VIRTUAL London.

Abstract

We live in an age of urbanization, with most urban growth taking place outside the region commonly referred to as ‘the West.’ Gaining insights into how people located ‘elsewhere’ think about cities allows us to better understand developments in these rapidly changing environments. Three questions guide this paper: what is a city, what shapes cities, and how will future cities look? First, I look for answers in contemporary scholarly works in urban theory. I identify three dominant discourses: ‘urban age,’ ‘planetary urbanization,’ and ‘everyday urbanism’ and condense each of them into one narrative. Second, I apply the lenses of each narrative to inquire into the ways of thinking about cities from ‘elsewhere.’ For this I conduct and analyze eleven semi-structured interviews conducted with cosmopolitan, educated leaders, socialized, educated, and located in cities in low-and-middle income countries outside ‘the West.’ The findings show that ideals of ‘Western modernization’ are hegemonic in ways of thinking about cities. Surprisingly, narratives derived from the two discourses in critical urban theory feature less prominently than expected. The interviewees located ‘elsewhere’ reveal only limited attention to both ‘global capitalist urbanization’ and novel ways of thinking about cities. Thus, following the empirical evidence of this research, contemporary urbanization ‘elsewhere’ seems to be rather an extrapolation of imaginaries about ‘Western modernism’ than sites of and for emancipation. To what extent ideals and notions of modernism are changing, especially considering the appearance of new ‘global cities’ in ‘the East,’ seems crucial for future research.