Operationalizing Southern Urbanism(s) in Uncertain Times

Two decades into this vital epistemic project, southern urban scholarship is shifting focus. While speaking back to the urban studies canon structured much of the early engagement, today, scholars are re-orientating. Responding to emerging directions articulated in Bhan’s 2025 public lecture in Beirut, Lebanon, we call for papers to form part of an Urban Studies special issue which operationalizes the contemporary southern urban project, attentive to the deep uncertainty, interconnectedness, and violence of this moment. This project has had multiple, and at times seemingly contradictory directions, impulses and approaches; and we hope to feature this heterogeneity and productive dissonance in this issue. Importantly, this call does not focus on contributions that theorize the concept of southern urbanism itself; but rather that decisively deploy and engage this orientation – way of seeing, doing, and being – towards a new generation of this epistemic and political project.

We now have two decades of scholarship which explicitly aims to advance the project of southern urbanism. This work has not only foregrounded the realities of “off the map” geographies which defy canonical theorization; it has also sought to shift the canon itself, claiming conceptual spaces and valorizing methodological practices relevant to the majority world experience. The structural successes of this project can be debated. For instance, there is now considerable interest in southern cities, not only as sites of raw data extraction but as contributors to urban theory. In dialogue with debates ranging from decolonial theory to science and technology studies, southern theory has contributed new vocabularies and conceptual frameworks. This expansion is notable. At the same time, much of the urban canon remains relentlessly fixed and defiantly unable to contend with the most pressing and unprecedented challenges faced not only in post-colonial geographies, but the global north as well. Similarly, many practical constraints continue to shape who gets to speak about which subjects and on what terms, with race, institutional affiliation, language and other factors shaping opportunities and access.

Since southern geographies are themselves diverse, both in local experiences and proximity to centers of power, the project of southern urbanism has also taken many forms. Consequently, the substance and politics of this project is neither uniform nor singular. It represents a diversity of gestures and directions, often reflecting regional intellectual histories, imperatives, anxieties, and solidarities – what might be called “southern urbanisms”. Even in this diversity, after two decades, the ecumenical southern orientation, or “disposition”, holds a series of commitments. Most notably, these commitments include the importance of place in theory making, the integration of diverse forms of urban knowledge and expertise (on equal terms), the relationality of power and networks, and the imperative of confronting urgent, real-world issues. The project is multi-faceted, incorporating theory, method, and practice. It is also decisively political – a position to be taken, despite the practical strains, paradoxes, and frictions.

This Urban Studies paper call is a response to Gautam Bhan’s recent lecture and publication. Bhan is the Associate Dean of the Indian Institute of Human Settlements in Bangalore, an anchor of the southern project. He is also a formidable housing rights and queer activist, with political commitments both in and beyond the academy. In 2019, he published a playful piece in Environment and Urbanization entitled Notes on a Southern Urban Practice. In 2025, he published a subsequent piece in Urban Studies: Still Thinking from the South, A Sequel from Beirut. This latter piece was part of the radical and established City Debates series hosted by the Beirut Urban Lab (BUL) and represented the annual Urban Studies lecture, a platform which has been shared over the years with prominent scholars of southern urbanism, such as AbdouMaliq Simone and Jennifer Robinson. The use of the word “still” in the title of the piece reflects an enduring, and indeed revived, commitment to the project of southern urbanism. In the piece he resists “speaking back” to the cannon or meta-theorizing what southern urbanism is or should be. Instead, he offers an intentional reorientation and operationalization.

The piece points to emerging focal points, directions and imperatives which are consolidating at this moment of global polycrisis, accelerated change, and deep uncertainty. Bhan emphasizes “twin impulses” that appear contradictory or divergent, but, indeed, form part of the multiple temporalities that operate within the southern urban project. The first impulse is to slow down and return to deeply grounded work – “doing more, but differently”, neither with the end goal of hyper-particularity or advancing generalizable theory. Rather, the aim is to deepen knowledge about what, why, and how southern cities are experiencing local and global processes. Such an approach lends itself to tentative and provisional claim-making, new vocabularies, and a comfort with disjunctures, frictions, glitches and dead ends. Not only does analytical work contest unhelpful binaries and tropes (for example, north/south or global/local) it can also emancipate scholars from the enduring focus on the failures of northern scholarship and canonical texts, making space for doing, thinking and making otherwise. The second impulse is towards urgent (re)direction of claims and bold propositionality. This speaks to the need (and indeed desire) on the part of southern scholars (and their thought partners) to take advantage of the moment of intense uncertainty, crisis imaginaries, and accelerated geopolitical recomposition to insert concepts and ideas that can circulate quickly and produce impact both within and beyond scholarly spaces. We ask: can operationalising these twin impulses contribute to shoring up what southern urbanism 2.0 is through its use?

In this call, we seek contributions that enact this call for a renewed southern urbanism by offering one or more of the following:

• Deeply grounded, contextualized, and descriptive work: Papers can be rooted in ethnographies of relational places, specific processes, infrastructures or networks, social or ecological more-than- human worlds (or other dynamic entry points into the urban). We are particularly keen to have contributions which engage with the contemporary moment of uncertainty, around under-explored themes and sectors in southern urban debates (for example, religious institutions, food networks, mega-projects, the rise of AI, finance, new forms of urban territory, political and legal contestation and mobilization, etc.).
• Provisional, tentative, and multi-scalar theorization: Papers can generate provisional concepts, vocabularies, or propositions, which have the potential to circulate, connect, refract, compare and repair. We welcome papers that are willing to theorise despite and within uncertainty, rather than waiting for conceptual closure, perfect data, or consensus. We are keen for contributions that undertake provisional theorisation across scale, either through the creation of concepts which have the capacity to mobilize and circulate between southern contexts and landscapes, or through, for instance, the refinement of understandings of planetary change from southern perspectives (for example in relation to the climate crisis, the endurance of authoritarianism, etc.). Rather than focussing on contesting northern frameworks, canons and concepts, we seek pieces that enter into dialogue with other contributions that articulate the southern experience.
• Rapid or propositional interventions and commentaries: Papers can offer bold commentaries and interventions which aim to intervene in urgent, unfolding, and ambivalent contemporary issues. These provocative pieces (conceptual or political/policy interventions), should emerge from sustained engagement with empirical and/or southern theoretical material and are directed towards sites of power and decision-making. These may take the form of commentaries that intervene in critical debates and we welcome less scholarly writing styles for these pieces. However, they may also form part of full length articles (see below options).

We encourage: submissions from scholars based in the global south (working on any geography); co-authored papers by teams working across southern contexts (teams could be composed of scholars working with activists, artists, or professionals); careful attention to the politics of citation and authorship; and diverse and compelling writing styles (which we think is very hard to achieve using LLMs, so please resist this).

We welcome the following types of submissions (see Urban Studies guidelines for more details on each):

• Research articles (6,000-8,500 words)
• Commentaries (4,000-6,000 words)
• Debates (8,000-10,000 words)