In the first chapter, she challenges Park’s and Wirth’s parochial and ethnocentric understandings of the Western city as the cradle of civilization and modernity as opposed to the primitivity and traditionality of the countryside and cities in other countries. In order to learn from different contexts, Robinson argues, it is not global cities or third world cities that should be central to academic analysis and policy recommendations, but what she calls “ordinary” cities, in all their complexity, diversity and peculiarity.ĢTo substantiate this claim, Robinson begins with a critical rethinking of the concepts of modernity and development in urban studies. Within this field, the differences across and within cities must be thought of as diversity rather than exemplars of a hierarchical division. For this reason, she envisages an urban theory that does not rest on pre-given categories of cities but on a cosmopolitan comparativism that places all cities within the same analytical field. It is Robinson’s contention that theoretical insights cannot be based on the experiences of a few wealthy cities only, and that a post-colonial field of urban studies should assume the potential for learning in a broad range of different settings. Her central thesis is that urban theory development has been hampered for too long by the assumed dichotomy between innovative “global cities” in rich countries and imitative “third world” cities in poor countries. ![]() 1 Jennifer Robinson’s “Ordinary Cities” delivers a powerful critique of the spatial division of academic theorization.
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