What is urban about critical urban theory?

ABSTRACT

This essay takes as its provocation a question posed by the feminist philosopher Nancy Fraser: “What’s Critical about Critical Theory?” In urban studies, this question has been usefully reframed by Neil Brenner to consider what is critical about critical urban theory. This essay discusses how the “urban” is currently being conceptualized in various worlds of urban studies and what this might mean for the urban question of the current historical conjuncture. Launched from places on the map that are forms of urban government but that have distinctive agrarian histories and rural presents, the essay foregrounds the undecidability of the urban, be it geographies of urbanization or urban politics. What is at stake is a critical urban theory attentive to historical difference as a fundamental constituting process of global political economy and deconstruction as a methodology of generalization and theorization.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical urban theory
• post-colonial theory
• feminist theory
• planetary urbanization
• agrarian question
• urban government

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Robert Lake and Deborah Martin for the invitation to give the Urban Geography plenary talk at the 2015 annual conference of the Association of American Geographers. I am grateful to Kate Derickson and Linda Peake for their roles as discussants. This essay has benefited from generous and thoughtful comments by Neil Brenner as well as from Gillian Hart’s long-standing engagement with the agrarian question. Most of all, I am indebted to the urban planners and engineers who introduced me to, and guided me through, the municipalities of Bhatpara, Dankuni, and Hooghly-Chinsurah in West Bengal, India.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.