Making Urban Theory: Learning and Unlearning Through Southern Cities. Mary Lawhon with contributions from Lené Le Roux, Anesu Makina and Yaffa Truelove. Routledge, Abingdon, UK and New York, USA, 2020, pp. xii + 124. ISBN 978‐0‐429‐32614‐1(ebk).

Abstract

Decolonization has become a buzzword in contemporary academic circles. In geography, the attempts to kindle a discussion on the 'decolonization' of discipline took a significant turn with the 2017 Annual International Conference of Royal Geographical Society (with Institute of British Geographers) in London, that was chaired by Sarah Radcliffe under the theme of 'Decolonising geographical knowledges: opening geography out to the world'. A themed intervention in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers under the same title followed the conference (Radcliffe, 2017). The conference led to further decolonial interventions in subdisciplines such as political geography, historical geography, transport geography and feminist geography (see Radcliffe & Radhuber, 2020;Ferretti, 2020;Wood et al., 2020;Zaragocin, 2019). However, it also stimulated debates about how such moves 'could do more harm than good' if the terms of decolonization are not determined by the scholars who have been 'racialised as Indigenous and non-white by coloniality' (Esson et al., 2017: 384-5). Others have also posed questions of who decolonizes what, where and why (Sidaway et al., 2021).The focus of this review is not on providing a detailed analysis of decolonization debates in geography. Instead, I take this detour to signal the wider importance of ideas of decolonization for contemporary geographers. Making Urban Theory attempts to engage with these thoughts by asking the questions of urban theory. The book has been published in the Routledge Research on Decoloniality and New Postcolonialisms series, which is edited by Mark Jackson from the University of Bristol. The series has published 14 books presenting alternative understandings of human knowledge, which include History, Imperialism, Critique by Asher Gaffar, Decolonising Schools in South Africa by Pam Christie, and Housing in the Aftermath of the Fast Track Land Reform Programme in Zimbabwe by Lovemore Chipungu and Hangwelani Hope Magidimisha. The full list of the books can be accessed at https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Research-on-Decoloniality-and-New-Postcolonialisms/book-series/RRNP.Making Urban Theory skillfully fits into contemporary decolonization debates in geography and urban studies. It thoughtfully engages with the critiques of northspecificity of urban theory and demonstrates how that could be decolonized within the 'classroom' and outside in the 'field' while tackling the questions of modernity, development, race and power in the global south. Drawing on postcolonial literature on hybridity and unlearning, Mary Lawhon proposes a framework 'in which juxtaposition can induce the hard work of being uneasy, contributing to unlearning a (comfortable) gaze and enabling researchers to learn anew about (un)familiar places' (p. 5). She, however, cautions against treating this quartet as a formulaic postcolonial research methodology and advises it to be treated as an iterative, ongoing process of reflexivity.At 124 pages, the book is relatively short. It comprises 11 chap...