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Urban Shadows: Materiality, the 'Southern city', and Urban Theory

McFarlane, C.

Authors



Abstract

We may be witnessing a ‘Southern turn’ in urban studies, but the implications for urban theory are only beginning to be worked through. In this article, I argue the need for urbanists to engage with a variety of ‘shadows’ on the edges of urban theory. The article engages with literature that theorises the interactions between urban materiality and social change, from community development literature to more expansive sociomaterial theorisations of the urban fabric. I invoke an expansive conception of the relations between the urban fabric and social change, and draw on a variety of examples through which infrastructures come to matter politically in the creative destruction of capitalist redevelopment. The article ends with consideration of how comparison might be conceived as a strategy of indirect and uncertain learning that entails the possibility of transformation in a predominantly Euro-American-orientated urban theory.

Citation

McFarlane, C. (2008). Urban Shadows: Materiality, the 'Southern city', and Urban Theory. Geography Compass, 2(2), 340-358. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2007.00073.x

Journal Article Type Article
Publication Date Mar 1, 2008
Deposit Date Aug 13, 2009
Journal Geography Compass
Publisher Wiley
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 2
Issue 2
Pages 340-358
DOI https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2007.00073.x