Making Urban Theory

Mary Lawhon is Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability, University of Oklahoma, USA. Her research interests include urban theory, postcolonial studies, urban political ecology and the politics of urban infrastructure.With contributions from:Lené Le Roux is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability, University of Oklahoma, USA. Trained as an urban planner, her research interests include southern urban theory, place and place-claiming, critical pedagogy and South African cities.Anesu Makina is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability, University of Oklahoma, USA. She previously worked as an environmental researcher at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Her research interests include African cities, urban informality and political ecology.Yaffa Truelove is Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, University of Colorado-Boulder, USA. Her research primarily examines the connections between urban waterscapes and socio-political processes in cities of the global south, including differing regimes and institutions of everyday urban governance.

• Introduction; 1: Postcolonialism and urban studies: Shifting the gaze from the city to the academy; 2. Disambiguating the southern urban critique with Yaffa Truelove; 3. Provincializing the urban question: Against the rural-in-the-urban; 4. The struggle for the city, and the struggle for the right to be city with Anesu Makina; 5. Teaching urban geography after the southern urban critique with Lené Le Roux; 6: Pathways forward: Urban studies after the southern urban critique? with Yaffa Truelove; 7: Unbundling urban theory: Of what is theory made? with Lené Le Roux; 8: Theorizing anew through southern cities; 9: Recognizing and reworking the norms that travel with theory; Conclusion; Index