IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/cityxx/v19y2015i5p646-664.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Beyond city limits

Author

Listed:
  • Mark Davidson
  • Kurt Iveson

Abstract

With the publication of their piece 'Towards a New Epistemology of the Urban?' in City 19 (2-3), Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid hoped to ignite a debate about the adequacy of existing epistemologies for understanding urban life today. Brenner and Schmid's desire to set urban research on a new course is premised on a wide-ranging critique of 'city-centrism' that they believe is holding back both mainstream and critical urban research. In this paper, we challenge Brenner and Schmid's call for urban theory to shift from a concern with cities as 'things' to a concern with processes of concentrated, extended and differentiated urbanization. In their justified desire to critique 'urban age' ideologies that treat 'the city' as a fixed, bounded and replicable spatial unit, Brenner and Schmid risk robbing critical urban theory of a concept and an orientation that is crucial to both its conceptual clarity and its political efficacy. We offer in its place a conceptual and political defense of 'the city' as an anchor for a critical urban studies that can contribute to emancipatory politics. This is absolutely not a call for a return of bounded, universal concepts of 'the city' that have rightly been the target of critique. Rather, it is a call for an epistemology of the urban that is founded on an engagement with the political practices of subordinated peoples across a diverse range of cities. For many millions of people across the planet, the particularities of city life continue to be the context from which urbanization processes are experienced, understood, and potentially transformed.

Suggested Citation

  • Mark Davidson & Kurt Iveson, 2015. "Beyond city limits," City, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 19(5), pages 646-664, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:cityxx:v:19:y:2015:i:5:p:646-664
    DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2015.1078603
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13604813.2015.1078603
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/13604813.2015.1078603?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Paul Mason, 2013. "Why it's STILL Kicking Off Everywhere," City, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 17(6), pages 808-809, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Hillary Angelo & Kian Goh, 2021. "OUT IN SPACE: Difference and Abstraction in Planetary Urbanization," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 45(4), pages 732-744, July.
    2. Lauren Rickards & Brendan Gleeson & Mark Boyle & Cian O’Callaghan, 2016. "Urban studies after the age of the city," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 53(8), pages 1523-1541, June.
    3. Vanesa Castán Broto, 2020. "Beyond tabulated utopias: Action and contradiction in urban environments," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 57(11), pages 2371-2379, August.
    4. Allen J. Scott, 2022. "The constitution of the city and the critique of critical urban theory," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 59(6), pages 1105-1129, May.
    5. Nik Janos, 2020. "Urbanising territory: The contradictions of eco-cityism at the industrial margins, Duwamish River, Seattle," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 57(11), pages 2282-2299, August.
    6. Robert Priessman Fenton, 2021. "Cacao Capitalism and Extended Urbanization: On the Contradictory Origins of Bounded Urbanism in Nineteenth‐century Coastal Ecuador," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 45(1), pages 5-20, January.
    7. Kristian Saguin, 2017. "Producing an urban hazardscape beyond the city," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 49(9), pages 1968-1985, September.
    8. Mark Davidson, 2016. "Planning for Planet or City?," Urban Planning, Cogitatio Press, vol. 1(1), pages 20-23.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Carmen Voces & Miguel Caínzos, 2022. "The Political Significance of Overeducation: Status Inconsistency, Attitudes towards the Political System and Political Participation in a High-Overeducation Context," Social Sciences, MDPI, vol. 11(8), pages 1-18, August.
    2. Andrea Gibbons, 2013. "One hundred and forty characters will not be changing the world," City, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 17(5), pages 657-660, October.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:cityxx:v:19:y:2015:i:5:p:646-664. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/CCIT20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.