ABSTRACT
Caught between accounts of modernity and development, which have both constrained understandings of cityness and limited expectations of urban futures, urban studies is ready for revitalisation. More than this, facing a world of ever-expanding cities, more likely than ever before to be home to poor people, urban studies cannot continue to base its theoretical insights on the experiences of a few wealthy cities: this would doom it to irrelevance. To address the twin problems of ethnocentrism and intellectual division, I have articulated a post-colonial account of ordinary cities and proposed that from the ruins of an urban theory divided by colonial pasts and developmentalist assumptions might emerge an understanding of all cities as ordinary. Ordinary cities, I have suggested, are distinctive and unique, yet they are all potentially part of the same field of analysis. Certainly, a different understanding of cityness has come into view as a result of the extended post-colonial critique offered here. Each chapter in this book has experimented with tactics that instigate a postcolonialisation of urban studies; each chapter has contributed something to the conceptualisation of ordinary cities; and most of the chapters have suggested some implications of ordinary cities for urban policy. In bringing the discussion to a close it will be helpful to reflect on these three issues that have been running through the different chapters: How to go about doing post-colonial urban studies? What are ordinary cities like? And what might urban policies for ordinary cities look like?
