Potential Futures For Urban Geography

As Urban Geography marked 45 years, we brought together leading scholars offering provocative reflections on the discipline's present and future through a special debate section. Kevin Ward's introduction situates these debates within the journal's history and asks what urban geography must become. Brandi T. Summers argues that the discipline must urgently confront race, colonialism, and environmental violence, insisting that the margin, where marginalized peoples and places create possibility, must become the center of urban geographic thought. Prince Guma extends this call by examining where African urbanists figure in global urban thought. He exposes how "epistemic centers" and gatekeeping structures systematically marginalize Black and African scholars, and calls for pluralization as a pathway toward epistemic redress. Agnieszka Leszczynski identifies what she calls a methodological tepidness in qualitative urban geography: researchers often fail to specify their analytical techniques or venture beyond familiar methods. She argues for a more experimental and playful approach to methods, particularly as urban geographers grapple with rapid urbanization and technological change. Bas van Heur traces the slow dissolution of urban geography as a coherent discipline, revealing its deep entanglement with planning and urban studies. Together, these essays emphasize that addressing knowledge asymmetries, methodological creativity, and intellectual pluralism remain essential to the discipline's future.