ABSTRACT
It is by now well-established that urban theory has been developed from a limited number of urban cases in the north, and that this has problematically resulted in a tendency towards universalizing theory that fails to adequately explain urban diversity and specifically cities in the global south. This is not to say there is no long history to the study of southern cities (see Myers, 2003; King, 2006), but these studies have largely been seen as sitting on the margins of urban studies. Further, scholars of southern cities participating in “international” conversations in urban studies have been required to frame their analyses through this northern-based literature (and often explained as exceptions to the northern norm), rather than develop new points of entry (Sanders, 1992; Myers, 1994; Robinson, 2006; Sheppard et al., 2013; Robinson and Roy, 2016). In contrast to earlier studies of postcolonial cities (e.g., Jacobs, 1996; Yeoh, 2001), my focus in this book is a specific intellectual move that turns the postcolonial critique back onto the academy and focuses on the conditions of the production of knowledge about cities (e.g., Robinson, 2006; Sheppard, et al., 2013; Roy, 2016). Mindful that there has been a conflation between the study of southern cities and this specific line of argumentation1, I use the phrase “the southern urban critique” to describe this analytical focus on the process of urban research and theory-making (Lawhon and Truelove, 2020).
