One of the last things I did before the start of the first lockdown was submit a paper for publication, something which now seems like a very old-fashioned thing; who knows, perhaps time will allow for that sort of thing again, one day in the future. Anyway, the paper is now published, online in advance, in the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society: it’s titled ‘The Strange Case of Urban Theory’, and is part of a special issue soon to go live on the theme of ‘Urban and Regional Theory: Negotiating Generalisation and Particularity’. The paper is one of the outputs of the Leverhulme project on ‘the urbanization of responsibility‘ that I held, formally, from 2014-2016, but which of course still lingers in life and mind in various ways. It’s my effort to say something into the debates in and around urban studies about the geographies of theory, comparison, that sort of thing. And it was an opportunity to finally cite David Harvey’s Explanation in Geography, approvingly.

This is the abstract of the paper:

“Recent debates in urban theory have centred on the problem of whether universal concepts can have applications to particular places. These debates could benefit from more serious attention to how urban thought involves styles of analogical reasoning closer in spirit to casuistry than to explanatory theory. The difficult status of ‘the case’ in urban studies is explored through a consideration of different types of universality in this field, leading to a re-consideration of ideas of experimentalism and wicked problems. Further attention should be given to the multiple styles of reasoning through which urban knowledge is produced and circulated.”

Access to the published paper requires a subscription to the journal of course – send an email and I’ll send you a copy; or, you can access the final pre-publication version here.