Provincializing Global Urbanism: A Manifesto

Abstract

“To thematize requires a project to select its objects, deploy them in a bounded field, and submit them to disciplined inquiry” (Guha, 1997, xv)

Mainstream urban scholarship envisions urbanization as a global process that is best achieved via the worldwide application of the development mechanisms pioneered in the advanced capitalist countries—currently, those of neoliberal globalization. Yet the repeated failure of this vision to deliver on its promise of wealth for all and ecological sustainability compels urban scholars to rethink mainstream presumptions. By means of a ten-point manifesto, we argue that provincializing global urbanism creates space from which to challenge urban theories that treat “northern” urbanization as the norm, to incorporate the expertise and perspectives of urban majorities, and to imagine and enact alternative urban futures.

Key words:

• Southern theory
• post-colonial urbanism
• provincialization
• method
• learning
• global urbanism

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank, without implicating, Ananya Roy, Vinay Gidwani, James Sidaway and the participants in conferences held in Minneapolis, Shenzhen and Jakarta, for stimulating and provoking this manifesto, and Elvin Wyly for helpful comments on an earlier draft.

Notes

²Europe's nineteenth century explosion of urbanization, coinciding with its emergence as the core of global capitalist industrialization, entailed a threefold increase in the number of urban residents. Across Asia, Africa, Oceania and Latin America, urban populations have increased 12-fold in the last 60 years.

³By “southern”, we mean those, everywhere, whose livelihoods have been made precarious by geohistorical processes of colonialism and globalizing capitalism.