Matthew Thompson's article is a welcome addition to conjunctural urbanism: it builds out a conjunctural method for identifying crises of capitalism towards crafting political itineraries of resistance. The point, he says, is to stay with the concrete to change it. As I elaborate in this commentary, to be politically effective, conjunctural urbanism must work across siloed intellectual, geographical and political traditions and be grounded in our own concrete struggles, or we risk blunting the tools of analysis and coalition-building that conjunctural analysis promises.
Thompson's paper is animated by an insistence that conjunctural analysis (CA) must recover its political purpose. We agree, and in this brief commentary, we highlight where an explicitly feminist approach to CA finds overlaps with Thompson's approach and identifies points of departure. We argue that feminist CA treats the question of “where to begin” is not chosen, so much as determined by the scholar's social and material location. Such an orientation, we argue, is not just a matter of enacting feminist principles; it reorients the political project of CA away from ever more detailed analyses of capitalism and toward opportunities for what we call solidaristic articulation.
With conjunctural approaches to urban research fast proliferating, along with the compounding crises they seek to study, now's the time to ask: what's the point of conjunctural analysis? Its purpose, I argue, is to offer a method for identifying points of condensation of crisis and contradiction within the social totality of planetary colonial capitalism, with a view to providing practical pointers on how to begin to exploit those moments for strategic intervention. This makes conjunctural analysis a distinctive, praxis-oriented mode of historical materialism – understood as an open, relational and holistic critical theory encompassing feminist, postcolonial and ecological perspectives, and alert to multiple social relations of domination, of exploitation and appropriation, notably gender, race and ecology as well as class. What conjunctural analysis adds to the two main methods of historical materialism – one apprehending capital's necessary form ; the other capitalism's historical formation – is a more strategic and speculative orientation to social change as this emerges through contestation at pressure points in contradictory social formations, to assist in praxis, in the rearticulation of these formations for emancipatory ends. To that end, I attempt to provide conjunctural analysis with an epistemological grounding in dialectical relations between subjectivity and objectivity, totality and particularity, thought and history, past and future – a means to understand where, how and why to look for the conjuncture. The article concludes with suggestions on what such a vision for conjunctural analysis might mean for urban research through considering urban applications of conjunctural thinking.
The link between urbanization and climate change is complicated. Cox's commentary piece is excellent because it pushes this issue wide open and brings forward fundamental questions regarding how urban studies and allied disciplines can best respond to the challenge that climate change presents to cities. The questions now discussed are whether some cities will suffer significant collapse in the era of climate change, and if so, at what point might it happen, how will it happen, and do cities have any recourse? To meet these questions, I argue that resilience theory and system transition theory are approaches worth considering to better comprehend these moments of change. These perspectives can help those interested in attempting to mount local climate action by aiding in the identification of early warning signs of impending shifts and by giving guidance on how to work pro-actively to promote better and more just outcomes.
In her paper, Savannah Cox makes a compelling argument regarding the general failure of contemporary urban thought to account for ongoing climate-linked losses – and the irreversible material changes they entail – in both its theorizing of urban change and futurity and the conceptual tools and vocabularies that underpin underlying modes of critique. Cox challenges urban thinkers to move beyond rhetorics attuned only to struggle and possibility, and to take seriously the forms of climate change-induced losses that can neither be remedied nor redeemed. Instead, Cox argues for the need to recalibrate urban thought around loss, limits and exhaustion grounded in the climate-changed worlds we currently inhabit. Following Cox, I contend that this current conjuncture presents a unique opportunity for critical scholars to better ground ourselves in the here and now , and to take seriously and learn from the novel modes of politics, decolonial praxes and collective struggles being led by frontline and climate-impacted communities in the face of the ongoing climate catastrophe. I draw from decolonial scholarship and the Black Radical Tradition to develop a basis for using catastrophe as a foundational starting point to theorize, resist and imagine radically new worlds and ways of being amidst the enduring conditions brought on by irreversible climate-linked losses.
Adopting an expanded and refined version of Neil Smith's concept of revanchism, we argue that revanchism plays a central role in a range of contemporary urban conflicts, including those associated with green agendas and policies. Attempts to ‘defend privilege and regain lost territory’ underlie the exclusionary and displacing practices of green agendas that are increasingly subsumed within ecomodernist accumulation strategies. Revanchist green urbanism must be understood as a multi-dimensional arena of conflict, reflecting the reassertion of both state and capitalist authority through environmental and sustainability policies. These assertions of power and authority do not go unchallenged, however. They increasingly provoke backlashes from both the right and the left, each seeking their own forms revanchism.
Urban research is excellent at generating theories, concepts, and interpretive vocabularies. But it has been less successful at explaining how these theories might accumulate, how they should be compared, and how we know when one explanation improves upon another. This editorial asks whether urban research can be cumulative without reducing the field's theoretical plurality. Building from recent debates on the Chicago School and the revanchist city, it argues that urban theory rarely develops through simple refutation or paradigmatic replacement. More often, theories are inherited, criticized, reconstructed, and redeployed under changed historical and geographical conditions. Drawing on debates in the philosophy of science, and especially on Frank Ramsey's pragmatist account of belief and explanation, the editorial proposes a modest comparative ethic for urban research. The goal is not theoretical unification, but a more disciplined practice of asking what theories explain, under what conditions they apply, what mechanisms they privilege, and how they differ from rival accounts. Urban research becomes cumulative when disagreement clarifies rather than merely multiplies explanation.
This article revisits Neil Smith's concept of the revanchist city in light of contemporary right-wing populism. While questioning Smith's original account of urban revanchism, it argues that his attention to affect, resentment and visceral reaction remains crucial for understanding today's political geographies. The article identifies a ‘new revanchism’ rooted in the shift from class politics to identity politics, intensified by economic stagnation, cultural polarization and place-based resentment. Comparing the United States, the United Kingdom and France, it shows that anti-urban imaginaries are especially powerful in the United States, where federalism, home rule and state fragmentation make cities central objects of populist anger.
New Urbanism continues to present a distinct challenge for research in Planning and Geography. At once utopian and pragmatic, it evinces an ability to reshape diverse environments by appealing to a relatively stable set of design principles. Theresa Brock Moneo's examination of Seaside shows that New Urbanist landscapes do not result from the application of design principles alone; they are embedded in political, ideological and cultural logics, including notions of tradition and fictional representation that shape our ideas about utopia and our sense of place. While New Urbanism may involve the application of universal design principles and ideas about tradition, in practice, the actualization of its utopian designs requires flexibility in managing different place-based contexts, including existing constituencies, institutions, built environments and cultural knowledge. Viewing phenomena like collective memory as objective knowledge rather than subjective experience could aid research into how New Urbanism engages participants in its utopian project within a variety of institutional environments.
Revanchism has evolved—in both ideological and material-embodied senses of the term—in the decades since Neil Smith's conceptualization in The New Urban Frontier , and since the wave of poststructuralist critiques elicited by David Harvey's Condition of Postmodernity . Most troubling are adaptive cybernetic fusions of 21st century computational life with recrudescent 19th-century Social Darwinist hierarchies of human nature and human worth. This paper revisits Smith's interpretation of the Revanche movement of 19th-century France and Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 notorious American frontier thesis; special emphasis is placed on the strange yet influential theories of evolutionary planetary consciousness developed by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In the late 1950s, Henri Lefebvre dreamed of writing a history of the devil, and imagined the spaceship Teilhard de Chardin taking humanity to a distant planet with a cool, progressive, gender-transitioning God. In 2024, Steve Bannon invoked Teilhard de Chardin's idea of the “noösphere” to explain Donald Trump's understanding of television and media consciousness amidst new configurations of militant spirituality and right-wing populist politics. Today's noöspheric infrastructures produce multi-scalar mutations of revanchist hierarchies and resentment, in combinatoric hybridities of identity and representation that evolve in asymptotically infinite forms of anti-urbanism.
This commentary engages with Teresa Brock Moneo's analysis of Seaside, Florida, exploring how nostalgia, collective memory, and idealised visions of small-town America are carefully constructed within the New Urbanist imagination. It argues that Seaside functions not simply as a planning or architectural experiment, but as a curated spatial narrative in which community, belonging, and authenticity are transformed into aesthetic and emotional experiences. Drawing on debates surrounding symbolic economy, spatial justice, and cultural commodification, the commentary reflects on the politics of designing places intended to evoke familiarity, comfort, and collective attachment. Reading Seaside through my own research on Black Caribbean neighbourhoods in London, particularly Brixton and Harlesden, the piece examines how culturally resonant spaces are frequently celebrated, branded, and aestheticised at the precise moment when the material conditions sustaining long-standing communities become increasingly fragile. In doing so, the commentary questions what is lost when the image of community becomes more valuable than the social and material conditions required to sustain community itself.
This introductory essay frames discussion and debate in the pages ahead about an important issue in urban studies – the realities of urban revanchism today if we are to understand the complexities of current urban development in the United States and beyond. Are revanchist impulses and processes alive-and-well and still virulent as persistent lurking forces albeit in modified or new forms? If so, what are these forms? And how, it follows, is revanchism being executed in planner, developer, media and politician daily practices? Or, alternatively, are revanchist realities all but dead, with other dominant forces and processes mostly responsible for structuring ongoing urban transformations? The bluntness and brutality of revanchist sensibilities and acts once became, to urbanist Neil Smith and many others, the clearest evidence of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ in motion, a historically specific truth that may still be the case. In this vein, we suggest that it becomes vital to continue engaging with the significance of revanchism in new ever-changing times. Recent multi-scalar political shifts, as possible new ‘carriers’ or facilitators of revanchism, make this engagement extremely relevant.
This essay reconceptualizes urban revanchism as a constituting element of the modus operandi and habitus of urban redevelopment. This reconceptualization not only helps transcend the binary distinction between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ revanchism, which has come to dominate research on revanchist urbanism, but also extends Smith's attempts to penetrate the underlying motives and hidden logics of gentrification. Drawing on the example of urban redevelopment on Chicago's South Side around the Obama Presidential Center, we argue that revanchism today operates in the habitus and taken-for-granted processes of rolling out such infrastructure projects and other urban redevelopment policies, tools and practices. Revanchism, today, contains a deep-seated therapeutic motif of urban consumerism where residents of marginalised communities are to embrace the identity of avid consumers and display a willingness to collaborate with entrepreneurs, developers, and authorities in their redevelopment efforts. Our essay shows that the central operative practices for revanchist urbanism often remain hidden in the taken-for-granted insinuations, workings, and sensibilities of urban redevelopment centered on the idea of creating new consumption spaces in the city.
This essay argues that urban thought is increasingly out of step with the conditions it confronts. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt and David Scott, I examine how and why redemptive forms of critique – those that cast critique as a means of rescuing or remaking the world – persist in important strands of urban studies, geographic and planning thought, even in the face of irreversible climate change. Through discussion of a recent pedagogical encounter where redemptive critical scripts failed to meet student concerns, I suggest the need to recalibrate urban thought around loss, limits and exhaustion. I then turn to recent work in negative, Caribbean and abyssal geographies as well as sociologies of loss to develop lines of inquiry and ethical orientations that are grounded in the climate-changed worlds we now and will inhabit. These are orientations that accept irreversibility and material loss, and that work with, rather than against, the emergent grammars through which climate-changed urban worlds are increasingly being sensed and understood. The work advocated for here does not represent a retreat into nihilism, but a commitment to revising the kinds of thinking and teaching we do such that they remain faithful to the conditions of the present. Without such recalibration, urban thought risks misreading the present – and failing to engage the questions posed by those most attuned to, and affected by, irreversible climate-linked losses.
In this short comment on Santamarina and Ince's intervention on urban neighbourhoods and far-right spatial strategies, I wish to add nuance to their argument by adding the issue of normalisation to the research agenda they propose. To this end, I challenge three dichotomies that explicitly and implicitly guide their propositions, namely far-right actors/anti-fascists, disruption/continuity, and fringe/centre. I argue that recalibrating our analytical lens to better understand far-right strategies at the neighbourhood scale requires breaking with these alleged binaries.
This commentary responds to Justus Uitermark's call for renewed engagement with the Chicago School of Sociology, arguing that such engagement should be interpretative as well as selective. While Uitermark urges contemporary urbanists to draw selectively from the School's legacy, I suggest that this risks flattening the internal tensions and conceptual richness that animated its founding figures. Through a close rereading of Robert E. Park, I show that his thought was neither biologically reductionist nor politically naïve. Park's concepts of human ecology, social control, group identity, and politics reveal a pragmatist framework that treats social life as a process of continual transformation rather than fixed order. His use of naturalistic metaphors was not an uncritical borrowing from biology but an attempt to integrate evolutionary reasoning into a human science of communication, opinion, and adaptation. Recognising these complexities requires situating Park's urban writings within the broader sociological context of the Introduction to the Science of Sociology and the intellectual milieu of early 20th-century pragmatism. I conclude by suggesting that a genuinely interpretative engagement with the Chicago School should also attend to its global receptions and recover its unresolved questions about the relation between nature, culture, and social order. These remain vital to the ongoing task of theorising the city and the human sciences today.
