerican urban studies provide a basis for comparison, but fail to explain the data collected in southern contexts. Sanders, in an argument that bears much resemblance to recent work (e.g. Robinson, 2010), notes that African cities are seen through northern lenses and ultimately judged inadequate/inferior or un-urban.

As best I can tell, Garth Myers was the only one to respond to this provocation in text. Myers’ abstract, published when I was in eighth grade, could equally have been published last year with a few minor terminological updates: “A number of geographers have recently championed the struggle against Eurocentric theoretical categorizations in geographical research on African cities. At the same time, many whose work has concentrated on African urban geography have felt left out in the more abstract theoretical debates of their colleagues based in the West. I argue for the possibility of confronting Western bias and contributing to broader theoretical debates by creating theoretical constructs derived from the African experience” (Myers, 1994). It is worth noting that Myers’ article starts with the premise that we all know the limitations of thinking through African cities with north-derived theory and provides citation rather than extensive examples. In other words, several decades ago this idea was not articulated by Myers as novel news. His literature review, however, looks rather different from more recent scholarship as it focuses on responding to the rarely cited Sanders invitation to debate. Specifically, Myers’ takes issue with Sanders’ (1992) explication of how we might undertake African urban scholarship as well as who might be positioned and permitted to do so.

In her provocation, Sanders (1992) points us to Asante's (1988) “The Afrocentric Idea” and argues for a new relationship in which Africa can be the subject, not object, of research. Sanders does not give us much detail about Asante beyond this, but Sanders’ reference to Asante as a starting point through which to rethink African urban studies becomes the focal point for Myers’ response. Myers pushes back against two implications that he attributes to Sanders through a more explicit articulation of Asante's Afrocentricity. The first is the privileging of “emic” perspectives (i.e., focusing on the logics internal to the city/culture examined). While Myers gives limited space to this concern, he here parallels wider literatures fearful of what Hountondji calls “ethno-philosophy” (Hountondji, 1996; see also Connell, 2007). The second point Myers contests is that those best able theorize African cities are black African scholars. Myers (1994: 198) observes, “Though he rejects the nationalistic argument that ‘all teachers of Black Studies should be black,’ Asante does so only to contend that these black teachers must be the right kind of blacks, i.e., Asantean Afrocentrists.” Sanders herself does not quite explicitly oppose outsiders studying African cities, but there is an interesting parallel in her observation that Africans often rely on “Western interpretive models” in their scholarly analysis, but that “A perusal of recent dissertations on Africa and articles in African Studies Review reveals that many young Africans do not consistently reproduce conventional urban research” (Sander 1992: 211).

Myers instead draws on Geertz and the anthropological tradition to urge human geographers (of any race) back to the field, and to use African cities as sites from which to generate concepts rather than rely on northern theory as our intellectual foundation. While in agreement with the need for concepts with relevance beyond African or southern cities, I am sympathetic to why scholars such as Sanders might be unconvinced that spending time in the field is enough. I am, therefore, in agreement with Myers’ opposition to prioritizing emic approaches as well as the question of who ought to do work on/in Africa, although I find that his recommendations in this particular piece do not take us far enough in our analysis of the process of theory-making (one can only do so much in any article!). As I have detailed in the introduction, there is utility both in concerns about who might be best positioned to theorize African cities as well as the importance of field time. And yet, I understand both as proxies for what I argue more substantively opens us up to thinking differently about African cities. Racial identity as well as time in the field enable, but do not directly cause (are neither necessary nor sufficient for) unlearning and learning anew. It is the slow and often fraught process of identifying assumptions within theory and within our own gaze that requires our explicit attention.

Myers was my first real introduction to African studies, and yet, somehow, I am as guilty as any in missing the longer roots of our contemporary conversations for too long. For despite thousands of citations to later work on the southern urban critique, Sanders and Myers’ conversation is woefully undercited. As in, according to Google scholar, less than fifty citations between the two. Slater's work has been better cited, but it is less explicitly urban in its framing, and is cited largely in nonurban work; McGee's wider ouvre is fairly well-cited, although the Presidential address noted above which is explicit about the limitations of northern theory has also received less attention.

I have, of late, wondered why this might be. I wager that most of us trained in urban geography missed this set of scholarly interventions from this moment. McGee and Slater both are better known as development geographers than urbanists; McGee, for example, is included in a collection on key thinkers in development studies (Lea, 2006). Garth Myers tells a lovely anecdote about the surprise of his department when he identified his ability to teach an urban course: he is an Africanist, and no one really thought much beyond that. Of the authors reviewed here, Sanders in most clearly identified as an urban scholar; as best I can tell most of her work is focused in the global north. Maybe in the early-1990s urban geography and urban studies more generally were not ready to mainstream this conversation. Maybe arguing against the canon and enquiry about who can produce this knowledge was more than mainstream urbanists could quite handle. Maybe we needed a softer entry point.

A decade later, Robinson provided us with what, in my reading, is a softer entry. Her 2002 piece in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (notably, an urban journal, in contrast with the outlets for the works cited above) starts with a related concern about our limited understanding of southern cities. Here, and later in her more detailed monograph, Robinson (2006) frames her concern in terms of disciplines rather than individuals, nationalities, race or indigeneity. She explains the gap between northern and southern cities as primarily rooted in different disciplinary attention: while northern cities contribute to and are understood through urban theory, southern cities are largely examined through conceptual frames from development studies. She traces this back in part to work on dependency theory in Brazil in the 1970s, and geographer Milton Santos’ urgings that cities be contextualized within this global political economic structure. This explanation largely accords with the consideration of McGee and Slater as development geographers rather than urbanists noted in the previous paragraph.

Yet, in contrast with others, Robinson's proposal is to draw southern cities (back) into urban studies, allowing for “ordinary cities” (such as, but not limited to, cities in the global south) to encounter and contribute to urban theory. In this move, she is equally interested in thinking more carefully about how northern theory might be usefully deployed in southern cities. In other words, her central contention is actually substantively different from Slater, McGee, Sanders and Myers: the problem is not about southern difference and too much northern theory. The problem is the designation of southern cities as part of development theory and not enough urban theory. (I examine Robinson's argument in more detail in Chapter 3).

In the burgeoning of attention to southern cities to that has followed Robinson's mid-2000s argumentation, however, I believe that key points of difference between these various scholars have regularly been conflated, even where scholars are not going back to read and cite earlier works. Slater (1992), McGee (1991), Sanders (1992) and Myers (1994) place much more weight on the difference of southern cities and the implications of this difference for how we theorize. Sanders’ line of argumentation focuses on from what and whom new theory ought to emerge, but is similarly concerned with north/south difference and too much of the northern gaze. Robinson is as equally emphatic as these authors that urban theory can be made from southern cities, but the novelty of her central thesis is the distinction she makes from this longer line of enquiry: southern cities are not so different that they ought to be studied as a separate category, through separate theoretical constructs, whether African, Asian or “Third World.” And, while neither the 2002 nor 2006 pieces address the point directly, we can draw on her wider work here as well as both before and after these publications to suggest that, contra Slater, Lefebvre just might be useful for thinking about southern cities. In the next chapter, I tease out these distinctions between different lines of argument in more detail through an investigation of the current literature.

Note

1 As but one example of how the literature thus far fails to make distinctions between the study of southern cities, postcolonial urban studies and the southern urban critique, I point to a recent edited collection. Edensor and Jayne's (2012) introduction to their edited volume Urban Theory Beyond the West describes what I have called the southern urban critique, but their literature review includes and makes no distinction between cases that uncritically deploy northern theory and those that take it as an object of critical enquiry.

2 Disambiguating the southern urban critique

With Yaffa Truelove

The southern urban critique has instigated renewed scholarly attention to southern cities and placed the south and theory-making more explicitly into urban analyses. As with any emerging set of ideas, however, there remains ambiguity, uncertainty and difference amongst advocates of this wider movement: what precisely is being argued is less clearly collective. Robinson and Roy (2016: 185) describe such “investigations into global urbanism” as “a heterodox field of inquiry which, in the last decade or so, has been tremendously enriched by lively debate, a proliferation of paradigms, and experimentation with various methodologies … [such studies] experiment with new possibilities for a more global urban studies, to work with but also press at the limits of extant urban theorization and method and at the same time to explore the potential to start with some entirely different resources and places.” Beyond this generalization, however, there is much uncertainty about the foundations of critique and their implications for scholarly practice. This chapter seeks to echo Robinson and Roy's point that the southern urban critique is not a singular call, but instead an umbrella term for several not-quite-disparate threads of argument. It also positions the focus of this book – the process of unlearning and learning anew as central to postcolonial theory-making – within this wider call.

As is often the case with writing, this chapter is rooted in my own struggles to find my way through the extant literature. During my postdoctoral fellowship at the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town, I helped start a reading group on African cities. In hindsight I better understand that I was interested in working through the southern urban critique from an African perspective, but at the time struggled to name this body of literature. My hope is that this book, and this chapter in particular, helps others to find their way through this wider conversation with more ease – and more quickly than I did!

This chapter builds on a piece published with Yaffa Truelove in Urban Studies (Lawhon and Truelove, 2020; in this chapter “we”’ refers to Yaffa and I. And, yes, it took that long to work through ideas, although there were also two babies and a few new jobs between my time at the ACC and the publication!). We are certainly of the mind that at this moment, the heterogeneity and exploration described by Robinson and Roy (2016) is healthy for advancing the broader collective agenda and our intention is not to suggest a need for reconciliation, unification, definitive claims or ideological close-mindedness. We find utility in the agonistic processes that can result from difference and believe that this contributes to our scholarly thinking. But we are concerned that much of the engagement with and critique of southern urban thinking is based on acrimonious defences of intellectual territory rather than engagement with and on the terms of the other (Roy, 2016; Hart, 2018). Thus, we seek to clarify arguments developed through the southern urban...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Research on Decoloniality and New Postcolonialisms
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1  Postcolonialism and urban studies: Shifting the gaze from the city to the academy
• 2  Disambiguating the southern urban critique
• 3  Provincializing the urban question: Against the rural-in-the-urban
• 4  The struggle for the city, and for the right to be city
• 5  Teaching urban geography after the southern urban critique
• 6  Pathways forward: Urban studies after the southern urban critique
• 7  Unbundling urban theory: Of what is theory made
• 8  Theorizing anew through southern cities
• 9  Recognizing and reworking the norms that travel with theory
•   Conclusion
• References
• Index