City as Flux: Interrogating the Changing Nature of Urban Change

Abstract

What do we mean by the changing nature of urban change? First of all, in the 20th and 21st centuries, cities have been changing in different and dramatic ways, whether through grassroots mobilizations, through technological leaps, or through profit-driven speculations. Second, our understanding of how cities change has also been evolving, in particularly through empirical work that challenges the broad-brush universalizations of conventional thinking. The authors of the six selected articles take us through an around-the-world tour of cities and regions that range from Mulhouse in France to Dakar in Senegal to Las Vegas in the United States to Bogota in Colombia and beyond. Each author carefully examines the nature of urban change and how planners, developers, and citizens are either dealing with that change or even shaping it. Together, what the articles suggest is that we need a more fine-grained understanding of the city as flux in order to obtain better theoretical insights as well as urban practices that can better manage and ultimately shape urban change to benefit citizens, especially those who are marginalized.