Locating crisis

Abstract

In this short intervention, I reflect on how I have used the concept of crisis in my work over the past 15 years. I argue that a spatial and pluralised understanding of crisis is essential to make sense of the political, material, and discursive stakes of contemporary urbanisation, and offer a reading of crisis that sits between the eventful and everyday. I outline ways in which urban crisis can be understood apart from, yet constitutive of a concept of crisis ‘writ-large’, and demonstrate through brief empirical examples how locating crisis conjuncturally defines its relationship to the state and social reproduction of and in the city.