ABSTRACT
This chapter confronts and partly integrates recent perspectives in urban studies with recent historical perspectives. It argues that a historical approach is needed to tackle Eurocentric and ethnocentric tendencies in urban studies, but that comparison is even more difficult for historians than it is for urban sociologists or geographers. Addressing cities and urbanization from a historical perspective is opening an extremely vast array of cases while at the same time creating the possibility to examine long-term transformations. In the last few decades, most theoretical reflections and discussions in urban studies and urban geography have been marked by one large underlying debate, the one between scholars working in the spirit of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and those working in a Marxist and neo-Marxist tradition. Eurocentrism is related to teleological thinking, which tacitly assumes that history inexorably steers towards a certain endpoint.
