Jennifer Robinson and Ordinary Cities: Urban Theory from the South

Ordinary cities is the concept with which the South African geographer Jennifer Robinson, a professor at University College London, proposed in Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development (2006) to refound urban theory. Her diagnosis is that urban studies have divided the world in two: the cities of the North, New York, London, Los Angeles, from which theory is extracted, and those of the South, Lagos, Mumbai, Lusaka, to which development recipes are applied. That division, Robinson argues, is a colonial inheritance that impoverishes theory and harms cities: all cities are ordinary, that is, all are places where complex urban processes happen and all can be learned from.

Against global cities and against developmentalism

Robinson aims her critique at two traditions. The first is that of Saskia Sassen's global cities and the world city hierarchy of John Friedmann and Peter Taylor, which rank the planet by each city's position in financial networks and leave most cities off the map. In her article Global and World Cities: A View from off the Map (2002) she showed that whole cities, such as Lusaka or Kinshasa, were invisible to a theory that saw only banks and corporate headquarters. The second is developmentalism, which treats cities of the South as problems to be solved, lagging behind a modernity that is always somewhere else.

Modernity does not belong to the North

Against both, Robinson recovers the idea of modernity from the Chicago School and from anthropology to show that the modern is not the property of the North. The inhabitants of Lusaka or Johannesburg invent every day forms of urban life, economies, architectures and politics that are as modern as those of Paris, and that theory fails to see because it measures them by foreign criteria. Robinson calls for a cosmopolitan urban theory, built from many cities rather than a few, and a practice that stops imposing development models and learns from what cities already do.

Comparative urbanism: learning from any city

The programme that follows is comparative urbanism, which Robinson has developed in later articles. Comparing does not mean measuring all cities by the same yardstick but putting different cases in relation to generate new concepts: what water management in Lusaka teaches London, what the informality of Mumbai has in common with that of platform couriers in Madrid. That comparison, Robinson says, must be done from anywhere and with any city, and break the habit of the South always being the case and the North always the theory.

The postcolonial turn and its critics

The proposal has marked twenty-first-century urban theory. With Ananya Roy, Aihwa Ong and AbdouMaliq Simone, Robinson is part of the postcolonial turn in urban studies, which has produced concepts such as worlding, cities that build themselves as global from Dubai to Shanghai, or informality as a mode of urbanization. Her critics object that the insistence on each city's singularity makes it hard to explain common processes such as global capitalism, and Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid have defended against her a theory of planetary urbanization. The debate between the two positions remains open.

For practice, ordinary cities have an immediate consequence: no city should be planned by copying New York or treated as a lost case of underdevelopment. Medellín, Curitiba, Kigali and Surabaya have produced urban innovations now studied in the North, and European cities are finding in the informality and self-building of the South answers to their own housing crisis. Robinson teaches us to look at every city as a source of knowledge rather than an imperfect copy, which is the condition for a truly global urban theory.