ABSTRACT
The future is urban. Global problems and their solutions will of necessity draw from and speak to the urban realities of the next centuries. The urban world is already a southern world and even though, as we have seen from the contributions in this Handbook, this delineation of ‘the southern’ is far from fixed, a collective repositioning of perspective in urban studies is currently underway. How we read cities and where we place them in a global lexicon is inevitably going to morph with the changes that are already evident within and between cities and towns. For now, however, a southern framing on global urban challenges is imperative if we are to have any intellectual and practical integrity or impact. Southern urbanism is thus a political construct, devised to shift assumptions and alter the locus of intellectual power, just as notions of planetary urbanism remind us of the global system of cities and the interconnectedness of all human and natural systems (Hodson and Marvin 2010; Madden 2012). In this final section of the book we consider the big forces that have brought us to where we are today, and which must configure our collective (re)engagement with the urban condition now and in the future.
