The territorial and technological geographies of the planet are being rapidly and profoundly transformed and restructured in the 21st century. A massive surge of plans, visions, and investments is materializing through new connectivity infrastructure and operations of vast, extended transportation and logistical networks, with the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative serving as a prominent example. To scrutinize this context, in this article, we advocate for a shift from infrastructure-led development to infrastructure-led urbanization, emphasizing the urban as the key analytical terrain. We argue that the urban perspective reveals conceptual, geoeconomic, and geopolitical dimensions that are at the core of the transformations brought about by the implementation of global infrastructure. By mobilizing the authors’ urban research experience spanning Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America, and by stressing the vital value of on-the-ground and comparative research, we illustrate the complexities and specificities inherent in these projects. In doing so, we propose a collective dialogue that explores and reorients conceptual and methodological possibilities to capture the complex interplay of geoeconomic and geopolitical forces within what we term ‘global infrastructure-led urbanization’.

Across the different vernaculars of the world's urban majorities, there is renewed bewilderment as to what is going on in the cities in which they reside and frequently self-build. Prices are unaffordable and they are either pushed out or strongly lured away from central locations. Work is increasingly temporary, if available at all, and there is often just too much labour involved to keep lives viably in place. Not only do they look for affordability and new opportunities in increasingly distant suburbs and hinterlands, but for orientations, for ways of reading where things are heading, increasingly hedging their bets across multiple locations and affiliations. Coming together to write this piece from our own multiple orientations, we are eight researchers who, over the past year, joined to consider how variegated trajectories of expansion unsettle the current logic of city-making. We have used the notion of extensions as a way of thinking about operating in the middle of things, as both a reflection of and a way of dealing with this unsettling. An unsettling that disrupts clear designations of points of departure and arrival, movement and settlement, centre and periphery, and time and space

Across the different vernaculars of the world's urban majorities, there is renewed bewilderment as to what is going on in the cities in which they reside and frequently self-build. Prices are unaffordable and they are either pushed out or strongly lured away from central locations. Work is increasingly temporary, if available at all, and there is often just too much labour involved to keep lives viably in place. Not only do they look for affordability and new opportunities at increasingly distant suburbs and hinterlands, but for orientations, for ways of reading where things are heading, increasingly hedging their bets across multiple locations and affiliations. Coming together to write this piece from our own multiple orientations, we are eight researchers who, over the past year, joined to consider how variegated trajectories of expansion unsettle the current logics of city-making. We have used the notion of extensions as a way of thinking about operating in the middle of things, as both a reflection of and a way of dealing with this unsettling. An unsettling that disrupts clear designations of points of departure and arrival, of movement and settlement, of centre and periphery, of time and space.

This article explores the impacts of large-scale infrastructure operations in Buenos Aires. Focussing on neo-extractive and logistical infrastructures in the southern area of Dock Sud, it investigates how these infrastructures urbanise – namely, how they integrate into urban spaces and the socio-spatial and material dynamics they generate. It does so by investigating the relationships between materiality and temporality, highlighting their complex and multifaceted interplay. While adopting a view from below – that is, by analysing the social conflicts experienced by those living in the spaces surrounding these infrastructures – the discussion sheds light on how Dock Sud’s urban materiality is contested through the creation of distinct and often conflicting temporalities. Specifically, the article delves into the socio-material situation of Villa Inflamable shantytown by scrutinising what it terms the politics of ‘mientras tanto’ [meanwhile], showing how residents reversed the state’s and municipality’s promotion of a prolonged condition of waiting to confront their extremely precarious and hazardous urban conditions. It contends that the mientras tanto reveals the fragmented ‘time – space’ of infrastructure, shedding light on its profoundly uneven socio-material dynamics and the related disputes that play out at the level of temporalities. The article argues that Dock Sud can be understood as the manifestation of a flammable city – specifically, the combination of the tireless political action conducted by the residents on the one hand, and the severe environmental conditions that the area suffers on the other.

本文探讨了布宜诺斯艾利斯大规模基础设施运营的影响。我们重点关注 Dock Sud 南部地区的新型采掘和物流基础设施，考察这些基础设施如何城市化，即它们如何融入城市空间，及其产生的社会空间和物质动态。本文通过考察物质性和时间性之间的关联来实现这一目的，并着重凸显二者复杂且多维度的相互作用。本文的讨论采用自下而上的视角 ——即分析居住在这些基础设施周围空间的人们所经历的社会冲突 ——揭示了人们如何通过创造独特且常常相互冲突的时间性，来对 Dock Sud 的城市物质性进行争夺。具体来说，本文通过审视所谓的“mientras tanto”（同时）政治，深入探讨 Villa Inflamable 棚户区的社会物质状况，展示了居民如何扭转联邦直辖区和市政当局推动的长期等待状态，以应对极其不稳定和危险的城市条件。本文认为，mientras tanto 揭示了基础设施碎片化的“时空”，阐明了其极不平衡的社会物质动态以及在时间性层面上发生的相关争议。本文认为，Dock Sud 可被理解为“易燃城市”的具象体现——具体而言，这种体现源于两方面的结合：一方面是当地居民持续不断的政治行动，另一方面则是该区域所承受的严峻环境状况。

This paper lays the ground for a novel discussion on the encounter between José Martí and Antonio Gramsci. It argues that Martí and Gramsci can be profitably and innovatively read together when interrogating the profound “spatial articulations” that animate their political vision. The discussion principally focuses on Martí's concept of Our America and Gramsci's Southern Question. Methodologically, the article deploys a “diachronic tactic” that mobilises a broad body of literature that emerged long after Martí's and Gramsci's lives, particularly considering contributions within Radical Geography and Postcolonial Studies. 

The significance of cities as concentrations of political and economic power can hardly beoverstated. Cities project power on the global stage and are recognized as powerful actorsby others: anchoring revolutions and giving their names to historical epochs and intellectualtraditions (Chicago or Frankfurt) and even phases of economic development. The power of thecity on the historical and global stages makes it even more important to study and grasp theway urban power is conceived, constructed, contested and exercised within and between cities.The premise of the chapter is that cities, urban arenas and urbanization dynamics remaincrucial sources of power and governing resources today, though the perspectives we discussdiverge radically in their claims, and the significance they impart to urban governance.Urban Studies has become a truly global interdisciplinary field, through which perspectiveson power and urban governance have multiplied and diversified. The chapter introduces keytraditions, exploring three distinct and internally differentiated bodies of thought: Marxism,neo-institutionalism and post-colonialism. It begins by discussing prominent traditions withinor related to urban Marxism: state theory, planetary urbanism and horizontalist approaches. Itthen discusses recent institutionalist perspectives, finally considering the growing influence ofpost-colonial perspectives questioning dominant ‘northern’ accounts of the city and urbanity.The chapter concludes by suggesting pathways for future research.

Within the enduring effort to rethink geography from multiple viewpoints and new conceptual categories, critical geographers have recently sought to “decentralize geopolitics” (An, Sharp, and Shaw 2021) by proposing alternative analyses that can tackle the Eurocentric stance that has largely defined the field. This paper contributes to this decentralizing effort by bringing into light, historically, an anti-imperial discourse that took the form of a proper geographical invention. Specifically, the paper analyzes the thought of the Mexican intellectual José Vasconcelos – who acted as Secretary of Public Education in the aftermath of the Revolution (1921-1924) – and argues that Vasconcelos' discourse represents a "subaltern” intervention against the imperial presuppositions of the newborn discipline of geopolitics. The paper contends that Vasconcelos' thought constitutes a conscious attempt, although clearly imbued with "postcolonial" tensions and contradictions, to challenge the "scientific" basis of the emerging geopolitical discourse at that time. By analyzing Vasconcelos' geographical and geo-social imagination through his recuperation of the myth of Atlantis and the idea of Cosmic Race, the paper illuminates an early operation of "subaltern geopolitics" (Sharp 2011) that aimed to contrast the new wave of Western imperialism which, intensively nurtured by socio-environmentalist narratives, strongly defined the turn of twentieth the century.  

The success of the ‘planetary urbanization’ approach is built upon the work of Henri Lefebvre and his understanding of the achievement of a world that is fully articulated through urban relations. However, scholars inspired by this view have normally considered his work and the Euro-American space as presumed starting points from which to observe the progression of planetary urban processes. This article proposes an alternative genealogy of planetary urbanization by looking at—both theoretically and empirically—the global ‘periphery’ of Latin America. Specifically, the article explores the early work of the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano at CELAC between 1966 and 1971. Framed within Dependency Theory, Quijano's reflections share strong similarities and consonances with some of the critical insights that Lefebvre would elaborate only a few years later. The article thus aims to ‘postcolonize’ the planetary urbanization approach by shifting its Euro-American theoretical and empirical centres, opening it up to contributions that—due to geo-cultural hierarchies—have traditionally been overlooked within the main Anglophone debates. In so doing, the article proposes to engage in a plural dialogue in urban studies that combines planetary urbanization with the postcolonial critique.