Vocabularies for Urban Futures

How might the urban be articulated? What analytical work do concepts do in making cities legible and knowable?

Conceptual vocabularies for understanding urban governance, economic formations and everyday life have infiltrated urban research and policy accounts to reflect both the challenges and the opportunities facing urban futures. These concepts help us to describe urban phenomena, but equally, and perhaps more so, they also do work to create productive connections and can allow us to think of new possibilities.

This project examines extant vocabularies on experiences of the urban habitat, governance of plural cities and plural economies, questioning how our understanding of the urban has changed over the past decades and the implications of that for how we comprehend the city of today.