What would Ruth Glass do?

This article is a contribution to debates in this journal surrounding the politics of urban epistemology. It uses a close reading of Ruth Glass’ introduction to London: Aspects of Change (1964) to advance a critique of urban knowledge production that suggests urban studies ought better to strive to accommodate the complex and often contradictory qualities of cities rather than seeking to tidy up these phenomena in exchange for clean terms of analysis. The example given in this paper is gentrification studies, which in some ways, fails to learn from the epistemic qualities of Ruth Glass’ essay, in which the term is coined. There is a risk that where academic taxonomy becomes too reified and too mobile it becomes a commodity itself which operates in an epistemology which reproduces the logic of capital. How might urban studies further strive to not only critically engage with cities but to produce ‘emancipatory’ knowledges which work to undermine the dominating logics which produce urban space?