Global Urbanism is an experimental examination of how urban scholars and activists make sense of, and act upon, the foundational relationship between the ‘global’ and the ‘urban’.
What does it mean to say that we live in a global-urban moment, and what are its implications? Refusing all-encompassing answers, the book grounds this question, exploring the plurality of understandings, definitions, and ways of researching global urbanism through the lenses of varied contributors from different parts of the world. The contributors explore what global urbanism means to them, in their context, from the ground and the struggles upon which they are working and living. The book argues for an incremental, fragile and in-the-making emancipatory urban thinking. The contributions provide the resources to help make sense of what global urbanism is in its varieties, what’s at stake in it, how to research it, and what needs to change for more progressive urban futures. It provides a heterodox set of approaches and theorisations to probe and provoke rather than aiming to draw a line under a complex, changing and profoundly contested set of global-urban processes.
Global Urbanism is primarily intended for scholars and graduate students in geography, sociology, planning, anthropology and the field of urban studies, for whom it will provide an invaluable and up-to-date guide to current thinking across the range of disciplines and practices which converge in the study of urbanism.
Chapter 36 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429259593
Michele Lancione is Professor of Geography at the Polytechnic of Turin, Italy, and Visiting Professor of Urban Studies at the University of Sheffield, United Kingdom. He is a member of the Common Front for Housing Rights (Bucharest), co-founder and editor of the Radical Housing Journal and corresponding editor at IJURR. His work focuses on radical forms of inhabitation and housing struggles (through a five-year European Research Council project) and the politics of life at the margins in the contemporary urban.
Colin McFarlane is Professor of Geography at Durham University, United Kingdom. His current work is on the politics and experience of urban densities (through a European Research Council project), the relationship between urban waste and life in the city, thinking the city through the idea of the fragment and the potentials for urban equalities (through a Global Challenges Research Fund project led by University College London).
