“What is urban about critical urban theory?”

Ananya Roy has been one of the drivers of a thorough rethinking of urban theory from developments in the global South. Roy engages an ongoing debate about globalizing cities regarding the nature of the urban, based on empirical fieldwork conducted in West Bengal, India. The processes of becoming urban, of making urban, are both old and incomplete. The urban question, as a project of critical theory, has always been concerned with historical alternatives. In fact, urban studies today is overflowing with arguments about urban citizens, residents, occupants, movements, and experiences as the new political subject. If rural market towns or agro-industrial hinterlands have been designated as municipalities, then a related category is that of “census towns,” a fast growing designation in India. Meeting Indian census definitions of the urban, these are governed by rural administration, notably gram panchayats.