ABSTRACT
This book has concentrated on reviewing the ways in which urbanists have accounted for cities around the world and sought to act as a point of departure in re-imagining cities in ways that take seriously urban theory beyond ‘the West’. In doing so, contributors have engaged with a diverse range of interdisciplinary theoretical work that is both urban focused and more broadly engaged with political, economic, social, cultural, and spatial practices and processes. It is abundantly clear that there is no typical or archetypal non-Western city, for the numerous urban settings featured throughout this book are extraordinarily culturally, morphologically, economically, historically and politically diverse. Moreover, chapters have variously worked at the intersection of theoretical debates concerning post-colonialism, globalization, modernity, Marxism and poststructuralism and considered a diverse range of topics and issues that include public space, the home, privacy, planning, squatter settlements, informality and everyday life, post-socialism, governance, neo-liberalization, state sponsored capitalism, exclusionary practices, urban ecologies and spectrality. Read together, these accounts offer an important redress to the failure of urban theory to keep pace with broader academic agendas that have had greater success in moving beyond theory dominated by North American and European traditions.
