Practising Urban and Regional Research beyond Metrocentricity

Abstract

Our experience of teaching a graduate-student module entitled 'Global Cities' in Singapore forms the starting point for reflection on the limitations of the global- and world-cities paradigms. Otherwise varied strands of critique, we argue, may be understood in terms of a common tendency in Anglophone urban and regional research. We term this tendency 'metrocentricity'. While this intervention in many ways echoes important existing critiques (Robinson, 2006; Roy, 2009), it is intended to call attention in particular to the need for alternative practices or ways of doing urban and regional research. After identifying metrocentric tendencies, we consider how teaching and research might be (re)oriented both conceptually and methodologically beyond metrocentricity. In making this case, we invoke insights from feminist geographies that view research as embodied work. Valorizing the diverse, situated practices and engagements of a range of actors - including but not limited to academics - is a key starting point for less metrocentric urban and regional studies. Copyright (c) 2010 The Authors. Journal Compilation (c) 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Cities on and off the map: A bibliometric assessment of urban globalisation research

“…Furthermore, even if the literature has come to reflect the 'southern' and 'beyond the West' perspectives that scholars such as Watson (2014), McFarlane (2008 and others (Amin 2004;Pieterse, 2009;Simone, 2009;Sheppard, Leitner and Maringati, 2014;Rao 2008) have long demanded, it is unclear whether UGR is now less centred on the most conspicuous world/global cities and megacities, or whether studies continue to overlook smaller cities (Bell andJayne, 1999, 2006), and only a handful of studies are dedicated to the dynamic secondary and mid-sized cities (Chen and Kanna, 2012). Bunnell and Maringanti's (2010) concept of 'metrocentricity' critiques the global and regional trend in biasing publication towards larger and wealthier cities. Birch and Wachter (2011) explain that megacities represent only a fraction of urban population worldwide, a proportion dwarfed by that of the more numerous small/medium cities.…”

Current debates in urban theory: A critical assessment

“…Other postcolonial urbanists appear to be rather more ambivalent about this issue. For example, Bunnell and Maringanti (2010) and Roy (2009), raise arguments against categories like world cities, international financial centers, and city-regions, not so much because they may be misidentified but because they are said, somehow or other, to relegate excluded cities to secondary status while supposedly diverting our attention away from the full diversity of urban forms and experiences that the world has to offer. Here again we come face to face with the new particularism and the relegation of all cities to the status of "ordinariness."…”

Borderland City in New India

“…They argue that 'if the role and nature of small urbanity is to be more fully understood, a number of "imaginative leaps" must be taken by theorists currently hung up on the notion that globalisation of the city means globalisation of the metropolis ' (2009: 690). Bunnell and Maringanti (2010) refer to this turn in scholarship as moving beyond 'Metrocentricity'. Moving beyond mega-cities also calls for more engaged ethnographic work, work that cannot be done from afar with secondary data (2010: 417).…”