Roger Keil

This collection of essays on ‘the city as a Southern Question’ is a tremendous trove of diverse approaches that engage both Gramsci’s original text on the question and a broad variety of empirical,...

This response revisits and extends the concept of crisis urbanism, arguing that contemporary crises are not external shocks impacting cities but are increasingly produced, reproduced, governed, and contested in processes of urbanization itself. Building on our original intervention, we conceptualize crisis as an ongoing and relational urban process rather than an exceptional or temporary disruption. Through the lens of crisis urbanism, overlapping phenomena such as climate change, housing precarity, infrastructural decline, and public health emergencies are understood as interconnected and mutually constitutive formations. Responding to the commentaries, we clarify the value of poly- and perma-crisis as analytical frameworks for understanding how crises interact across temporal, spatial, political, and epistemological dimensions. While engaging critiques concerning political imagination, historical specificity, relational harm, repair, and scale, we maintain that cities are not merely sites of crisis management but also key arenas where crisis knowledge, politics, and alternatives are produced. Rather than offering a closed framework, crisis urbanism is presented as an evolving diagnostic and methodological orientation for analysing the entangled crisis formations that increasingly shape contemporary urban life.

In diesem semi-autobiografischen Essay beschäftigen wir uns mit einem Schlüsseltext unseres kürzlich verstorbenen Freundes und Kollegen Klaus Ronneberger: „Container des 21. Jahrhunderts“ aus dem Jahr 2000. Wir erläutern die geschichtete wissenschaftliche und politische Arbeitsmethode Ronnebergers, seine erstaunliche Fähigkeit, Tendenzen der Verstädterung vor Ort in Frankfurt, aber auch in der Welt zu analytischen Texten zu verdichten und in schwierigen Zeiten politische Perspektiven aus dieser Analyse herauszulösen. Wir enden den Aufsatz mit einer Widmung von Ronnebergers umsichtiger Vision für die Zukunft des Städtischen und konfrontieren seine Imagination mit den erheblichen Verwerfungen, die die städtische Welt im ersten Viertel des 21. Jahrhunderts erfahren hat.

Situated in interdisciplinary literatures on climate urbanism and future making, this article examines the multi-sited case of climate-corporate futuring in contemporary global urban climate governance. Drawing on a dataset of five workshops on climate resilience organized by two globally facing urban think tanks, the article analyzes critically the contingent and frustrated process by which global in urban climate governance sought to construct “best practice” and manufacture climate commonsense for the world of cities. Such a multi-sited endeavor of co-producing consensus across space is argued to be a methodological and defensive maneuver as professionals seek to adapt to, and capitalize on, climate-changing urban futures. Fleshing out such authoritative geographies of climate knowledge in interurban space reveals the process by which liberal-corporate alliances dominant in transnational climate networks seek to foreclose, from the inside out, more just urban climate futures. They do so by operating across and beyond cities, in stark contrast to extant research that remains trained on the city. It reveals, ultimately, the spatial and institutionalized consolidation of a particular splice of elite financialized coastal urbanism made to stand in for the 21st-century world of cities.

In 2023-2024, the Ontario government proposed dissolving Peel Region, a two-tier governance structure serving one of Canada’s most diverse and rapidly urbanizing suburban areas. While framed as technocratic restructuring, the initiative was underpinned by political calculation and populist appeals to local autonomy, revealing deeper tensions in how territory, governance and social service delivery are imagined and politicized. Approaching territory as a relational and contested construct—an active force in decision-making and a site of social relations imbued with meaning—the article critically examines the political stage surrounding the proposed dissolution and foregrounds how a network of non-profit social service providers, the Metamorphosis Network of Peel, became a key territorial actor resisting top-down reforms. Although the dissolution plan was ultimately abandoned, it exposed the fragility of state-led governance and opened space for alternative imaginaries and re-territorialization grounded in networks of care infrastructure and embedded forms of expertise. Tracing how Metamorphosis mobilized place-based advocacy and service-oriented networks, we argue that this coordinated response, while not municipalist in a classical or insurgent sense, reflects an incipient form of regionalist praxis that we call here “social service regionalism.” The Peel case contributes to international debates on re-territorialization by advancing a processual, post-sovereigntist account of spatial politics. It illustrates how regional governance is recalibrated in practice not through bureaucratic engineering but through polycentric spatial politics and embedded networks more attuned to local realities.

This article argues that the current advance of global crises necessitates new thinking on how the urban intersects with crisis. We develop four overlapping modalities for theorizing how multiple and deepening crises are entwined with urbanism and are generative of a conjuncture we approach as crisis urbanism : chrono-politics of crisis urbanism, spatial-politics of crisis urbanism, statal-politics of crisis urbanism, and the epistemological politics of crisis urbanism . The theoretical framing of these modalities sheds light on the interlinking and enduring character of crisis urbanism and offers a better understanding of poly- and perma-crises associated with the urban way of life and the political geographies these are generating, including, dialectically, the turn to reparative urbanism to address harms within the city. Crisis is understood as not (yet) enveloping urbanism but rather as an ever-present process within urbanization. Crisis urbanism is, then, the name we give to this process, but it is also a method: a means of analysing an always politically constructed and dialectically composed process, one that is relational and ongoing. In conclusion, the article reflects on the prospects of transformative reparative politics within and beyond the current urban conjuncture.