Urban theory with an outside

This paper critically engages planetary urbanization’s claim that it generates ‘Urban Theory Without an Outside’. It argues planetary urbanization is part of the broader ideological terrain of urban studies whose textual field reifies the city, the urban and urbanization as objects and processes of analyses through a kind of ‘methodological urbanization’. The paper argues the conceptual and political value of delineating views from outside urban studies and planetary urbanization – in particular from domains like area studies – that unmoor the primacy of the city, the urban and particularly urbanization in understandings of socio-spatial processes across planetary space. It suggests how these perspectives can usefully act as ‘supplements’ indifferent to urban studies, reminding urban studies of the limits of its own forms of knowledge production in relation to socio-spatial process and city formation. To do this, the paper sketches an anti-colonial history of Colombo, Sri Lanka

Dissimulated landscapes: Postcolonial method and the politics of space in southern Sri Lanka

This paper puts forward a broadly postcolonial method for engaging with landscapes in South Asia, in this case southern Sri Lanka. It argues that, as valuable as the familiar theoretical and conceptual languages of Euro-American landscape geography are, they also risk concealing a range of different aesthetics, social formations, and experiences that unfold in the non-Euro-American landscape. They risk dissimulating the politics of places as they are produced and lived contextually. In the paper I work this argument through a critical engagement of the landscape architecture of Sri Lanka's most famous tropical-modernist architect, Geoffrey Bawa; I specifically focus on his favorite, intensely choreographed, view at the estate Lunuganga on Sri Lanka's south coast. As I show, while tools from the new cultural geography and beyond can help us to read this view as a classically modernist and apolitical landscape, a work of 'art for art's sake', it is only a radically contextual familiarization with Sri Lankan society, politics, and history that can also reveal the landscape's more subtle instantiation of a spatializing Sinhala-Buddhist hegemony. Indeed, I show how some of the familiar (Eurocentric) concept-metaphors that we might intuitively bring to a reading of this landscape-namely 'nature', 'religion', and 'subjectivity'-hold at arm's length particular kinds of landscape politics that emerge from differently textualized human relationships with the environment. The paper charts a method responsive to this particular landscape, and by doing so insists on the difficult task of retaining the singularity of landscapes positioned beyond the Euro-American staging grounds of the conceptual debates current within contemporary cultural geography

Utopian urbanism and representational city-ness: On the Dholera before Dholera smart city

This commentary responds to Ayona Datta’s critique of India’s smart city agenda by emphasizing the representational work that urban futures require. In the context of Dholera smart city, I draw attention to the discursive terrains – around city-ness and utopianism in particular – mobilized by the state in order to normalize the inevitability of exclusionary urban planning and imaginations. I suggest these representational fields are key battlegrounds for critical urban geography

Building Sacred Modernity: Buddhism, secularism and a geography of religion in southern Sri Lanka

Although revisions to the Sri Lankan constitution in 1972 and 1978 respectively were notable for the ways that they, first, accorded Buddhism the foremost place amongst Sri Lanka's other religions. Second, they offered it special protection in the national polity, the country still to this day professes a notional secularism through its commitment to parliamentary democracy and political modernity. A closer look at the parliament building itself, however, reveals more clearly the forms of neither religious, nor entirely secular, sacred modernity that Bawa has built at Kotte. Buddhism then is mobilized not as a 'religion', or religious influence, but instead as an ornamental facet of the broader effort to historiographically realign the nation-state in and with its own native modernity. A rooted Sinhala ethnos intractably linked to a historical narrative of Buddhist practice was part of this anti-colonial modernity. That is part of this space's sacred modernity

Kicking Off in Brazil: Manifesting Democracy

On 6 June, nine days before the Confederations Cup was due to kick off in Brasília, the first of a series of public protests – ‘manifestações’ – began in São Paulo. They quickly swept across Brazil, rippling through at least 70 cities, including Rio de Janeiro, Belem, Belo Horizonte, Salvador and Brasília. The largest protests that the country, and indeed Latin America, has witnessed in more than twenty years, the manifestações have received widespread media attention and critical commentary both within Brazil and overseas. This dispatch reflects on these recent protests, signposting and discussing a number of issues that they raise in Brazil's current conjuncture and more broadly, such as urban and class politics, state violence, political mediation and representation, and the uneven developmental politics of Brazil's so-called ‘emerging economy’ identity. It suggests that the manifestações pose challenging questions for all of these issues

Tropical Modernism/Environmental Nationalism: The Politics of Built Space in Postcolonial Sri Lanka

This paper explores the relationships between Sri Lanka’s tropical architecture, its negotiation of the Sri Lankan environment, and the post-colony’s contested politics of nationhood. By focussing on the work of Minnette de Silva, an early pioneer of Sri Lankan tropical architecture, and on the stylistic and aesthetic influences on her work, and hence on contemporary manifestations of the genre, the paper traces the connections between a conscious desire amongst tropical modernists to build with Sri Lanka’s superabundant tropical nature – rather than guarding against it – and emergent aesthetic constitutions of an avowedly “post-colonial” politics. It goes on to demonstrate how the fluid spatialities, and historical and cultural narrativisations of de Silva’s work have been drawn into hegemonic articulations of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism in the last few decades, despite her more secular modernist intentions. The paper argues for a situated geopolitical understanding of de Silva’s pathbreaking tropical modern architecture

Between area and discipline: Progress, knowledge production and the geographies of Geography

This paper explores tensions that emerge from the injunction to make progress in geographical knowledge production in the globalizing landscape of higher education and research. The paper identifies gaps that emerge between disciplinary geographical knowledge production and area studies knowledge production, particularly connections to non-western areas on which many geographers work. It suggests these gaps are symptomatic and productive of the discipline’s problematically constituted community: the ‘we’ of Geography’s vanguard. The paper charts the precipitation of these tensions within Geography’s disciplinary dispositif before suggesting three alternative knowledge production tactics aimed at closing any such gaps and that in turn democratically reconstitute disciplinary Geography’s ‘we’

Mainstreaming geography's decolonial imperative

This commentary makes three points in relation to the theme of ‘decolonising geographical knowledge’. First, it highlights the potential that the theme has in terms of widening the imperative to decolonise geographical knowledge; second, drawing on decolonial critiques of postcolonial theory, it stresses the structural difficulty of decolonisation efforts that are conceived within extant disciplinary infrastructures; and third, it argues that decolonising geographical knowledge should encourage geographers to, in fact, turn away from the discipline as we attempt to ‘speak to’ the places, peoples, and communities on and with which we work

Towards framing the global in Global Development: prospects for development geography

This paper examines data in the public sphere on the global scope of geography’s UKRI Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) projects. Building on decolonial critiques of development research, I argue that geography should frame ‘the global’ of global research as a sphere of ethical choices in research design and practice. The distribution of funded projects in the UKRI Gateway data suggests geographers succeed where they extend on the more worthy aspects of the discipline’s Area Studies legacy. The discipline’s engagements with Early Career Researchers, international colleagues, and the development sector, however, have potentially been reshaped by GCRF and thus need closer examination. While the UK government has brought the GCRF programme to a close, further work on these themes should inform the next iteration of global research. The ethical choices which make research global will remain fundamental to equitable design and impact in Global Development projects, thus scholars in development geography should prepare to make their projects more transparent and accountable

Neighbourliness, conviviality, and the sacred in Athens’ refugee squats

To better understand the range of possibilities and opportunities for (co)existence available to displacement‐affected people, attention must be given to the thick webs of sociality shaping interactions in situations of mass displacement. This paper makes the case that refugee squats in Athens are distinct spaces wherein different understandings of (co)existence converge – spaces whose production is contingent on support from neighbourly relations and networks that are mediated in moments through conceptions of conviviality informed by religion. Based on ethnographic work carried out in 2016 and a spatial analysis of refugee squats in Athens, this paper emphasises neighbourliness and conviviality as they relate to sacred understandings of coexistence. This helps highlight the limits built in to thinking about the movement of refugees from the global South through Euro‐centric ontologies of the social. More than this, following postcolonial debates on the decentring of knowledge production, the research makes manifest how Islamic socio‐cultural memories of jiwār or a right of neighbourliness complicate geographies of humanitarianism that make stark binary assumptions between religious and secular space. In turn, the evidence from Athens indicates that refugee perspectives on neighbourliness are imperfectly translated by migrant rights activists as solidarity, obscuring the different ways Muslim structures of feeling contribute to the production of refugee squats