In This Issue...

Worldwide, the new year starts with grim reminders of social suffering and political domination. What is the role of urban research and theory in such a world? This collection of articles suggests that it is the analysis of frontiers of capitalist predation, be it the ‘lifeless dwellings’ produced by the global super-rich (Atkinson), or the ‘technosphere’ of restless global capital (Lin), or the making of ‘fungible space’ for global logistics (Danyluk). As Anguelovski argues, such frontiers include ‘green infrastructure planning’ and other forms of climate change interventions. Doshi thus reminds us of how displacement takes place in the name of improvement and under the sign of postcolonial development. In such a world, forms of inclusion can also become the means of displacement, as Vidal shows in the case of housing cooperatives. The tools of resistance, Dozier demonstrates, can creatively appropriate the ‘right to property’ and thus contest urban development, but they also engender new rounds of reform and control.

There are methodological challenges at stake in the study of worldwide processes of urban transformation. As Connolly shows, a vibrant debate is underway in urban studies as to whether the conceptual framework of planetary urbanization can capture the ‘metabolisms and circulations’ that make up a lived world and its ontological multiplicity. Kobi’s essay on ‘locality, materiality, and territoriality’ reminds us that even ‘construction sites [that] have been emerging everywhere’ have historical and political specificity. Indeed, the question of history, and of the historical method, is central to this issue of IJURR. By emphasizing the long histories of capital and empire, Boodrookas and Keshavarzian resignify Persian Gulf cities ‘not as an eclectic sideshow but as a central site for global shifts in urbanism, capitalism and architecture in the twentieth century’. Blatman-Thomas and Porter locate the urban, and key categories such as property, in racial capitalism, specifically settler colonial cities. They demonstrate that attention to settler-colonialism, consigned to critical race studies and postcolonial theory, is a foundational methodology for urban studies.

— Ananya Roy