Inclusiveness in urban theory and urban-centred international development policy

Abstract

Issues of inclusiveness are prominent today in both urban theory and in international urban development policy. Within the academy over the past decade, an influential strand of scholarship has sought to decentre urban theory from a relatively small and canonical set of cities, mostly in Western Europe and North America. This postcolonial urban studies work has argued that there is a need for ‘new geographies of theory’ that are more inclusive of the experiences of cities in other world regions (Roy, 2009). In increasingly urban-centred international development policy, meanwhile, inclusion is now rhetorically central to conceptions of better futures and appropriate ways of realizing them. The words ‘inclusive’, ‘inclusion’ and ‘inclusivity’ appear dozens of times across the 24 pages of the New Urban Agenda (NUA) document. In this paper, I consider what is understood by inclusiveness in both postcolonial urban studies and in the NUA, before examining the latter in the light of recent scholarly critique.