What Is the “South” in Southern City? An epilogue

The chapter summarises the relevant theoretical issues at stake in the investigation of the “Southern City,” putting stress on the fact that a Southern City is a site of conflict and uprising, of a wide and heterogeneous range of social struggles. Such movements, uprisings, and changing social behaviours outside of the West have often anticipated and spurred analogous mobilisations in the so-called Global North, in a way that reshuffles the relations between centre and periphery. The discussion herewith is a dialogue of a genealogical account of current uses of terms like South and global South in the context of notions as the Third World and the Tricontinental, and above all, focusing on Gramsci’s writing on the Southern Question. The chapter highlights, on the one hand, the international dimension of the Southern Question, while on the other hand pays attention to the displacement of the margins toward the centre, which turns the Southern Question into a global one. The scalarity of urbanism arising out of colonialism and its dramatic transformations engendered by global processes of the last decades go beyond the vexed notion of the global city resting on the vehicles of financialisation, logistics, and platformisation, leading to the emergence of planetary urbanisation. Far from being a homogenising process that levels spatial differences, planetary urbanisation provides a framework to analyse the multifarious ways in which the Southern City often anticipates and drives metropolitan developments at the global level.