ABSTRACT
Educational research and practice have defi nitely entered the urban age. There are all sorts of conferences, special issues, books, book series, and journals dedicated to the study of urban education. My graduate school, Syracuse University, markets itself as a leader in urban education. The urban fi rst became an object of educational inquiry with the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the Equality of Educational Opportunity Study in 1966, the latter of which is commonly referred to as the Coleman Study. It seems, however, that the urban is rarely defi ned. Edward Buendía writes that the earliest urban education policy documents “constructed a population deemed as the urban that has been reduced to racial, economic, cultural and spatial attributes that are seen as corresponding to the totality of their aspirations, experiences and intellectual proclivities.” 1 I would argue that this happens today when the urban is referred to uncritically: the urban is completely confl ated with poor Black and Brown communities and people; spaces of chaos and instability are colored Black and Brown. The problem with uncritically calling upon the “urban” in urban education is not only that it risks reifying city spaces as ones of disorder and chaos, tying these characteristics to poor people and people of color; the problem is also that we miss identifying the urban as a desirable way of understanding contemporary struggles over education, and indeed over life itself. The urban is, moreover, a useful way of naming our aspirations, particularly as they relate to education and life in cities, where most of us live these days, for the urban is the city as use . It is to an exploration of the urban and the city that I now turn.
