Introduction: How to Think About Cities

From Koch, R. and Latham, A. (eds) (2017 forthcoming) Key Thinkers on Cities. London: SAGE. Introduction: How to Think About Cities Regan Koch and Alan Latham Thinking has its strategies and tactics too, much as other forms of action have. Merely to think about cities and get somewhere, one of the main things to know is what kind of problem cities pose, for all problems cannot be thought about in the same way. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961: 558) I. Introduction Let’s think about cities. They are astonishing places. Often described as one of humanity’s greatest achievements, they are a collective response to some of our most fundamental needs. Centres of innovation, cities generate tremendous wealth and opportunity. Markets and factories, skyscrapers, shopping malls and stadiums, cities are places where things get made, whether that be cars, toasters, furniture, laptops, or less tangible things like experiences, trends, contracts and code. Cities also shelter and nurture millions of people in ways that often feel close to magical. They are full of communities and people fashioning novel and striking ways of living together. They facilitate all sorts of unique freedoms, unique ways of pursuing desire and self-expression. For all that, cities can seem thrown together and accidental, a mess of incompatible and unlikely elements. They can be engines of inequality and greed; places where the fact that some people are rich is the result of others being poor. They can be dirty, smelly and polluted. They can segregate and exclude. They are often ugly and inhumane. Other aspects of city life are clearly the result of elaborate, meticulous planning. Think of the extraordinary coordination that allows millions of commuters to pulse into and out of a large city each day. Or the often taken-for-granted (until they aren’t working) systems of infrastructure that keep water running, homes heated and cooled, phones and internet working. The extensive networks of care involved in educating children, caring for the sick and providing for the vulnerable, speak to the multitude of informal arrangements and formal institutions that serve and protect those in need. For all their flaws and inefficiencies, their inequalities and inequities, it is remarkable how many different things cities are and do. This is a book about different ways of thinking about cities and urban life. Profiling the work of 40 individuals at the cutting edge of contemporary urban research, it invites readers to consider a range of theoretical traditions and methodological approaches to understanding cities. Social scientists and others have generated a number of different ways of conceptualizing and describing urban environments. Economists think about cities in ways that are different than sociologists. For anthropologists, urban environments are not the same as they are for planners or spatial scientists. Human geographers work with different tools than do artists or architects or urban designers. The 40 thinkers in this volume are representative of these diverse ways of thinking about cities, and of the trans-disciplinary field that has come to be known as urban studies. The purpose of this book is to provide a guide to this field. For the uninitiated it may serve as an entry point to the formal study of cities, and for those already immersed in urban studies it is an invitation to consider some different approaches to the kind of problem that a city is. II. The kinds of problems that cities are Cities and urban environments are extraordinarily diverse places. For an urban researcher, studying a city is not simply about confronting the city’s problems, but also about considering the kind of problem that a city is. The answer to this question is they are not one kind of a problem, rather they are a range of problems. There are many different ways these problems might be framed. We would like to suggest six thematics through which thinking about cities and urban environments might be approached: Economic... One kind of problem cities are is economic. If the first industrial revolution started in rural England in the 18th century, it quickly came to be concentrated in newly emergent urban centres: Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, Birmingham (Briggs, 1965; Clark, 2000; Harvey, 1989). Elsewhere the story has been similar. The rise of the United States as a global economic and industrial power was largely the product of its growth as an urban society; a society built around cities like New York, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore, Los Angeles. Japan’s industrialization was driven through the growth of cities like Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama, Nagoya (Allen, 1981; Berry, 1973; Glaeser, 2011; Hall, 1998; Mosk, 2001). And in the contemporary moment, the extraordinary emergence of China as an economic powerhouse is all about the urbanization of a previously rural society. Long established cities like Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong have seen tremendous growth, as well as the development of vast new conglomerations that scarcely existed 30 or 40 years ago: Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Harbin, Jinan, Chengdu (Brenner and Schmid, 2014; Castells, 2014; Wu, 2015; Wu and Gaubatz, 2013). This raises the question of why so much economic activity has come to be concentrated in urban areas? Why are they centres of so much wealth and power? And beyond these questions are more nuanced ones. Why is it that some cities come to dominate whole countries and regions while others do not? Why do some cities grow so quickly while others do not? And why do some cities switch from being centres of growth to places of poverty and economic distress? Social… The concentration of economic activity presupposes social concentration. Cities and urban environments demonstrate enormous variations in their population density; some are remarkably spread-out and ill-defined, while others concentrate enormous numbers of people in remarkably small areas (Demographica, 2016; Pacione, 2001; World Bank, 2015). Seoul’s population density is around five times that of New York City. The population density of Phoenix is a thirtieth that of Mumbai or Hong Kong, and half that of New York. Monaco compresses its entire population in two square kilometres, while Buenos Aires stretches over 2500 square kilometres. However, all cities, be they dense or sprawling, large or small, have to deal with a set of common social problems centring around how people live together in such close proximity. These range from questions like how people access the basics of life such as housing, water and nourishment, to how different ethnic groups and different social classes share the common spaces of a city. They involve questions about how children should be looked after and educated, how the elderly and vulnerable are cared for, how social order is to be maintained and policed (Gehl, 2010; Hayden, 1980; Jarvis et al., 2001; Knox and Pinch, 2010; Tonkiss, 2013; Zukin, 1995). So as well as being an economic problem, cities need also to be thought of as a social problem – as questions of social order and organization. Just as there is no single city form, nor is there any single answer to how these social questions are addressed. Different urban societies have generated an enormous variety of answers to these social questions. Some have created cities defined by patterns of systematic segregation and inequality, while others manage to create an overarching sense of egalitarianism and inclusion (Abu-Lughod, 1980; Caldeira 2000; Espino, 2015; Hall, 2013; Lynch, 1981; McLaren and Agyeman, 2015; Massey, 2005; Robinson, 1996; Smith, 1996; Wacquant, 2008). Institutional… To think of cities as a collection of social and economic questions brings us to a third way of thinking about them ‒ they are also problems of institutional order. Things like markets and exchanges, schools and hospitals, systems of electricity, water supply and sewage disposal do not just happen. They are supported and coordinated by a vast range of institutions. To start, we can think of things like law and the legal system. These institutions form the taken-for-granted backdrop through which the social and economic life of cities unfolds; it is easy to forget the role they play in structuring and organizing everyday urban life (Kim, 2015; Koch, 2015; LoukaitouSideris and Ehrenfeucht, 2009; Valverde, 2012). In other cases, institutions have a more obviously visible role in the life of cities. Things like planning systems and city governments are clearly intertwined with how all sorts of aspects of urban life are governed and organized (Boyer, 1994; Caldeira, 2000; Flyvbjerg, 1998; Holston, 2008; Molotch, 2014). But thinking about cities as questions of institutional organization ‒ mediating in a whole range of ways who gets access to what ‒ also points to the need to think about the less formal institutions that help urban life hold together (Anderson, 1999; García Canclini, 2005; McFarlane, 2011; Roy, 2003; Sennett, 2012). It is well established that cities everywhere are animated by thick networks of association. These run from relations of kinship, religion, ethnicity and occupation, through to friendship, neighbourhood and the surprising connections of shared enthusiasms like sports teams and festivals (Amin and Thrift, 2002; De Boeck and Plissart, 2004; Fischer, 1982; Simone, 2004; Wellman, 1979). What is less understood is how and why these associations sometimes serve as dividing lines in hostile relations between groups, and at other times become vital sources of solidarity and care. Infrastructural... This brings us to a fourth kind of problem that cities are: infrastructural problems. Cities are fundamentally about questions of sharing and distribution. And all of this is built and organized through often complex and intricate networks of physical infrastructure: things like roads and streets, electricity grids, mass transit systems, telecommunications networks, water supply and wastewater disposal systems, to name just a few possible examples (Gandy, 2014; Graham and Marvin, 2001; Hughes, 1993; Kitchin and Dodge, 2011; McShane, 1994; OMA, Koolhaas and Mau, 1995). We can think of infrastructure as all those systems and networks that are necessary for the collective functioning of a society. These need not be publicly provided, but they are characterized by the fact of their collective consumption. Of course all social life in some sense involves forms of infrastructure. But cities, because of their size, because of their concentration of population, because of their heterogeneity, put extraordinary demands on the infrastructural. They have constantly required the development of socio-technological systems that allow hundreds of thousands, in some case millions, of urban dwellers to be provided with clean water, for houses and buildings to be provided with electricity and heat. In cities like Tokyo and London these systems allow several million people to travel into and from the centre of the city each day. To think of cities as an infrastructural problem, then, is to recognize that cities are not just economic or social, indeed that they are not just built environments, they are in fact socio-technological artefacts (Bijker et al., 1987; Blok and Farías, 2016; Hommels, 2005; Mitchell, 1995). And to think of cities as an infrastructural problem is simultaneously to think of cities and urban environments as sets of socio-technological problems. Cities are built as much by engineers as they are by architects or urban planners, but the fair and effective provisioning of such infrastructure raises a host of questions that go beyond technical matters. Ecological... Importantly, cities are not just places that are shared with other people. Urban dwellers cohabitate with a whole host of other non-human agents. Many of these go largely unnoticed: the weeds that populate a street verge; the grasses and flowers that cover an unbuilt suburban lot; the animals like mice, rats, raccoons, foxes, squirrels, sparrows, geckos and lizards, starlings, gulls, pigeons, myna birds, feral cats and dogs that find productive niches within urban environments. Indeed, there are a whole list of synanthropic species that have co-evolved to thrive in the environments that humans create. Just as a significant proportion of the human species is now ‘urban’, there are subsets of plants, insects and animals that too have in a range of senses ‘urbanized’ (Jeremijenko, 2009; Lachmund, 2013; Monbiot, 2014; Niemelä, 1999; Sullivan, 2004). The dynamics of this symbiosis are complex and go way beyond a simple sense of the natural being parasitic on the human or vice versa. Urban environments and the people within them are dependent on the physical environments within which they are built: for water, for food, for clean air. Urban dwellers are also dependent on a wide range of ecological services and infrastructures to ensure that the vast amounts of biological waste they produce do not come to act as vectors of microbial contagion (Corburn, 2013; Forman, 2014). So cities can also be understood as an ecological problem, as a set of questions about how humans are mixed together with the ‘natural’ processes of the physical environment, or how the human and non-human interfold. Thinking about the city as ecological involves thinking about urban environments as enormous metabolic systems of energy and matter; as sites that teem with a diversity of different forms of life; as complex organisms that are heterogeneous mixtures of the organic and inorganic, of the microscopic and the monumental (Amin and Thrift, 2002; Bennett, 2010; Davis, 1998; Gandy, 2003; Swyngedouw, 2006). And it is also to be prompted to think about how urban environments and their demands for energy and materials are an integral part of what some climate scientists have come to call the anthropocene (Bulkeley and Betsill, 2003; Lorimer, 2015; Seto et al., 2012; Vince, 2014). Complexity... Finally, cities can be thought of as problems of a certain kind of complexity. This in a sense is to reiterate the points outlined in the previous five paragraphs. Understanding how cities and urban environments work requires thinking about how a range of relationships interact together simultaneously. The dynamism of cities comes in no small part from the fact that they draw together so many different elements into close proximity. They pull together people of different backgrounds, skill sets, capacities and world views. They bring together complex lattices of institutions and organizations. They draw all sorts of heterogeneous material and non-material entities into relation with each other in planned and unplanned ways. Indeed, urban mixing does not just happen through proximity, it is also about diverse connections to faraway places. This is to say that cities and their environments in a quite fundamental sense are pluralizing, diverse and heterogeneous in their character. More, is to stress that in a fundamental sense cities themselves generate much of that plurality, diversity and heterogeneity. It is not simply that cities and urban environments are with all their plurality, diversity and heterogeneity, are complicated entities to understand ‒ although of course they often are. We need to go further. It is not just that cities are complex ‒ that they involve intricate networks of connection and interdependence. Rather cities are composed of entangled meshes of dynamic, interrelated, emergent, self-organizing systems. Or, put another way, cities are a problem of organized complexity (Batty, 2013; Jacobs, 1961; Johnson, 2001; Storper, 2013). They are made up of a host of interconnected systems where the component elements are not just related but where the effect of each component is very much greater than the simple sum of its parts (Miller and Page, 2009). Thinking seriously about cities requires taking into account the power of this complexity. Of course not all problems encountered in cities are simply and straightforwardly ‘urban’ problems ‒ problems of ‘the city’. Cities and urban environments are also bound together with a range of different scales of action; the national, the regional, the international, the global, to name a few examples (Sassen, 2006; Storper, 2013). Urban economies are part of wider transactional networks. Social dynamics are not just endogenous to cities. They are entangled within broader social dynamics and often complex patterns of connection to other places, just as social and cultural institutions are. The knowledge and expertise that goes into producing the socio-technical infrastructures is almost always part of more global techno-scapes. The reach of ecological ranges are rarely conterminous with urban boundaries. And the organized complexity found within cities is itself a subsystem of a range of larger complex socio-economic systems. Indeed, one of the challenges of urban studies is disentangling these different layers of causality. And, if some thinkers within urban studies are keen to assert the privileged place of ‘the urban’ or ‘the city’, others are more circumspect, arguing only that cities and the urban are distinctive realms of action – not the most decisive. III. Ways of thinking about cities, ways of theorizing cities One advantage of starting with key thinkers as a way of approaching the field of urban studies is that it helps to emphasize plurality in terms of how urban problems might be addressed. Looking at the academic trajectories and research agendas that different individuals have embarked upon gives a sense of this plurality. Just as cities can be approached as a diverse array of problems, those problems can be thought about and framed through different styles of thinking. And these styles of thinking may lead towards quite different and in some cases mutually antagonistic views of how cities are organized and function. This diversity arises in part from the variety of intellectual traditions that populate the contemporary social sciences and humanities. But it is also a product of the different ways thinking itself may be understood. It is easy to conflate thinking with theorizing. Certainly much ‒ but by no means all ‒ of the Western intellectual tradition emphasizes a dichotomy between mind and body, theory and practice, thought and action. We would discourage readers from flattening their thinking in this way. Thinking can be visceral, practical, imaginative, oriented to action and affecting, as much as it may be abstract, analytical and removed from emotion. Reading the entries of the thinkers collected in this volume should convey a sense of the various ways that thinking may be configured in relation to the work of building theory, working with empirical evidence, and in the work of transforming urban spaces and cities. In no particular order, we would like to suggest five different ways that thinking about cities gets done within urban studies. Thinking as local explanation and description… Much of urban studies is interested in the distinctive elements and relationships that different urban forms draw together, the factors which make cities unique. It wants to describe how people live together in a particular place; the meanings they ascribe to their activities, the imaginaries that inform their worlds. Researchers focusing on this emplacement are aware that there are factors shared in common across different cities and spaces that will help them make sense of their research site. However, their primary interest is less in defining the exact shape of these commonalities as working at developing convincing accounts of how the relations encountered during research unfold. The work of Elijah Anderson is exemplary of this approach, as is that of Dolores Hayden. As an urban ethnographer Anderson’s work seeks to describe the situated interactions through which categorizations like race and social class become manifest in American cities. Anderson is careful to place his accounts into a broader context of contemporary urban life in the US, but the persuasive force of his books is a product of the thick descriptions of the Philadelphia neighbourhoods he studies. Similarly, the force of Hayden’s work as an urban historian is a product of the detail she accumulates in her description of ‒ among other topics ‒ the domestic worlds of suburbia, or 19th-century attempts to create gender-equal forms of housing. In a similar vein, but on a different scale, Fulong Wu has described the dynamics of government and market-oriented restructuring that have been at the heart of China’s tremendous urban expansion. His work details the political and economic transformations which make what is happening in China distinct from previous patterns of urbanization elsewhere in the world. Thinking as a set of tools and heuristics… The use of description as a form of social explanation and argumentation does not preclude an interest in more generalizable kinds of theory. However, much writing within urban studies is interested in developing more formal codifications than those offered by thick description. For such work, a key part of thinking about cities involves developing explicit theoretical concepts that allow us to think with precision about the social, political, economic or ecological dynamics being studied. Here thinking about cities and urban spaces involves drawing on and developing concepts that operate as tools or heuristics that facilitate comparison across diverse cases. Practically, concepts are constructions that help us to make sense of the particular concrete, empirical puzzles that the world confronts us with. Saskia Sassen’s concept of the global city is a good example of this style of thinking. When it was introduced the concept of the global city described a distinctive but previously overlooked set of socio-economic relations characteristic of certain cities ‒ indeed certain sectors within certain cities ‒ that held a privileged position in an emergent form of economic globalization. The productiveness of the concept lies less in the question of whether she is right (whether there are indeed distinct global cities), and more in the issues and debates the concept of global city open up. In a somewhat different register, the writings of both Ash Amin and AbdouMaliq Simone elaborate novel theoretical concepts for thinking about urban economies, social life and infrastructure, through which we might think more carefully about how urban worlds are put together. In contrast, Richard Sennett eschews the production of formal theory in his writing, choosing instead through examples and description to offer his reader possible ways of thinking about important urban questions such as how strangers manage to cooperate, or how different groups live together. Thinking as intervening... To treat theoretical concepts as tools or heuristics is to highlight the extent thinking can be thought of as practical. The point of concepts employed in this way is not strictly speaking whether they are ‘true’ or not. Rather it is their usefulness in helping us accurately make sense of whatever problem the researcher finds themselves entangled with. A further way of thinking about the kind of thinking that animates urban studies is to focus on the concrete interventions undertaken in cities by urban planners, architects, politicians, artists and others. This includes a diverse range of actions from the work of crafting plans and designs, creating concrete policy interventions, to staging artistic interventions that encourage urban dwellers to think about their relationships to each other and their environment. What is most striking about this style of thinking is how it is directly entangled with the day-to-day flow of actual cities. So, for example, the artist and activist Natalie Jeremijenko stages imaginative interventions that encourage urbanites to interact with the nonhuman animals they share their city with: birds, fish, mice, plants, tadpoles. The architect Jan Gehl re-designs urban spaces to re-scale them to the form of the individual human body, just as Kevin Lynch had put his work on urban perception to use in his urban design practice. In a similar way, Enrique Peñalosa, the sometime mayor of Bogota, developed a series of inventive interventions that were aimed at both improving life in the city he governed and conveying a sense that the city was for everyone. Thinking as critique… It can be easy to overlook that intervention-oriented thinking involves not just action, but also theories of action. A fourth style of thinking however explicitly places the work of theorizing at its centre. Thinking as critique is focused on uncovering the hidden and unacknowledged biases and power asymmetries that structure contemporary cities. One style of work in this vein ‒ which underpins much work in critical urban studies ‒ involves describing the underlying structures or forces through which cities and urban environments are organized. Here, while theory may still be thought of as a tool or heuristic, more commonly it is understood as the objective apparatus through which the real underlying relationships within the social world are made apparent. The work of thinking about cities then comes to also be a question of theorizing the processes that structure cities. Crucially the work of theory takes on a foundational quality; without the proper theorization of the unseen processes driving urban development, researchers cannot make useful sense of the empirical phenomena that they might be interested in. The work of neo-Marxists such as Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey and Neil Brenner is exemplary of this approach. Harvey’s analysis of contemporary urban life is built on the proposition that contemporary cities are fundamentally structured through the dynamics of capitalist accumulation. It follows from this that cities and the multitude of processes that structure them cannot be understood unless this reality is taken into account. Similarly, Lefebvre argues that a generalized process of urbanization has come to define the contemporary moment. As a result, as Brenner has stressed, it is essential to properly theorize ‘the urban’ before one can productively start making sense of contemporary urban life. Not all forms of social critique within urban studies are premised on the need to specify underlying structures. Drawing together both the notion of thinking as description and thinking as the generation of conceptual heuristics and tools, an alternative mode of thinking as critique focuses on tracing out the way specific urban relations are assembled. The aim here is to unpack the subtle mechanisms through which patterns of inequality and unfairness are instantiated. M. Christine Boyer’s work for example demonstrates how seemingly neutral practices of heritage conservation in fact construct limited and exclusionary narratives of collective memory in the New York cityscape. In a different vein, Bent Flyvbjerg has analysed how processes of urban planning in Denmark are not as transparent and democratic as they are presented to be, but rather are built upon and reproduce asymmetries of power and influence. For Boyer and Flyvbjerg, critique is a means of contributing to public debate about their cities and the ways in which planning processes might be organized differently. Thinking as modelling… A final style of thinking focuses on the construction of formal models. As with thinking as critique, thinking as modelling emphasizes the development of robust theoretical constructs. But it does not seek to reveal or decode an otherwise unseen reality. Rather it seeks to fashion precise analytic representations of the world. At its most basic a model is nothing more than a simplified description of relationships. In this sense each of the previous four styles of thinking involves forms of modelling. More strictly, however, thinking as modelling involves creating formalized, empirically testable, descriptions of the social world. These formal descriptions may take the form of diagrams or other visual representations. They may also be presented as mathematical formula. This style of thinking ‒ unlike the four so far discussed ‒ is closely related to that undertaken within the physical sciences. Given that the work of modellers relies both on the generation of robust quantitative data and the use of highly schematic assumptions about the parameters of interaction, it can produce descriptions that are simplified, highly stylized and removed from the messy complexity of actual urban worlds. However, as the sociologist Howard Becker (2005: 151) has pointed out, ‘being unrealistic doesn’t deprive these representations of value or usefulness’. And while writers like Brian Berry, Michael Batty, Karen C. Seto and Edward L. Glaeser are keen to stress the extent to which their models are scientific and hence produce distinct kinds of analysis compared to less quantitatively oriented urban work, one does not have to accept this claim to appreciate the usefulness of this style of thinking. Thinking with models can tell us much about the enduring morphologies of urban growth, the dynamics of scaling between and within cities, how agglomeration economies work, and much else. Each of these five ways of thinking about cities share commonalities, not only in that they are different ways of imaging what the city is, but also what it might be. Normative or aspirational ideas about cities could be thought of as yet another way of thinking about cities. However, we think that each mode of thinking outlined above can be oriented towards imagining and enacting better urban futures. This in part accounts for a great deal of overlap between the different approaches outlined. For example, thinking as critique may begin with the work of theorizing, but it can also inspire and contribute to on-the-ground kinds of direct activism. Henri Lefebvre’s (1996) formulations of the ‘right to the city’ have been the rallying call for a tremendous amount of urban political struggle and community organization. Conversely, the development of theoretical tools and heuristics often forms the basis for discussions about how more desirable alternatives might be realized. We can see this in Ash Amin’s work, which challenges taken-forgranted assumptions that can lead to misguided kinds of urban policy making and intervention. Likewise, detailed local descriptions and speculative models can form the basis for public discussion and deliberation about how best to address the persistent and emerging problems that cities face. The larger point then is that just as the city presents itself with multiple kinds of problems, there are a variety of different ways of thinking that can be used to tackle these problems. V. How to use this book, and who’s in it? There are any number of textbooks and compendiums that offer an introduction to the world of cities and urban research (see Bridge and Watson, 2010; LeGates and Stout, 2011; Paddison and McCann, 2014; Parker, 2015). Key Thinkers on Cities (KToC) is not designed as a replacement. Instead, there are three ways we hope this book might be used. First, it offers an initiatory primer for anyone interested in cities but unfamiliar with urban studies as an academic field. Read together, the 40 entries in KToC provide a sense of the broad ranging themes, concepts and theoretical approaches that underpin a great deal of contemporary urban scholarship. Second, undergraduate and postgraduate students in urban studies and related academic disciplines will find KToC a useful resource for learning alongside course textbooks and assigned readings. Each entry outlines the intellectual context and basic ideas of a key figure students are likely to encounter in their studies, and will help to make connections and points of contrast between them. Third, KToC can be a valuable point of reference for scholars in any field that relates to cities and urban issues. The volume provides a resource for understanding the basic contours of different urban debates and research trajectories. Overall, the aim of KToC is to provide an engaging map of the trans-disciplinary field of urban studies. It does so by outlining the contributions of established leaders and those whose work is currently reshaping the way we think about cities and urban environments. The 40 people featured in this book have produced some of the most influential and inspiring thinking about cities in recent decades. Some of them are very well known across different disciplines and beyond academia; others perhaps less so. The book is not a ‘who’s who’ list or ranking exercise, nor is it an attempt to inscribe a certain canon. Rather, the entries have been selected to represent the diversity of ideas, approaches and empirical subject matter animating urban scholarship today. Indeed, one of the most exciting things about contemporary urban studies is its plurality. KToC highlights this plurality and invites its readers to think about cities and urban environments from a range of diverse perspectives. Some of the key thinker choices will seem obvious (how could you have book on key thinkers without people like Jane Jacobs, David Harvey, or Saskia Sassen?) Others might seem surprising. Some may not even appear to be obviously urban thinkers (Natalie Jeremijenko is an artist; Mariana Valverde is a legal scholar who does not just write about urban issues). We have undoubtedly overlooked some areas of urban scholarship ‒ not least because we have chosen to concentrate on work that has at least one leg in the social sciences; and we have only included thinkers whose work is widely available in English. Nonetheless, the thinkers collected here provide a sense of the vibrancy and dynamism of contemporary urban studies. So, how have the different thinkers been selected? The starting point was thinking in terms of core themes in urban scholarship: economics, politics and government, social and cultural life, infrastructure and technology, ecology and health, and planning and design ‒ the six problematics outlined above. Next, we considered the principal disciplines that feed into urban studies: economics, sociology, anthropology, planning, urban design and architecture, and human geography. These were then considered in relation to diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives circulating within the field. These include comparative research (Matthew Gandy, Ananya Roy, Jennifer Robinson), case study (Bent Flyvbjerg, Harvey Molotch, Mariana Valverde, Fulong Wu) and ethnographic research (Elijah Anderson, Teresa Caldeira, Néstor García Canclini, Loïc Wacquant, Sharon Zukin), quantitative analysis and urban modelling (Edward Glaeser, Karen C. Seto, Michael Storper), historical approaches (M. Christine Boyer, Dolores Hayden, Richard Sennett), critical urbanism and political economy (Neil Brenner, Mike Davis, Steven Graham, Saskia Sassen, Neil Smith), actor-network theory and assemblage theories (Ash Amin, Jane M. Jacobs, AbdouMaliq Simone) and various modes of urban intervention (Jason Corburn, Jan Gehl, Natalie Jeremijenko, Rem Koolhaas, William J. Mitchell, Enrique Peñalosa). In selecting thinkers, we sought to include a number of figures who were foundational to the initial formation of the field of urban studies in the 1960s and 1970s. This includes those such as Janet Abu-Lughod, Jane Jacobs, Kevin Lynch and Henri Lefebvre who have passed away, along with still active scholars like Brian Berry, Mike Batty, Manuel Castells and David Harvey. We have purposely omitted earlier thinkers one might expect to find in a volume on key urban thinkers ‒ people like Walter Benjamin, Robert Park, Louis Wirth, Max Weber, Georg Simmel and Lewis Mumford. There is more than enough introductory writing on these thinkers, and we think there is as much to be learnt from the new as from the old. Finally, as to how you might go about reading this book, there’s no prescriptive formula. We suspect that few readers will work through it sequentially, cover to cover. You might start by just flipping through, looking to see how many names or key writings you are familiar with. The first entry you read might be that of one of your personal favourites, or you might want to learn about someone completely unfamiliar to you. Either way, we hope the entry will inspire you to dive deeper into some of their work, or perhaps you will follow a cross-reference onto another key thinker whose work is in some way related. Regardless of how you use this volume, we hope that you find it a helpful resource and return to it every now and again. 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