Urban Theory beyond the West

摘要

It has become commonplace to denounce the universalizing claims made in studies of supposedly paradigmatic cities in the global North like Chicago and Los Angeles. Urban theory, it is often said, cannot remain rooted exclusively and parochially in the Western European and North American great cities of the late nineteenth and early or mid-twentieth centuries. Urban theory needs to be reconstructed, taking into account the experiences of cities 'beyond the West', as Tim Edensor and Mark Jayne put it in the title of this edited collection. Spurred on by the arguments of Jenny Robinson, Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, and Colin McFarlane and Kevin Ward (among others), Edensor and Jayne have put together a volume that tries to advance urban theory 'beyond the West'.