This article attempts to clarify some of the most pressing questions that have arisen thus far in the debate on planetary urbanization.

This is an edited, curated transcript of the discussion that took place at a workshop on planetary urbanization in 2016.

Special Issue Dedication

This paper critically engages planetary urbanization’s claim that it generates ‘Urban Theory Without an Outside’.

To demonstrate the value of writing under erasure, I focus upon waste – as both material and semiotic artifact of capitalist urbanization – and offer a “supplementary reading” of Bangalore that sketches the multiple constitutive outsides of the city, which in turn make empirically evident the stakes of planetary urbanization's occlusions.

This paper reviews aspects of a Lefebvrian discussion around these issues and focuses in on the explosion and subsequent reassembly of “disjunct fragments” of the urban in a world of global suburbanisms.

In this commentary, I argue that the planetary urbanization thesis inverts the feminist intervention, coopting feminist conceptions of relationality and hybridity while evacuating them of their political – and, crucially, their epistemological – force.

In this paper, I argue for the need to take a provisional approach to urban theory, particularly in conceptualizing post-crisis urban transformations.

This article confronts debates about extended and concentrated urbanization with Indigenous claims to time and space. It does so in part by discussing the degree to which notions of extended and concentrated urbanization allow us to understand the dynamics of pipeline politics in Canada, notably Indigenous claims leveled at infrastructure projects.

Special Issue Introduction

This intervention contributes to feminist and queer responses to Brenner and Schmid’s ‘planetary urbanization’ thesis.

This paper critiques the meanings typically attributed to “totality” and “totalization” by Brenner and Schmid as well as their critics, and then explicates the concepts of totality and totalization developed in the tradition of Hegelian Marxism, especially in the works of Georg Lukács, Jean-Paul Sartre, Henri Lefebvre, and Fredric Jameson.

In this commentary, I discuss the fact that although I initially set out to write an essay that would put queer urban studies into conversation with this new approach, I instead chose to stay on the outside of planetary urbanization along with many other scholars whose work is informed by queer, feminist, and critical race theoretical approaches.

Following consideration of some of the most prevalent misrepresentations of this work within this special issue, I build upon Barnes and Sheppard’s (2010) concept of “engaged pluralism” to suggest more productive possibilities for dialogue among critical urban researchers whose agendas are too often viewed as incommensurable or antagonistic rather than as interconnected and, potentially, allied.

This paper argues that the ‘city’ as a political entity is significant in struggles over the ‘urban’, by identifying two moments of ‘differential urbanization’ in the Middle East.

In our engagement with Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid’s thesis on planetary urbanization we argue that, while they have successfully marked some important limits of mainstream thinking on the urban, their privileging of epistemology cannot produce an urban theory for our time.