Abstract

Writing from the southern tip of Africa in the crisp winter temperatures of June, this is an exciting moment for us personally and professionally. This is a big book on what are path-determining issues for the twenty-first century. Cities, especially southern cities, are our future. We want to make clear, however, that this book does not establish a body of scholarship on the global urban south through a critique of the norms and the limits, the problems and the lacunae of northern scholarship and its universal presumptions and applications. It is instead a celebration of scholars and scholarship committed to making urban futures better, more interesting, legible, sustainable, and more just. It also works towards a geographical realignment in urban studies, bringing into conversation a wide array of cities across the global south — the ‘ordinary’, ‘mega’, ‘global’ and ‘peripheral’ — as well as diversely situated authors and perspectives. As the nuanced texts and the many glorious images in the book reveal, assuming a southern perspective, or point of departure, inevitably alters one's gaze on cities: this is an invigorating, not debilitating, shift in orientation for urban studies.