Ordinary city, ordinary life : off the expo map

The title of this chapter is a play on the ‘Better city, better life’ theme and a homage to the work of the geographer Jennifer Robinson – specifically her influential article ‘Global and world cities: a view from off the map’ (2002) and the subsequent book Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development (2006). Robinson observes that the majority of the world’s cities are absent from academic maps that chart the rise and fall of the world’s most economically connected cities. Robinson (as well as a number of other authors) has challenged the geography of urban theory, whereby cities in the ‘first world’ are seen as models for the generation of theory and policy, and those in the ‘third world’ are seen as problems to be diagnosed and resolved (Mbembe and Nutall 2004; McFarlane 2006). This hegemony has been challenged by the documentation of cases of knowledge and policy transfer and city-modelling that takes place between cities of the global South (Huang 2008; Bunnell and Das 2010; Chua 2011; Lowry and McCann 2011). Following Robinson, Ananya Roy (2009) has argued that the centre of urban theory must move from Europe and North America to the global South, where the majority of contemporary urbanization is taking place. Roy seeks to start mapping out a new, more worldly geography of urban theory, disrupting existing geographies of core and periphery and instead positing multiple cores and peripheries, including within the global South. It is in this context of questioning the geographies of urban knowledge that I approach this analysis of the representation of the city and of urban knowledge at Expo 2010 and its social, economic and geographical inclusivity.