Why Cities Should Not Be Identical Models: Jennifer Robinson

Cities should not be identical models because the urban theory that judges them all by a single standard, that of a few Northern metropolises, turns every other city into an incomplete case that must catch up, and the British geographer Jennifer Robinson, a professor at University College London, devoted Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development (2006) to dismantling that hierarchy. Her question is simple: why should a few cities explain all the others. Her answer, postcolonial and comparative, is that all cities are ordinary, meaning that all can produce theory from their own trajectory, and that the task of urbanism is to learn from each rather than measure how close it comes to New York, London or Chicago.

Modernity and development: the two gazes that divide the urban world

Robinson identifies two ways of seeing that divide the urban world. The first is modernity: from the Chicago School to global city theory, a few Western cities were studied as the place where modernity is invented, and from them came the concepts that later travelled to evaluate the rest. The second is development: the cities of Africa, Asia and Latin America were studied by another discipline, development studies, as problems of poverty, informality and management, not as places of creativity and culture. That division, she argues, is a colonial inheritance that impoverishes theory and harms cities, because their policies copy recipes made elsewhere.

Lusaka and Johannesburg: the modernity theory failed to see

Her starting case was Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, where anthropologists of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute studied in the 1940s and 1950s the urban life of African migrants and found a modernity of its own, with music, fashion and associations, that European theory failed to see. Robinson showed that Johannesburg, where she researched for years, is as modern and as creative as any Northern city, and that global city rankings, which place it low for its financial services, erase everything the city is. That erasure has consequences: governments chase global status with iconic projects instead of attending to the city that exists.

The travel of concepts and comparison in any direction

The mechanism of the hierarchy is the travel of concepts. An intensively studied city produces categories, gentrification, global city, suburb, which then serve to evaluate other places as if the original experience were the normal path. Robinson does not propose abandoning comparison but reversing its direction: comparing any city with any other, letting concepts travel from the South as well, and treating difference not as proof of backwardness but as theoretical opportunity. Her later work, gathered in Comparative Urbanism (2022), develops that method of genetic and generative comparison among very different cities.

Effects on the discipline and criticism

Her proposal has changed the discipline. Together with Ananya Roy, Edgar Pieterse and AbdouMaliq Simone she is part of the turn toward urban theory from the South that has reshaped journals, conferences and curricula, and has inspired research that puts Jakarta in dialogue with London or Lagos with Los Angeles. Critics note that giving up hierarchies can hide real inequalities of economic power among cities; Robinson replies that recognising those inequalities is different from making them the criterion of which cities deserve theory.

Robinson's lesson is that the city one studies, governs or inhabits need not resemble any other to matter. Single models, whether the global city, the smart city or the creative city, impoverish urban policy because they measure each place by what it lacks, and a planning that starts from its own city's trajectory, conflicts and ways of life learns more and excludes less. All cities are ordinary, and that is why all of them are interesting.