Planetary Urbanization: Mutations of the Urban Question

A new round of debate on the urban question is today unfolding, in relation to which key aspects of inherited urban theories, including those produced in recent decades, now appear inadequate or even obsolete. Against this background, this chapter considers the wide-ranging epistemological, conceptual, and methodological challenges posed by emergent patterns and pathways of planetary urban transformation, which are relativizing the inherited spatial dualisms (city/countryside, urban/rural, human/nonhuman) and scalar imaginaries that have long anchored the field of urban studies. The production of these dramatically rescaled urban spaces engenders major challenges for critical theory, research, imagination, and practice.