Urban studies unbound : postmillennial spaces of theory

Each of the urban monographs discussed in this book draws on one or more theorizations of the urban that have been in play since the turn of the Millennium. To contextualize the monographs, in this chapter we provide a brief overview of this theoretical landscape – an intellectual cartography of the current state of critical urban theory. In one way or another, the theoretical contributions to be discussed below each depart from a predominantly anglo-phone orthodoxy that dominated critical urban theory at the turn of the century: urban political economy. Before turning our attention to transformations in the field of critical urban studies over the past two decades, we provide a brief sketch of the state of the field at the turn of the Millennium, which is taken here as an inflection point of sort despite some important strands of continuity. This represents a point of departure for the critiques and new lines of scholarship that have reshaped the field in the past two decades – the terrain explored in Urban Studies Inside/Out.