Introduction

Writing on cities has traditionally followed a North–South directionality. This introductory chapter sets out an agenda for the volume which follows that seeks to suspend such hierarchical assumptions and to explore new methods for reading, interpreting and understanding the everyday registers of urban life that stem from the Global South but have global relevance. Via the concepts of detachment, entanglement and convergence, it raises questions of what separates and links Southern and Northern urbanity. It further proposes to map changing coordinates of urban life by tracking urban orientations, understood both as a spatial metric and as a marker of disposition and attitude, as well as by exploring the positive and negative potentials of disorientation.