ABSTRACT
The southern urban critique has instigated renewed scholarly attention to southern cities and placed the south and theory-making more explicitly into urban analyses. This chapter seeks to echo Robinson and A. Roy's point that the southern urban critique is not a singular call, but instead an umbrella term for several not-quite-disparate threads of argument. Demographic arguments about increased urbanization trends or arguments about institutional inequalities across universities, for example, are largely rooted in the deployment of the south as a location, albeit one that is relationally produced. Critiques of northern urban theory based on empirical difference found in the literature have scholarly parallels throughout the social sciences. The chapter argues that the strongest version of the southern urban critique requires a deeper engagement with postcolonial theory and the specific ways colonial relations and rationalities remain deeply embedded in the present.
