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.

Research on shrinking cities has shown how long-term population and associated economic decline reshape urban governance and constrain fiscal capacity. Yet the budgetary practices through which shrinkage is governed remain relatively underexamined. This paper addresses this gap through a case study of Buffalo, New York, tracing fiscal governance across two major crises: the Global Financial Crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on a mixed-method research design, we examine how budgetary decisions were produced through interactions among state oversight, local political leadership, inherited fiscal commitments, and crisis-driven interventions. We show that fiscal governance in Buffalo does not follow directly from fiscal conditions such as shrinkage or fiscal stress. Instead, it emerges through the interaction of institutional arrangements, political agency, and long-term liabilities, particularly other post-employment benefits. While the Great Recession was mediated through technocratic state oversight and austerity, pandemic-era federal relief temporarily reconfigured the city’s fiscal position without resolving underlying constraints. These findings challenge deterministic accounts of shrinkage and recast fiscal governance as a dynamic, context-specific process, offering a framework for comparative analysis across diverse urban contexts.

For 20 years, turbulence has defined American urbanism. In the late noughties, a global financial crisis pushed many US cities to the brink of bankruptcy. Austerity followed, with belt‐tightening squeezing city services. Then came Trump, then came COVID. The pandemic would, unpredictably, make US cities cash rich thanks to the Federal government's largesse. And now we await Trump 2.0. For US cities the prospect of radical change seems real. But what type of reform will Trump bring? Herein lies the difficulty. Trump 2.0 is as hard to predict as the first version was. Immigration, tariff reform and government efficiency are currently Trump's domestic talking points. Yet we have little idea about what precisely will be done across all these policy arenas. This is a pressing conundrum for urban scholarship since each arena will impact the future of US cities. This reflection will assess how US cities are entering into the incoming Trump presidency and consider two possible versions of urban reform under Trump: the unlikely ‘coordinated version’, and the more likely ‘uncoordinated version’ defined by Trump's populist politics.

How much did the Great Recession change U.S. municipal budgetary and fiscal governance? According to an academic literature that subsequently emerged, the period saw a combination of both change and continuity. The work offered two distinct ways to explain and understand the emerging context: austerity urbanism and pragmatic municipalism. This paper reviews these explanations with the goal of showing how and why they developed contrasting conceptualizations. We argue differing epistemological approaches underpin the two competing approaches. Understanding these differences is, we argue, critical for moving forward. The COVID 19 pandemic saw another round of changes to U.S. municipal budgetary and fiscal governance, thus stimulating, we argue, the need for another round of conceptual development. However, an under-appreciation of the distinctions between austerity urbanism and pragmatic municipalism threatens to stymie this on-going, post-COVID 19 pandemic conceptualization. We review recent developments in the broader U.S. municipal fiscal governance literature to generate a set of guideposts for this much-needed work.

Cities now commonly engage with financial actors, tools, and markets to manage their budgets and associated activities. The growing significance of finance within urban governance is connected by some scholars to the latter's increasingly speculative character. One area of urban governance where financial tools are now commonly used for speculative ends are public pensions. Across the United States, many state and local governments face large unfunded pension liabilities. In some cases, this has led them to issue pension obligation bonds to reduce their unfunded liabilities. This paper examines the extent of recent pension obligation bond issuance and develops a comparative case study of three Massachusetts municipalities. The research results show that the speculative content of pension obligation bonds varies, even across three Massachusetts municipalities. By using pension obligation bonds, all three case study cities have exposed themselves to different levels of financial risk and have given themselves a long-term governance challenge by installing a speculative financial tool within their budgeting.

Urban geographers have been pursuing divergent theoretical projects. Some have pushed urban theory to become ageographical, the goal being to search out and explain of a globally omnipotent urbanization process. Others have moved in a different direction, seeking to detail how singular constellations of processes produce only particular urban places. This theoretical divergence has led some to question whether middle-range urban theories continue to have purchase today. This paper seeks to contribute to this attempt to rekindle an interest in middle-range urban theory by examining the relevance of Karl Popper’s situational analysis to how we understand contemporary urbanization.

Urban geographers have recently been developing "conjunctural analysis." This paper contributes to this emerging project in two ways. First, it argues that the existing literature has overlooked a critically important theoretical distinction-between normative and rationalist analysis. Second, we develop three meso-level concepts-plasticity, composites, temporalities-to provide concrete guidance on doing conjunctural analysis. We use the example of U.S. municipal finance to illustrate the intellectual returns of this schema, arguing that this example also demonstrates the approach's wider applicability. Through pairing these concepts with prospective methodologies, we move the conjunctural analytic beyond its currently nascent state.

With 78 specially commissioned entries written by a diverse range of contributors, this essential reference book covers the breadth and depth of human geography to provide a lively and accessible state of the art of the discipline for students, instructors and researchers.

Metaphors are indispensable for comprehending complexity (see Landau et al. 2013). But truth and understanding are different things, and the truth content of metaphors is hotly debated. In analytical philosophy, the likes of Donald Davidson (1984) have argued that metaphors may be highly effective in prompting thought, but these thoughts have no necessary connection to truth conditions. In continental philosophy, metaphors have often been assigned a more central role. By dispensing of the objective/subjective dualism, many continental philosophers have extensively used metaphors to describe the human condition. But doubts remain. Derrida and Moore (1974) claimed that every “sign” (i.e. words) is essentially metaphorical since it cannot possibly “signify” the actual thing. For example, I might be typing with my “finger” (sign), but this word does not articulate the whole being of my digit (e.g. its tendons, muscles, scars, etc.). Nietzsche would say even more (see Kofman, 1994), claiming that there is absolutely no correspondence between the stimulus (i.e. thing in the world) and the final utterance (i.e. metaphor). Philosophical debates have therefore placed a “use with caution” label on the metaphor. The continued use of metaphors in the social sciences therefore occurs on contested philosophical grounds. And yet, this usage (and, by extension, abuse) is unavoidable. This is certainly true when it comes to the urban disciplines. The city and urbanization are immensely complex things. They are, strictly speaking, unknowable. No matter how familiar you are with a city, there will always be residents you don’t know, histories yet to be uncovered, livelihoods you’re unaware of, and changes that are yet to be noticed. This does not mean we should not try to understand cities. Rather, we simply need to be aware that the tools we employ, like metaphors, will always be partial, failing, and/ or problematic. This is one reason why I am thrilled to feature Wilson and Wyly’s (2022) forum paper in this issue. Metaphors are essential and yet potentially dangerous analytical tools. They require careful presentation and reflective discussion. I would hope that anyone reading Wilson and Wyly’s “Dracula urbanism” thesis can identify its utility. The metaphorical application of Bram Stoker’s vampire to contemporary urbanism brings a particular set of issues to the fore: parasitic development, demonization of poverty, the disciplinary use of technology, and so on. However, their metaphor also, by definition, sends other processes and things into the background. Our commentaries do a wonderful job of revealing some of these disappearances. Dallas Rogers takes up the question of metaphors and their utility directly, making a distinction between those that reveal and those that fool. Renee Tapp encourages us to look beyond the pessimism of Dracula urbanism and think