A bold proposition

The concepts employed to understand cities around the world are sourced from a limited set of urban experiences. From the stages of urban development to the models of urban ecology and the problems of equity associated with global cities – much of urban theory is sourced in influential and important works researching cities like Los Angeles, Chicago or London. The parochialism of urban theory has instigated the debates around comparative urbanism, what Peck (2015: 161) has described as a succession of critiques ‘deconstructing the imperial hubris of Northern and Western “schools” of urbanism, provincializing their theatres of production, and questioning their claims to global salience’. Not only is urban theory, or the dominant schools of thought pertaining to urbanism, limited in its origins; it is also imposed elsewhere as common, universal truth.

At the heart of these debates, there is a tenuous consensus about the parochialism of urban theory. The limitations of urban theory have been described by a variety of scholars for many decades, from ‘the myopia of parochialism’ lamented by Walton and Masotti (1976), to the ‘intellectual parochialism’ described by Storper and Scott (2016), summarizing the critiques of Robinson (2006) and Roy (2011); that urban theory is sourced from a narrow urban experience is widely accepted (see also McFarlane, 2008; Edensor and Jayne, 2012). Storper and Scott (2016: 1121) even decry this as an obvious truth about the state of urban research:

For them, the parochial deficits of urban theory are a matter of accounting for more empirical variation. There remains a singular logic to urbanization, however, which offers the universal framework to understand what exactly constitutes a city (Storper and Scott, 2016). The same processes of agglomeration and polarization are witnessed in all cities, they contend, albeit with variation.