ABSTRACT

The ‘West’ remains the subject of urban theory, even when the putative object of discussion is a city ‘beyond the West’. The un-nameable region carries in its more typically used designation as ‘non-West’ the burden of difference, of being the ‘reverse’ of the nameable subject; the prefix ‘non’ stands for an ‘absence’, a ‘lack’ of all that is ‘important’ and ‘worthwhile’ (Webster’s Dictionary, 2001). Our insistence on redressing this scholarly disdain should not obscure the long history of theoretical reflections on urban processes in the non-West. In the nineteenth century it took the shape of concerns about colonial governance, the city considered as a tool for expropriation, an experimental field, a problem of tropical disease and sanitation. Sociologists and urban planners in the early twentieth century theorized and modelled new towns all across the colonial world. In the wake of decolonization in the twentieth century attention turned to these cities and urban regions as sites of development,2 renewing and recasting the older conception of colonial cities as laboratories and nodes in the capitalist market. In its most recent incarnation, urbanism beyond the west has come to be re-viewed in the light of a planetary ecological crisis and global political insecurity.