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Jennifer Robinson
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Jennifer Robinson

1965

British geographer who disputes the hierarchy of cities: she proposes studying them all as ordinary cities, not failed copies of London.

Robinson pointed to a bias in the discipline itself: a few cities are studied as models — global, creative, smart — and the rest are measured by how far they fall short. So most of the urban planet always appears in deficit, defined by what it lacks.

Her proposal is comparison on equal terms: treating every city as ordinary, with its own history and its own solutions, and letting theory be written from Johannesburg or Lima too. This is not a matter of academic fairness: policies imported without that care simply fail.

A South African geographer trained in Durban and Cambridge, professor of human geography at University College London after a spell at the Open University, Robinson came to urban theory from the apartheid city: The Power of Apartheid (1996) analysed how racial segregation was manufactured through planning, housing and administration. That experience explains her refusal to let a few Northern cities serve as the measure for all the others.

Her 2002 article on cities off the map and Ordinary Cities (2006) dismantled the hierarchy between global cities and Third World cities and proposed a comparative urbanism in which any city can be a source of theory. Comparative Urbanism (2022) develops the method for doing so. She is one of the main voices of the postcolonial turn in urban studies, alongside Ananya Roy and Garth Myers, and critics such as Peck reproach her for giving up structural explanations; she replies that comparing is not giving up explaining.

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