Amidst struggles from pandemics to the echoes of war, cities worldwide are facing tumultuous forces – alongside everyday municipal challenges – that are redefining the nature of an ‘urban space’. The displacement and occupation reshaping Gaza’s landscape and the destruction of life and infrastructure in Ukraine, for example, demonstrate how urban spaces have become both battlegrounds and refuges—symbols of resilience and vulnerability. However, existing theories and paradigms remain too limited to fully comprehend the challenges these cities face or to imagine a sustainable urban future emerging out of them.
Within this larger discourse, Gautam Bhan, Michael Keith, Susan Parnell, and Edgar Pieterse in Cities Rethought: A New Urban Disposition (2024) provide a powerful lens to reimagine and rearticulate a more liveable future out of such challenges. This volume serves as a riveting entry point for understanding the economic, social, political, and cultural experiences of cities that circulate and intersect in complex ways. Four different scholars from four different countries come together to reflect on the similarities and gaps in understanding that they identified with a transdisciplinary lens.
At the heart of the book lies a concept of urban disposition. This entails adopting a perspective attuned to the distinct challenges and opportunities inherent in urban life in order to devise context-specific solutions. This disposition is centred around three key elements: normative, analytical, and operational. These elements are explored in detail across three chapters. First, they advocate the development of a normative position that complements both analytical frameworks and practical operations. Second, they emphasise adopting innovative modes of analysis to address the evolving complexities of contemporary urban environments, while also contributing to the formulation of strategies for progress. Third, they stress the importance of translating analytical insights into actionable strategies aimed at achieving a new normative objective.
The book’s exploration of normative location explores dispositional questions such as: What is the fabric of a city? What are the characteristics of urban life under a welfare state? What kind of rights related to access to resources can a citizen fight for in the city? These questions are not meant to be answered definitively but to encourage the reader to interrogate the underlying assumptions in debates surrounding urban life. For instance, one way of examining housing policies can be from the normative location of power dynamics. The authors illustrate this perspective with the example of Cairo, where the Egyptian state housing policies to impose financial obligations that discourage citizens from challenging the regime.
While the authors’ call for recognising why certain standpoints, topics or methods are used over others is not new – echoing Max Weber and his predecessor, Heinrich Rickert – the application of this notion to urban studies remains a powerful and pertinent one. In Towards a New Epistemology of the Urban? (2015), Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid raised similar questions. Through the concept of epistemological reflexivity, they emphasised the situatedness of all forms of knowledge and the need to reinvent analytical categories in response to ongoing historical change. This approach highlighted the mutual constitution of the subject (the knower) and object (the site) and urged for an understanding of urban transformation through social practices and political struggles. Cities Rethought further clarifies this idea by introducing the concept of normative location and the practice of analytical redescription.
After establishing normative location, the authors introduce analytical redescriptions as a new form of knowledge production. Rather than viewing urban problems as static, solvable issues, the authors suggest viewing them as dynamic puzzles that can be interpreted and reinterpreted in multiple ways. The authors identify six puzzles as examples ranging from housing estates in London and environmental planning in Durban, South Africa to the migration from India’s cities during the COVID-19 pandemic to offer alternate descriptions that highlight the ever-changing nature of urban crises.
For instance, during the 2020 COVID lockdown in India, millions of migrant labourers left cities on foot, embarking on arduous journeys to their rural ‘homes’, which could be up to thousands of kilometres away. While this migration was generally framed as a public health crisis, the authors redescribed the puzzle by suggesting that patchworked history of urban safety nets, challenges of delivery of social protection and informal nature of labour to be equally responsible. The concept of analytical redescriptions is thus a powerful tool for rethinking urban challenges which encourages the reader to approach urban crises as an interconnected phenomenon and embrace complexities that are associated with it.
The final element of the book, the operational move, underscores the importance of translating theoretical insights into practical action. The authors argue for engaging with the complexity of the city without falling into the traps of institutional rigidity, professional silos, or fragmented political and cultural structures. In this section, the authors share four reflections: mapping the operational ecosystem of the city; finding the pulse or the rhythm of the city; measuring success and failure; and understanding how one can construct, endure, and live a life dedicated to practice.
The operational ecosystem, for example, involves informal delivery systems, such as water supply, that do not fit neatly into the public or private domain, particularly in the global South. These systems vary based on state capacity, cultural norms and political traditions. The pulse of the city refers to the shifting hegemonic ideas which are attuned to global and local shifts in priority. For example, the first UN Habitat Conference in 1976 led to a shift of focus from rural to global urban future while the second Habitat Conference emphasized housing rights.
When discussing the complexity of measuring success and failure, they call for critically analysing which tradeoffs are more acceptable than others. For example, Mumbai’s slum redevelopment program sought to improve housing but did not address structural vulnerabilities, including caste and gender. In fact, it ended up creating a ‘vertical slum’ and reinforcing social inequalities, as Varsha Ayyar describes in a 2013 essay, ‘Caste and Gender in a Mumbai Resettlement Site’.
In dealing with the complexity of urban dynamics, the authors advocate what are called ‘communities of practice’. These are epistemic communities grounded in self-association and solidarity, rather than formal ideologies or organised groups like academic association. The authors cite the very writing of Cities Rethought as an example: scholars from different countries, continents and disciplines discussing the gaps in practice of urban studies.
That said, while the communities of practice idea calls for a transdisciplinary approach, there is a risk that such epistemic communities may exclude scholars without the necessary social capital or access to intellectual networks. Such epistemic communities, often situated within specific academic or institutional contexts, may inadvertently marginalize voices which are integral to understanding the complex realities of those experiencing polycrises firsthand. For instance, Ananya Roy’s call for ‘subaltern urbanism’ in a 2011 essay, ‘Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism’, comprises a radical challenge to the dominant megacity narrative through the study of slums, represents a more inclusive approach to knowledge production.
Overall, Cities Rethought presents an interesting and enjoyable read with a unique blend of theory and real-world examples. The book pushes the readers to think beyond the conventional urban paradigm to reimagine a city as a space of fluidity and potential. It invites the readers to reconsider how cities might foster collective action and resilience in the face of uncertainty. However, for all its claims of not propounding another form of urbanism, the book falls into its own trap by doing just that: propounding a new urban disposition that remains abstract.
A significant gap in the book is its neglect of suburbanisation – a concept that has garnered increasing attention in urban studies. Scholars including Roger Keil in Suburban Planet (2017) argue that the concept of the ‘urban age’ can be better characterised as the ‘suburban age’. Keil understands suburbanisation as a process of non-central population and economic growth which is accompanied by urban spatial expansion. By focusing solely on urbanisation in its reimagination of cities, the book inadvertently reinforces the mainstream discourse which looks down upon suburbanism. This oversight is particularly notable in the example of Cairo, where the abovementioned study on housing policies was situated in the gated suburbs. The concept of suburbanisation could have clarified analytical redescriptions like pandemic based reverse migration and of operational ecosystems like informal delivery systems.
Nevertheless, the strength of the book lies in its ability to provide a structured yet flexible framework for tackling urban problems and is a significant contribution to urban theory. It challenges the readers to rethink the relationships between cities, citizens, and the global crises shaping them while offering new tools for reimagining the future of urban life. By emphasising the interconnectedness of local and global challenges, the book opens up new avenues for innovative urban solutions that prioritise sustainability, equity, and collective well-being. Ultimately, Cities Rethought offers a vision of cities not as static entities but as fluid, dynamic spaces with new possibilities for solidarity in the face of global crises.