Martin Müller: Thinking Cities Beyond North and South

The talk interrogates the dualism of North and South, which has marked much recent theorising in urban studies, for its silences. It argues that current global urban theory produces an erasure of a large swathe of cities from its purview. Those cities – from Berlin to Beijing and from Teheran to Tokyo – sit uneasily between the hemispheric divide of North and South in what could be called the global Easts: the inbetween spaces of global urbanism.

For bringing about urban futures where cities anywhere have an equal seat at the table, we need to move beyond hemispheric thinking in urban theory. It proposes not a Southern or Eastern urban theory, but a worlding of urban theory through a triple move of, first, expanding our geographical imagination, second, diversifying our theoretical repertoire and, third, equilibrating the skewed geopolitics of urban knowledge production.

Keywords: global urbanism, Global South, Global East, postcolonialism