Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers

Abstract Information is a source of power in the planning process. This article begins by assessing five perspectives of the planner's use of information: those of the technician, the incremental pragmatist, the liberal advocate, the structuralist, and the “progressive.” Then several types of misinformation (inevitable or unnecessary, ad hoc or systematic) are distinguished in a reformulation of bounded rationality in planning, and practical responses by planning staff are identified. The role and ethics of planners acting as sources of misinformation are considered. In practice planners work in the face of power manifest as the social and political (mis)-man-agement of citizens' knowledge, consent, trust, and attention. Seeking to enable planners to anticipate and counteract sources of misinformation threatening public serving, democratic planning processes, the article clarifies a practical and politically sensitive form of “progressive” planning practice.

Planning in the Face of Power.

A critique of postcolonial reason: Toward a history of the vanishing present

Planet of slums

New forms of urbanization are unfolding around the world that challenge inherited conceptions of the urban as a fixed, bounded and universally generalizable settlement type. Meanwhile, debates on t...

Towards a new epistemology of the urban

“To thematize requires a project to select its objects, deploy them in a bounded field, and submit them to disciplined inquiry” (Guha, 1997, xv) Mainstream urban scholarship envisions urbanization as a global process that is best achieved via the worldwide application of the development mechanisms pioneered in the advanced capitalist countries—currently, those of neoliberal globalization. Yet the repeated failure of this vision to deliver on its promise of wealth for all and ecological sustainability compels urban scholars to rethink mainstream presumptions. By means of a ten-point manifesto, we argue that provincializing global urbanism creates space from which to challenge urban theories that treat “northern” urbanization as the norm, to incorporate the expertise and perspectives of urban majorities, and to imagine and enact alternative urban futures.

Urban Pulse-provincializing Global Urbanism: A Manifesto

Our experience of teaching a graduate-student module entitled ‘Global Cities’ in Singapore forms the starting point for reflection on the limitations of the global- and world-cities paradigms. Otherwise varied strands of critique, we argue, may be understood in terms of a common tendency in Anglophone urban and regional research. We term this tendency ‘metrocentricity’. While this intervention in many ways echoes important existing critiques ( Robinson, 2006 ; Roy, 2009 ), it is intended to call attention in particular to the need for alternative practices or ways of doing urban and regional research. After identifying metrocentric tendencies, we consider how teaching and research might be (re)oriented both conceptually and methodologically beyond metrocentricity. In making this case, we invoke insights from feminist geographies that view research as embodied work. Valorizing the diverse, situated practices and engagements of a range of actors — including but not limited to academics — is a key starting point for less metrocentric urban and regional studies.

Practising Urban and Regional Research beyond Metrocentricity

Capitalist value making is underwritten by the production and disposal of waste through a complex, often invisible economy of informal waste recycling. This infra-economy is anchored by nodes that process and circulate variegated forms of waste generated in cities and their adjoining hinterlands. Bholakpur, in the city of Hyderabad, India, is one such place. There are hundreds like it scattered around the country. Even as they perform the double function of reproducing the urban economy while inoculating it from the injurious effects of its own detritus, places like Bholakpur and the people who work and reside there are continuously abjected by civil society’s propertied classes, which view them with anxiety and loathing, as a source of crime, nuisance and detriment. Thus, “waste” as concept-matter but also a locus where labor and ecology meet is a neglected but powerful site for a critique of both postcolonial capitalism and contemporary urbanization in countries like India.

The Waste-Value Dialectic: Lumpen Urbanization in Contemporary India

This special issue, papers presented at an Urban Studies Foundation-funded conference in Jakarta (March 2011), examines the current ‘urban century’ in terms of three revolutions. Revolutions from above index the logics and norms of mainstream global urbanism, particularly the form they have taken as policymakers work with municipal officials worldwide to organise urban development around neoliberal norms. Revolutions from below refer to the multifaceted contestations of global urbanism that take place in and around cities, ranging from urban street demonstrations and occupations (such as those riveting the world in early 2011 when these papers were written) to the quotidian actions of those pursuing politics and livelihoods that subvert the norms of mainstream global urbanism. It also highlights conceptual revolutions, referencing the ongoing challenge of reconceptualising urban theory from the South – not simply as a hemispheric location or geopolitical category but an epistemological stance, staged from...

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Introduction: Urban revolutions in the age of global urbanism

This is the first issue of a new biannual, the Review of Urban Affairs. The RUA will contain articles that look at different aspects of urbanisation in the context of the growing importance of "urban society" in India and elsewhere in the world. The review will be guided by an external advisory group which will suggest themes, commission articles and have them reviewed/revised before publication.

Anant Maringanti

Papers

Urban Pulse-provincializing Global Urbanism: A Manifesto

Practising Urban and Regional Research beyond Metrocentricity

The Waste-Value Dialectic: Lumpen Urbanization in Contemporary India

Introduction: Urban revolutions in the age of global urbanism

Urban concerns: An introduction