Productive tensions? The 'city' across geographies of planetary urbanization and the urban age

Abstract

A shift away from the city as the default unit of analysis in urban studies is one of the widely agreed-upon advances brought about by the planetary urbanization thesis. Yet academic critique of methodological cityism has gained traction during a period when the city is not only globally prominent through the “urban age” discourse but has also been consolidated as a key scale of policy action in multilateral agendas. Rather than focusing on a new theory-policy disjuncture, this intervention identifies potentially productive tensions between aspects of the planetary urbanization and urban age theses. We argue that: (1) inclusion of the experiences of Southern cities in the formulation of multilateral urban agendas are openings to consideration of urban processes that extend well beyond the city; (2) the city as an established locus of ground-level political action provides a window onto the role of human dynamics in extended geographies of urbanization.