Editorial: We have never been urban

Abstract

Are we in a new urban moment, or have we never been urban? Recent literatures have theorized the emergence of a new moment or epoch in the history of urbanization (or in urbanization theory?) under a range of terms–the Urban Age, the Anthropocene, planetary urbanization, and so on. This contemporary moment is interpreted as ‘geohistorical developments [that] pose a fundamental challenge to the entire field of urban studies … its basic epistemological assumptions, categories of analysis, and object of investigation require a foundational reconceptualization’ (Brenner and Schmid 2012). Underlying the idea of planetary urbanization is a certain temporality–Brenner and Schmid put it at ‘during the last thirty years’ (Brenner and Schmid 2012). Being written in 2012, that dates the current sense of urban catastrophe and destabilizing of conventional epistemological categories to the 1980s. However, Merryfield (2013) footnotes that Wirth’s is probably the ‘best take’ on describing planetary urbanization–the reference is to Wirth 1938. The timeline is therefore not strictly precise, nor is periodization the most pressing debate here–it’s clear that whenever it might have started, it is now, and it is urgent (see also Gandy, this volume).