Roy A. The 21st-century metropolis: new geographies of theory, Regional Studies. This paper calls for ‘new geographies’ of imagination and epistemology in the production of urban and regional theory. It argues that the dominant theorizations of global city-regions are rooted in the EuroAmerican experience and are thus unable to analyse multiple forms of metropolitan modernities. By drawing on the urban experience of the global South, the paper presents new conceptual vectors for understanding the worlding of cities, the production of space, and the dynamics of exurbanity. It makes the case that such area-based knowledge deepens recent theoretical attempts to articulate a relational study of space and place. Roy A. Les metropoles du XXIe siecle: nouvelle geographie de la theorie, Regional Studies. Cet article appelle a de nouvelles geographies de l'imagination et de l'epistemologie pour la production de theories urbaines et regionales. Il avance que les theorisations dominantes des villes-regions du monde ...

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The 21st-Century Metropolis: New Geographies of Theory

Smart cities are now arguably the new urban utopias of the 21st century. Integrating urban and digital planning, smart cities are being marketed across the world as solutions to the challenges of urbanization and sustainable development. In India, in particular, there has been a move towards building 100 new smart cities in the future in order to spur economic growth and urbanization. Using the case of Dholera, the first Indian smart city, I examine how global models of smart cities are provincialized in the regional state of Gujarat through local histories, politics and laws. First, I argue that Dholera smart city is part of a longer genealogy of utopian urban planning that emerged as a response to the challenges of development and modernity in post-independent India. Second, that Dholera highlights a shift towards an ‘entrepreneurial urbanization’ in a regional state interested in scaling up a ‘Gujarat model of development’ for emulation at the scale of the nation. Finally, that in Dholera ‘speed’ is a ...

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New urban utopias of postcolonial India: ‘Entrepreneurial urbanization’ in Dholera smart city, Gujarat

The emphasis on culture in studies of colonialism tends to obscure other forms of colonial power while making it impossible to contextualize the cultural argument and assess its salience Rather than focusing on texts, systems of signification, and procedures of knowledge generation, as the colonial discourse literature is wont to do, a fuller understanding of colonial powers is achieved by explaining colonialism's basic geographical dispossessions of the colonized In so doing, the issue of power is not prejudged and the particular roles of different modes and theories of colonial power come into focus I explore these propositions by considering the powers underlying the reserve (reservation) system in British Columbia, a system that, by allocating a tiny fraction of the land to native people and opening the rest for development, facilitated the geographical reorganization of the province My conclusions are these: the initial ability to dispossess rested primarily on physical power and the sup

How Did Colonialism Dispossess? Comments from an Edge of Empire

We invite readers to dig for ganguri (yams) at and with Bawaka, an Indigenous Homeland in northern Australia, and, in doing so, consider an Indigenous-led understanding of relational space/place. W...

Co-becoming Bawaka: Towards a relational understanding of place/space

Recent work in social science challenges managerial assumptions about homogenous knowledge domains, and traces the effects of a world economy of knowledge structured by the history of colonialism a...

Using southern theory: Decolonizing social thought in theory, research and application:

Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference Dipesh Chakrabaity Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000 ix + 301 pp, notes, index

Douglas R. Holmes

Papers

Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference.