Routledge Handbook of Critical Urban Research

The Routledge Handbook of Critical Urban Research presents a comprehensive overview of critical urban research in the social sciences. Featuring contributions from a global team of leading experts, the volume interprets, interrogates and engages the Urban through contemporary concepts, theories, practices, and methods. Part 1 assesses concepts such as urbanization, urban governance, and speculative urbanism for their interpretative value, examines assemblage and complexity theories for their analytical power, and highlights the importance of interpreting cities and the urban in a gender-conscious way. Part 2 examines how urban realities are produced, interpreted, governed, embodied, and contested through intersecting relations of power. Moving beyond descriptive approaches to the city, contributors interrogate the epistemological assumptions, political structures, and methodological frameworks through which urban life becomes visible and intelligible. The final section brings together chapters which foreground struggles over justice, repair, and collective urban futures, examining how inequalities are reproduced through racialised, colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist structures while also highlighting practices of resistance, solidarity, care, and alternative urban imaginaries. In this sense, the handbook is concerned not only with understanding cities critically, but also with expanding the possibilities for more just and equitable urban worlds. This is an essential resource for advanced undergraduates, masters and doctoral students, and experienced critical urban scholars.