Size matters? Reviewing largeness and affirming smallness in urban research spatial imaginaries

Abstract

Largeness, a latent quality in the spatial imaginaries of critical urban scholars, shapes what is considered valuable urban research. Notions of size are meaningful in inherited practices of delineating sites of inquiry and constructing fundamental urban hierarchies. A predominant focus on bigger cities and major theorisation has overlooked smaller sites and minor approaches in urban human geography. Smallness is explored as a disposition to examine urban places and processes free from the conflations of size and significance, and speculates three potential utilities: a critique of the primacy of largeness; egalitarian validity of urban sites; and diversification of subject and practice.

I Introduction

The 100-year history of urban scholarship has enthroned the city as the preeminent site of inquiry and sovereign of an urban hierarchy. Despite the plurality and heterogeneity of urbanity and urbanisation, and the significant sociospatial transformations unfolding over the last century, most key contributions to global urban studies and critical urban theory have been generated in large metropolises of the global north (e.g. Dear, 2002; Harvey, 1973; Sassen, 1991; Weber, 1958). This geography of urban theory has been extensively critiqued for its methodological and theoretical partiality, generating new entry points for urban research (Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2015; Barnett, 2020; Roy, 2009). By entering the debate through Barnett and Bridge’s (2016) call to critically reflect on how and why ‘the urban’ becomes salient in the first place, this paper contends a further bias exists in urban theory and research practice towards large, larger and largeness.

It is the argument of this paper that sizeism is an intrinsic aspect of scholarly understandings of ‘the urban’, a latent heuristic which delineates conceptual and empirical boundaries. Although not entirely unrelated to quantitative and empirical size, this paper regards size as a relative and qualitative sensibility; thus ‘sizeism’ denotes the disposition towards largeness in researchers’ practices from problematisation to case selection and theorisation, and in wider academic practices ranging from teaching, publication and the generation of policy-facing knowledge. A perception of largeness is inherent in urban scholars’ delineation of what is the urban; a sociospace of many, much or more activities, functions, people, processes and/or relations. Thus, common understandings of urbanity are related to tacit sensibilities of extent and magnitude. In turn, a perception of smallness relegates other sites, processes and realities to the liminal of not-urban-enough, and are overlooked in urban theory and studies.

Two significant effects of a disposition towards largeness are identified. Firstly, the draw to research bigger centres of accumulation results in the pre-eminency of ‘the city’ (an actual place, imagined object, unbounded unit of urbanisation and discursive trope) as the naturalised site of urban inquiry, overshadowing non-city urbanisms and smaller sites, experiences and contributions. Secondly, an imaginary of size creates a semiotic scale of least to most urban, where largeness becomes conflated with significance, and the resulting tendency to generate major theories from ‘major’ sites. These two inclinations in urban scholarship have been similarly observed and critiqued by notable works since the turn of the millennium. New points of departure have changed the where and from where of urban research and theory, particularly through seeking to (1) pluralise the sites of urban inquiry and (2) flatten traditional hierarchies of scale and knowledge production. A prism which contests size as its vantage point may complement these efforts in critical urban theory. After reviewing these debates, the paper proceeds in three main parts, through firstly enunciating largeness and its saliency in spatial imaginaries of the urban, then turning to review the inherited practices of largeness in urban scholarship’s genealogy, before thirdly positing ‘smallness’ as route towards an urban scholarly disposition free from sizeism.

Contesting the Where of urban research

Since debates erupted over what is ‘the urban’, to no single conclusion, critical urban theorists continue to problematise theoretical definitions and reformulate approaches to theorisation by questioning where is the urban; where are its objects, subjects and sites of inquiry; and from where urban knowledge can and should be generated. Contemporary critical urban theorists have called upon critical studies, urban planning and more globalised bodies of urban scholarship to unsettle and diversify their ideas and practices of knowledge production. Inspired by this work in critical urban theory, it is timely to consider how these efforts to reshape urban sites and hierarchies support a reflection on size in shared sensibilities of the urban.

Critical urban scholars have argued it is vital to expand the where of urban theory generation due to urbanity’s increasingly multiple, polymorphic and multi-scalar condition (Brenner and Schmid, 2015; Schmid et al., 2018; Schmid and Streule, 2023; Wheeler, 2002; Roy, 2016). Seeking to understand the urban relationally has been one mode of reconceptualising the site and category of the urban. Assemblage urbanism conceives the city as unorganised and non-stratified, always in the process of (de)formation (Jacobs, 2006; Jones, 2009; McFarlane, 2011; Smith, 2003). It questions the city as a stable territory and closed system and ushers in topological and ANT-based approaches to urban research (Amin, 2007; Amin and Thrift, 2002; Burns et al., 2021). However, assemblage urbanism maintains an enduring focus on the city. Relations meet and become at the city-site, so the mobility, presence and absence of processes are not traced in and across other urbanisms. Approaching the urban through assemblage implicitly sees the city as a more important site than a smaller urbanism, due to the belief that a higher number of relations has a bigger territorial effect (Latour, 2005; Murdoch, 2006). Therefore, the application of assemblage urbanism has continued to privilege the city over the full urban tapestry.

A second prism which sought to change the way we see urbanity and reconceptualise its site is Brenner and Schmid’s (2015) planetary urbanisation. Its main contribution is its rejection of methodological and theoretical cityism through extended urbanisation. This approach appreciates the plurality of urban form and conceptualises relations beyond the concentrated urban. However, its contentious privileging of urban processes and subsuming of all sociospace as urban raises concerns over experience, place-specificity and difference in its tendency towards major theorisation (Davidson and Iveson, 2015; Gillen et al., 2022; Inostroza and Zepp, 2021; Jazeel, 2018; Storper and Scott, 2016). Nevertheless, choice logics of planetary urbanisation have been used in important work which decentres the metropole by animating vantage points and questions from the peripheries, such as suburbs (Keil and Wu, 2022) and military bases (Galindez, 2023).

It is also essential to expand the where of urban research since over-representation of particular places in knowledge-production has significant theoretical and political consequences. This body of critique has advanced important agendas such as ordinary cities (Amin and Graham, 1997; Robinson, 2006), overlooked cities (Nugraha et al., 2023; Ruszczyk et al., 2020), small cities (Bell and Jayne 2006, 2009), intermediate and secondary cities (Cardoso and Meijers, 2016; Chen and Kanna, 2012; Rodríguez-Pose and Griffiths, 2021), peripheries (Gururani, 2020; Reis and Lukas, 2022; Schmid et al., 2018), the global east and southeastern perspectives (Müller, 2020; Yiftachel, 2016, 2020) and subaltern urbanism (Mukhopadhyay et al., 2020; Roy, 2011). Core to these arguments is that urban theory cannot be developed based on a few large, wealthy, over-researched cities at the top of a global hierarchy alone. This hierarchy of places and knowledge normatively and practically narrows the purchase of urban theory (Robinson, 2006), generates universalised narratives that may be highly contested in different places (Jacobs, 2012), and reproduces a desirable and homogenous model of successful urbanism that can limit imaginaries of the future and create local political pressure (Acuto and Pejic, 2021; Barnett and Parnell, 2016; Golubchikov, 2010).

By bringing an awareness to established practices of a spatial hierarchy and a normative ethical-political marginalisation of places and knowledge in the conventional purview of urban scholarship, the above scholars have opposed the common practice of generating major theory from a few large cities in the global north and evened the cartography of knowledge production. However, a significant portion of these agendas remain city-centric in focus and practice (Brenner and Schmid, 2015; Van Meeteren et al., 2016). Researching excentric cities, although it broadens representation, does not include non-city urbanisms and perpetuates the notion of urbanity-as-cityness. Nevertheless, the southern turn more broadly changes the knowledge architecture by opposing the privileging of academic and professional knowledge from hegemonic identities, assumptions and histories, and recentring subjects, voices and experiences that have been excluded from mainstream geographical inquiry (Hawthorne, 2019). Feminist, postcolonial, black and indigenous scholars have created new vantage points and approaches to the urban, engendering different perspectives on urban life and theorisation (Gieseking, 2020; Oswin, 2015, 2018; Simone, 2016).

The 21^st century theoretical debates have extensively and convincingly argued the need for new dispositions and to reject the largest cities as the archetypal territory of urban inquiry. These arguments, outlined above, are reiterated to support the call to critically reflect on our dispositions towards size in urban spatial imaginaries. Despite the effort to relocate the reference points of urban theory and remap its geography of knowledge, a theoretical and empirical bias towards large cities has persisted in critical and global urban studies (Kanai et al., 2018; Wagner and Growe, 2021). Urbanity-as-largeness obfuscates smaller sites, processes and realities which make up the tapestry of urban forms and experiences, equally capable to generate knowledge and opportunities for theorising. This especially matters since most of the global urban population live in small(er) settlements and urbanisms which are not ‘cities’ (Atkinson, 2019; Birch and Wachter, 2011; UN-DESA, 2019). Comprehensive urban theory and robust urban development policy insights cannot be generated from a few over-represented cities, as this knowledge may not be applicable or appropriate for the majority of urban realities. Furthermore, the historically contingent category of the ‘city’ may not be the most productive lens to understand contemporary landscapes and dynamics in the current urban age.

New dispositions in approaching the urban are necessary to de-scale hierarchies of knowledge and validate more empirical, methodological and theoretical sites of inquiry. By critically reflecting on the preference for largeness in the spatial imaginaries of urban scholarship, smallness emerges as being ‘at stake’, enabling new questions to be asked of the urban (Barnett and Bridge, 2016). The aim of the paper is to trace the sensibility of size and a disposition towards largeness in urban research practice, and to explore the vista opened up by smallness.

II The spatial imaginary of largeness

Defining the urban is troublesome. This trouble is well-evidenced and embedded throughout the tradition of urban geography, from morphological definitions of physical form and material artefact (Conzen 1969, 2004), to spatial expressions of wider political and economic processes (Castells, 1983; Harvey, 1992; Lefebvre, 1970), from key nodes in global networks and relations (Brenner and Schmid, 2015; Sassen, 1991), to social organisms, cultural constructs and multiple, uneven, overlapping of realities (Davis, 1990; Park, 1915; Soja, 1989; Zukin, 1995). The trouble lies in the oscillation in understanding between the urban as processes and as site. Urban scholars and experts will vary by which degree they engage with the urban as social and spatial, as virtual and actual (Isin, 2008), as building and dwelling (Sennett, 2019). Many key critical contributions expand on this trouble in defining the urban (Brenner and Schmid, 2014), but contemporary urban studies tend not to stay with the trouble of definition. Faced with the complexity and uncertainty in defining the urban, practitioners will often fall back on commonly shared sensibilities.

Size is an under-articulated quality in common spatial imaginaries of the urban. Spatial imaginaries are collectively held, embodied understandings of space and spatiality that are performed through socio-spatial practices (see Bailly, 1993; Huyssen, 2008; Watkins, 2015). In urban research, practices of problematisation, theorisation and research methods circulate and propagate meanings of the urban and naturalised subjects of inquiry, alongside everyday images, data and language (Millington, 2016; cf. Söderström, 1996). Spatial imaginaries are pragmatic and ordinary, and necessary in framing problems and objects of study. However, once imaginaries are generally treated as true, real or common-sense, this forecloses contestation and alternatives (Watkins, 2015). Spatial imaginaries are closely associated with othering, which evokes a sense of what belongs and what is excluded based on perceived homogeneity and constructed difference (Sharp, 2009) and can normatively prescribe how things should be (Davoudi et al., 2018). Reflecting on common-sense imaginaries of what counts as urban in global and political-economic traditions allows for an examination of epistemic exclusion and naturalised hierarchies in urban studies (McCann et al., 2013; Robinson, 2006).

This paper proposes largeness as a shared quality in scholars’ typical spatial imaginaries of the urban. Largeness is evoked as a lexicon for the dominant understandings of ‘the urban’ as spatially expansive, massive and populous settlements of high density; as concentrated nodes of global relations, patterns and movement; as sites of economic structure, industry, labour and growth; as stages for political action and activism and increasing base of global governance; and as sites of experimentation, influence, creativity and the generation of ‘big ideas’ for future development and human progress. Therefore, the proposed vocabulary of largeness is also intended to be synonymous with bigness, muchness and more.

For example, in practice, scholars attending to the future of urban development, sustainable planning and the global political economy will use ‘actual’ demographic, statistical and functional definitions of places to select spatial and social subjects of urban inquiry. This speaks to an intuition that the city contains more. We consistently return to a territorial sense of urban places having high populations, high concentration of economic and social activity, of cities being large and complex system of systems. Metrics such as population, built density, infrastructure, labour market proportions, attempt to convey the largeness of cities and imply their correlative significance. Mass, extent and agglomeration remain some of the most insisted upon definitions of urbanity (Scott, 2022; Scott and Storper, 2015, 2016).

In popular urban spatial imaginaries, urbanisms are more than their material metrics of size, they also have big meanings. A strand within urban research recognises the city as greater than the sum of its parts, believing the city’s physical largeness creates room for more extent and intensity of affect (Amin and Thrift, 2017; Sennett, 2019). These engagements capture the oft-described bustling, energetic, spectacular, modern qualities and nature of the city. Feelings of abundance, opportunity, thickness and human potential are also present in a sensibility of largeness. Anecdotal and qualitative sensations of this largeness, such as the faster pace of urban life captured by walking speed, can be quantified as a predictor of the size of the urbanism (Bettencourt et al., 2007). Cultural discourses and representations from films, music, art, postcards also convey the thrilling largeness of the city. For example, it is a common Anglophone trope to move from the ‘small town’ to the ‘big city’. Urban places, but principally cities, are seen as exceptional human environments. Therefore, largeness and its associated urbanity, or urbanity and its associated largeness, rests on a feeling of mass and significance.

Territorial and affective largeness are key qualities in urban researchers’ ordinary practice and spatial imaginaries, which maintain and reify a naturalised understanding of urban-as-largeness. In consequence, this common-sense association between largeness and urbanity make cities the most intuitive, naturalised and distinct urbanity. This championing of the ‘city’ as the preeminent site of the urban is evident in the interchangeable use of urban and city in academic and political vernacular, as was the case during proclamations of an Urban Age, urban SDG collaboration and the mirrored turn in scholarship on global urbanism (Lancione and McFarlane, 2021). This is more than a rhetorical issue, it is widely recognised that the majority of urban geographic work centres on the city (Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2015; Bunnell and Maringanti, 2010; Steinführer et al., 2016). Cities are considered major, great, preeminent. Large is also inferred with primacy, substantial, exceptional and meaningful. The semiotic scale of the significance of an urban site or object of study constructed by urban-as-largeness, frames cities as the most undeniably urban site, with two consequences. Firstly, it creates an anxiety and avoidance of researching sites that are smaller than cities, due to being perceived as less urban. Secondly, researching cities and ever-larger sites is desired since they are perceived as more significant, and thus lead to more significant research. The quality of largeness in spatial imaginaries of the urban helps articulate the given desire to generate knowledge predominantly from cities, and mostly from the largest cities, due to their unassailable representation of urbanity and correspondent significance.

Naming and acknowledging largeness in urban spatial imaginaries and research practices is not an attempt at scholastic correction, it offers a vocabulary to critically question how the urban is problematised, and reflect on why we should research the urban, and what we should regard as salient when doing so (Barnett and Bridge, 2016). Since largeness is salient in our problematisations of the urban, smallness is at stake. Largeness is tangible in its effect on delineating what counts as urban and what is good urban research. Having a notion of size in how urbanity is understood creates a scale of degree of urbanity premised on a quantitative ontology of amount or sum of economic relations, people and built environment which is then used as a rationale to rank settlements into a scalar-hierarchy. This has powerful effects in research and policy which results in size being inferred with significance and value. Larger urbanisms are considered more valuable because they have more, and doing research in large places is considered more meaningful, thus, more attractive. Sites, experiences or approaches considered ‘small’ are inferred as less and less worthy of urban research. Understanding size in spatial imaginaries of the urban, and contesting smallness as ontologically equal, will aid the contemporary push in critical urban research towards pluralising sites of inquiry and flattening normative hierarchies.

III Practising largeness

Sizeism, the normative pull towards largeness over smallness, is an inherited disposition and intellectual practice that can be observed in past conceptualisations and proponents of the urban. This section will trace key developments in critical urban scholarship and reflect on the vestige of largeness and its two-fold effect in delimiting ‘the city’ as the object of urban inquiry, and in constructing a normative hierarchy in global urban theorisation and empirics. This review is not a critique, but a recognition of largeness as salient in assumed imaginaries and engagement with the urban. Its identification in urban research performance generates opportunities for other vistas. The following reviews the historical presence of largeness in urban spatial imaginaries and research through territorial(ising) and semiotic practices.

Territorial/ised largeness

Territorial/ised largeness refers to the greater number of functions, processes and characteristics of a city to justify the exceptionality of the urban from other spaces, warranting a distinct sub-discipline, and resulting in a common-sense mainstreaming of city-sites over towns, suburbia and peripheries in critical urban inquiry. The perception of an agglomerative mass of relations and functions are typically mapped and measured in quantitative, empirical, physical, material modes which attempt to territorialise the abstract whole.

The City ¹ announced the arrival of the Chicago School’s urban sociology, where vivid monographs formed generalisable knowledge about urban phenomena from the large, industrialising cities of Chicago, Philadelphia and Atlanta (DuBois, 1899, 1903; Park et al., 1925). An extant inheritance from the Chicago School is Louis Wirth’s (1938) oft-repeated definitional triad of the city as populously large, dense and demographically heterogeneous. Measuring population and demographic analyses continue today as key statistical proxies in planning and governance definitions to represent the distinctive size of the urban condition (UN-DESA, 2019). Wirth’s demographic definition also captures the sentiment that cities have more and muchness (i.e. diversity and identities) in territorialised understandings of largeness.

The second historical reinforcement of territorialised largeness in urban scholarship was the development of a functionalist tradition in defining the urban. Regional science and planning in the 1970s and 1980s especially developed the notion of the city as a large, significant, dense, nodal spatialisation of phenomena (Friedmann, 1986; Friedmann and Wolff, 1982; Weaver, 1978). The relationship between urbanisation and economic development is contested (Fox and Goodfellow, 2016), but during this period of global restructuring, the role of cities as engines of growth and development became an important function to research (Sassen, 1991). Thus, the density, centrality, agglomeration, concentration and volume of activities, usually economic, form the functional tradition of urban definition (Beaverstock et al., 1999; McFarlane, 2016). The view of cities being sites that contain a concentration of large economic networks, of global expansion and complexity, of harbouring capacity for significant innovations are territorial representations of the largeness of cities.

Demographic and functional definitions are often combined, as the coming together of population, infrastructure and function confer the agglomeration and scale associated with the city. For example, Weber (1958) and Jones (1966) list and evaluate the structural components which constitute the city from physical size, population, economic versatility, labour markets and emergent governance systems. National statistics and structural analyses of population, labour market share and administration continue as the most prevalent definitions of the urban in global governance today (UN-DESA, 2019). Since structural understandings of the city view organisation and society as co-produced with urbanisation, this perspective might reinforce the implication that a larger urbanism will generate bigger effects, more relations and greater production. Territorialised practices of largeness see the urban through its topography and role in the material reproduction of the society in which it functions.

Urban scholarship was founded on the historical imaginary that special dynamics and processes happen in large(r) human settlements. Territorialised notions of size are an attempt to manifest this intuitive rationale for the division of space, which coalesce into a sense of urban-as-largeness. Territorialised vistas see the distinctness of urbanity as premised on the largeness of its population and/or economic function, which can lead scholars towards doing research in larger urbanisms, privileging cities over other forms. Ontological and methodological cityism have accumulated in contemporary academic and policy narratives, which see cities as the loci, access point and representative of the whole of urbanity. For example, a recent shift in literature towards global urbanism see cities as the privileged site where urbanisation(s) concentrate and manifest (Lancione and McFarlane, 2021; Zeiderman, 2018). For urban science, seeing the city as a territorially predictable confluence of processes informs the view that cities are fundamentally the same, and interventions repeatable (Batty, 2013; Bettencourt et al., 2007). City-centric understandings of the urban persist in policy and governance narratives, where the city is treated as a global discrete object with exclusive crises (Espey et al., 2023; Parnell and Pieterse, 2016). Visions of future development are primarily shaped in the city (Dixon and Tewdwr-Jones, 2021), ultimately overlooking other, and alternative, urban futures.

The city, as actual place and heuristic device, is the imagined urban container which holds more people, more functions, more processes, thus, is the naturalised site for critical and urban development studies. It perpetuates discipline-wide anxiety of engaging with places with smaller populations, less density and fewer economic functions; perceived to be less urban due to their smaller territorialised size. As a consequence, hybridity, plurality and differentiation are overlooked, sometimes even erased. For example, Sahasranaman and Bettencourt (2019) make the first effort at systematically characterising urbanisation in India comparative to 19^th century Euro–American literature. This work disregards the urban theory generated from actually existing and everyday urban processes in Indian census towns (Samanta, 2014), subaltern urbanisation (Denis et al., 2017) or peripheral urbanisation (Guruani, 2020) which challenge inherited universal accounts of the urban and epistemologies of territorialised largeness. Critical urban scholarship has a perfunctory drive to research undeniably urban cities, premised on territorialising a sense of urban-as-largeness.

Semiotic largeness

Bigger is also considered better. Not only are cities distinguished as distinct and separate to other sociospaces (urban-as-largeness), but are also considered more important locations for the generation of research insights (largeness-as-significance). Largeness plays a part in manifesting a scalar and symbolic hierarchy within the category of urban. There is a qualitative correlation between size and significance, thus a place’s largeness, on the basis of having more, is ranked higher in researchers’ cognitive maps of significance for empirical case selection and value of knowledge generated. Semiotic largeness refers to the larger significance attributed to a place that is perceived as bigger in meaning, affect and influence. It does not strictly relate to a place’s demographic or functional size, since New York would be perceived as symbolically bigger than Jakarta, despite Jakarta being ‘territorially’ larger. Sizeism contributes to the theoretical and empirical privileging in critical urban studies and global development scholarship of the largest, highest-ranking, apex global and major cities.

Seeing cities as extraordinary sociospaces partly derives from a phenomenological quality or feeling of cities being marvellous, unique and significant. Spatial imaginaries of opportunity, vigour, magnitude can be seen through urban theory’s history, from Park’s (1915) and Mumford’s (1938) reverence of the city as the equal to human civilisation, to modern visions of the city as triumphalist vectors for futurity, such as in climate change governance (Bulkeley, 2010; Long and Rice, 2019), sustainable development (Lerpold and Sjöberg, 2021) and urban age narratives (Martinez et al., 2021). The city is a symbol of social order, power and significance. As a synthesis of complexity and meaning, and a whole that is bigger than the sum of its parts, the city is constructed as a locus of imagination pregnant with affect, influence and effect (Amin and Thrift, 2017; Sennett, 2019). A bigger city is presumed to have more power and complexity, and will generate more influence, insight and meaning, which is the semiosis of largeness-as-significance.

An expectation of world-making glorifies the symbolism of cities. For example, a moment of utopian urbanism held the view that reorganising the city was an opportunity to reorganise civilisation. Here it was assumed that the city’s ideals, morality and politics would be adopted in broader sociospatial terms, in all contexts and settings (Amin, 2006; Friedmann; 2000; Pinder, 2002). Semiotic largeness also affords prisms through which to see the city as the structuralist manifestation of large political and economic orders, so to analyse the city would be to analyse global processes (Harvey, 1992; Magnusson, 2013; Merrifield, 2013; Munro, 2023). Seeing the city through its semiotic largeness endows the city as privileged entry point for urban geography and beyond, despite the potential relevance of every kind of urban sociospatial context for developing our understanding of the emerging world of urbanisms. Semiotic largeness encourages the desire to research the largest of cities, since they are assumed to contain more complexity, influence and symbolism.

A city’s territorialised largeness is used as the rationale for mapping and ranking a global hierarchy of cities, such as the enumeration of advanced producer services (Sassen, 1991; Beaverstock et al., 1999). However, as postcolonial theorists critique, additional ideological qualities of modernism and developmentalism are at play in the construction of superiority in this hierarchy (Robinson, 2002; Roy, 2009). An urban hierarchy is well-established through multiple inheritances. Geddes’ (1915) Cities in Evolution and Hall’s (1966) The World Cities developed the notion of global cities, which informed the world cities paradigm, a major field of urban research from the 1980s (see Beaverstock et al., 1999; Friedmann 1986; Knox and Taylor 1995). Its modern formulation, global cities research or world city network analyses, has evolved in response to criticism (Robinson, 2002; Roy, 2009), but there has not been a significant change in the underpinning principle (Derudder and Taylor, 2021; Van Meeteren et al., 2016). It is still considered common-sense in urban research practice to have a ranking of globally connected and economically significant cities, despite positioning urbanisms as linear to each other, and reproducing primary cities as the most important site with ancillary landscapes (Keil, 2020). Aside from generating real-world effects for the planning and development of cities, having an accepted sub-group of elite cities fosters a mode of grand theorisation based on the specific experiences of territorially and semiotically large sites of inquiry.

A notable example of largeness conflated with significance in the history of urban theory is the work of the LA School. Practitioners sought to emulate the Chicago School and place Los Angeles as the emblematic postmodern city, or the capital of the late 20th century (Soja and Scott, 1986). Urban studies needed a new theoretical framework for the myriad variety, volume and pace of contemporary global urban change (Dear, 2002; Dear and Dahmann, 2008; Nicholls, 2011). During this period of global restructuring, LA School proponents demonstrated a fetishization for ground-breaking, grand theorisation. Placing a single global city as the paradigmatic site to generate universal theories on transforming capitalist spatialisation is severely exclusionary of the plural effects in various sociospaces and temporalities, or its resistances. No city can function as a privileged archetype or exemplar relative to others (Amin and Graham, 1997), LA was not a master version of urbanisation which can be known and seen replicated elsewhere. The city was big in the sense it had significant and exclusive insight into new, modern, exciting developments, and the research practices of grand (i.e. large) theorisation. The LA School illustrates a teleological imaginary seeking radical discoveries and ‘breakthrough’ major theories, reproducing cities as the naturalised site and condition for theoretical progress. Semiotic bigness, then, can give rise to major theorisation and universalising teleologies.

The critique of semiotic largeness regarding its theoretical, methodological and political effects mostly echoes what has already been reviewed, including the overwhelming focus on cities in urban studies (Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2015; Bunnell and Maringanti, 2010), urban theory being predominantly generated from the apex of a constructed global hierarchy (Robinson, 2002; Roy, 2009), the obfuscation of the majority of urban forms and functions which are considered ‘lower-ranking’ (Bell and Jayne, 2009), and reinforcing hegemonic teleologies as aspirational (McCann et al., 2013). Semiotic largeness restricts research engagement to similar sites, as can be seen in recent comparative studies where there is a tendency to compare similar (large) cities, even though the approach encourages thinking through the fullness of urban territories (Robinson, 2022). Major theory learns from large places and other large accounts, whereas smaller sites and subjects of inquiry are perceived as lesser value, thus less worthy to research and less likely to contribute to learning and theory. Smaller urbanisms and planes of inquiry are subject to universalising accounts from larger urbanisms and theories, continuously aspiring and adapting to a body of knowledge that does not represent smaller experiences. Generally, urban theory and policy are poorer in purchase and narration for not learning from the full tapestry of urbanity.

IV Smallness: Urban disposition without sizeism

It can be inferred that approaching the urban through smallness would be to include more empirically ‘small’ urbanisms (e.g. with populations less than 500,000, 100,000 or 50,000) or places that have not been extensively researched. Although this would be entirely plausible and constructive work, this paper explores smallness as an urban disposition as if size was not salient in our imaginary of the urban, to truly expand the where of critical urban studies and theory-generation. For this reason, smallness is not positioned as a correction to, or replacement for, largeness. If sizeism, including a prioritisation of smallness, were to remain salient as an organising and hierarchising principle of urbanity, ontological inequities would persist between different contributions to knowledge. An urban disposition without sizeism supports urban research that does not reify the implied significance of knowledge based on the size of place, contributing to efforts to pluralise sites and flatten hierarchies of critical urban knowledge.

An attention to smallness is by no means absent within existing urban scholarship. As the disposition towards largeness has disproportionately influenced methodological, political and normative practices in urban research, there have been ongoing challenges to this preference for mass and significance, and (re)orientations towards smallness and its vista. The most influential proponent of this point of departure would be Jane Jacobs’ (1961) counter to hegemonic, big visions of how the city ought to be and large-scale modernist planning, through attending to the smaller but equally important lived realities in neighbourhoods, buildings and on sidewalks. Her attention to smallness offered refreshed insights into how cities function and evolve, revealing the importance of social capital and multi-use design to oppose the dominant abstracting model of planning. Jacobs’ perspective continues in the practice of urban planners and activists who uphold minor, participatory and human-centred methods in urban development.

There has also been a historically minor but currently growing tradition of researching urbanity in territorially and semiotically smaller sociospaces to resist the canonical primacy of the largest cities, evidenced by the attention to secondary cities (Chen and Kanna, 2012; Lynd and Lynd, 1929) small cities (Bell and Jayne, 2006; Ocejo et al., 2020) and small- and medium-sized towns (Donaldson, 2023; Rondinelli, 1983; Steinführer et al., 2016). Such contributions expand understandings of diverse urban modalities, illustrate the effects, replication or resistance of global urban processes beyond archetypal global cities, and appreciate the role of these places in generating meanings and functions of urbanity.

Urban scholars in planning, global development and critical studies have asked normatively large questions of the urban, thus smallness could capture contemporary works with ontologically and methodologically ‘smaller’ entry points, such as views from the periphery (Keil, 2020; Mukhopadhyay, 2020), neighbourhoods and scales of belonging (Clayton, 2012; Rishbeth et al., 2018), and ways of seeing from ethnography, flâneur and the everyday (Ruddick et al., 2018; Simone and Pieterse, 2017). Smaller entry points afford openings in vistas, methods and insight which resist generalisable models, assert local context and lived experience, and produce valuable knowledge for urban policy and planning. Urban theorists might also draw from a wider body of work that has renewed points of departure by engaging with questions of size; for example, an architecture of bigness (Koolhaas, 1997), irregular shapes (Law, 2004), the advocacy of small is beautiful (Schumacher, 1973), and the geographies of big and little things (Jacobs, 2006; Thrift, 2000).

Parallels might be drawn between the two measures of dimension: size and scale. However, unlike size, scale has been critically interrogated, moving it away from being neutral, Euclidean and territorially bounded, towards an epistemological device with material effects (Brenner, 2001; Howitt, 1998; Jones, 1998; MacKinnon, 2011; Marston, 2000; Marston and Smith, 2001). Although its conflations with power have been thoroughly problematised, its manifestations in practice remain because of its saliency in urban imaginaries, experiences and meanings (Arribas-Bel and Fleischmann, 2022; Collinge, 2006; Davoudi and Brooks, 2021; Kärrholm et al., 2023; Linder, 2022; Paasi, 2004). Thus, learning from the scale debates, smallness is not a call to ‘abandon size’ since size will remain in practitioners’ imaginaries of the urban. However, approaching the urban through smallness is a flat disposition that permits an engagement with urban sites and processes without imposing predetermined axiomatic analytics or causal organisation (Jones et al., 2007; Marston et al., 2005; Springer, 2014; Woodward et al., 2012; see also Schatzki, 2002, 2019, Ash, 2020). Therefore, it does not see sites as less or more urban.

Smallness has no definition relating to absolute size, there are no demographic, economic, cultural or geographical features that objectively qualify as ‘small’. Smallness is relative and when employed as an approach to urban inquiry, it values a processual and relational way of thinking. Size is a qualitative dimension in spatial imaginaries, and so largeness and smallness have a degree of anthropometric salience that cannot be fully captured in exact definitions. Smallness and largeness are vocabularies that can slide between differently sized masses of networked processes and bundles, permitting engagement with any place, anywhere, in discussions of the urban. The primary contribution of smallness as an approach to urban inquiry is to provide a nomenclature that forestalls sizeism, disrupts the common-sense sites of inquiry and flattens urban research hierarchies – consequently, being small does not mean being less. No settlement type is layered above another; thus, every site is equal and valid in its contribution to urban theory-generation. Three reflections will briefly speculate what smallness might mean for research practices. First, it is a way to mobilise a critique of the primacy of largeness; secondly it offers a flat and egalitarian approach to urban research; and thirdly, it is a means to enrich research subjects and ways of generating theory.

Critical awareness and/or provocation to Largeness

Earlier sections demonstrate the prevalence of largeness in historical intellectual inheritances, spatial imaginaries and practices of delineating and hierarchising the urban. Naming the saliency of size(ism) in global and critical urban scholarship can further the urban debates seeking to flatten hierarchies, diversify sites and subjects of inquiry and stay with the trouble of defining the urban. It offers a vocabulary for reflecting on size across urban research practices.

Largeness can be critiqued for its exclusionary practices of smaller urbanisms which are imagined to be less urban, thus less significant for practical research and theory-generation in critical and urban development studies. These predominantly overlooked sites are subject to the universalising narratives generated from domineering urbanisms and theories. Neglecting smaller sites generally weakens universal urban theory since it may be highly contested in under-researched non-big spaces (Jacobs, 2012), such as financialisation in secondary cities (Price, 2020) or sustainable development frameworks in local conurbation communities (González et al., 2023). Critiquing sizeism may subvert the devaluation of alterity in urban forms and experiences, undermining an othering gaze where places are seen as deviant, anomalous, failed, or problems to be resolved (Bell and Jayne, 2009). Challenging the correlation between size and degree of significance reduces the homogenising, universalising and domineering effects of big theories generated at elite sites. For example, ‘non-conforming’ phenomena of de-urbanisation and urbanisation without growth are negatively connotated due to imaginaries of largeness. An urbanism that decreases in size is assumed to be losing significance, while an urbanism that expands spatially without corresponding growth in function or importance, are treated as deviant and critical development policy problems rather than appreciated as new forms and mode of the urban (Fay and Opal, 2000; Potts, 1995). An awareness of largeness might elucidate tensions in taken-for-granted practices and epistemological devices, reinforce current critiques, and possibly mobilise new critiques.

Regardless, ‘doing smallness’ is ultimately a reflexive act by a practitioner. It is a tool to assess whether or how size (ism) is reflected in urban empirical analysis and theorisation. This paper does not seek to correct or subvert the disposition towards largeness, rather, this paper seeks to clarify how largeness is salient in questions of what and why it is important to know about the urban (Barnett and Bridge, 2016). This has not been a task of defamiliarisation, but rather one of familiarisation, of becoming acquainted with collectively held imaginaries and understandings of the urban and why it matters. Attending to smallness is a means to reflect on one’s spatial imaginaries when encountering a site. It is a means to reflect on positionality, on how personal experiences imbue our sensibility of what is the urban. Similarly, in the context of research practice, doing smallness allows for reflection on how a research subject or focus may depend on one’s first-hand experiences and proximate discourses, themselves linked to one’s entanglement within academic reading, publishing and gatherings. Normatively, urban scholars interested in development, political economy and critical theorisations ask large questions of the urban and are macro in their orientation. However, attending to smallness leverages opportunities to ask dispositional questions of ourselves and our practices that, while seemingly small, can potentially have big effects. A reflexive awareness of our urban spatial imaginaries, and what is salient in our discussions of the urban, can help us to reflect on why an issue is considered important to research, in a manner that moves beyond a simple proportional representation of a process and its physical or empirical size.

Approaching the urban through smallness

Smallness is an urban disposition detached from sizeism. This enables the equalising and validating of all sites and phenomena that contain some element, process or effect of urbanity. A city’s largeness compared to a town’s does not signify that a city is more urban than a town, nor a town less urban than a city. De-scaling urban theory from its assumptions of size-as-significance evens the cartography of knowledge production in urban research to treat every urban process, effect and site which assembles urban relations as having equal ontological status. Smallness is a flat, processual and relational understanding of the urban meaning all sociospace evidence presences or absences of urban processes, making it visible and observable to urban scholars. This abandoning of predetermined typologies and boundaries equalises the potential for manifold sites to contribute to knowledge equitably, stays with the trouble of defining the urban, and engenders contextualised and historically contingent contributions to urban theory.

This legitimisation of more and varied urban sites to analyse and build theory opens urban work to contestation, mobility and a geography which comes in different shapes and sizes. This broadening of inquiry can be generative through researching different urban experiences, governance and histories of urbanisation. Responding to new contexts leads to new knowledge and theories, innovation of methodologies and approaches, and greater representation and participation in shaping urban discourse and policy. Urban scholarship stands to be enriched by including urbanisms that have historically been dismissed or overlooked, new theoretical and empirical material can be found in the plurality of small urbanisms’ infrastructure, culture, economies, built environment, planning, development politics and political ecologies. Smallness may be found to be qualitatively different to the condition of largeness, or illuminate a greater range of sociospatial scaling effects. Approaching the urban through a small disposition may revitalise and reconsider analyses of space and urbanisation, as new(er) vistas have done before.

Small subjects and doing research

Predominantly attending to largeness within urban research has unintentionally led urban scholars and theorists to overlook many sites of inquiry, their size and imagined degree of urbanity and significance responsible for their relative invisibility. Diversifying the urban site of inquiry is important because actually existing urbanity is becoming more plural, multiple and mobile (Brenner and Schmid, 2015). A preference for largeness in case selection and mode of theorising obscures important questions of how global urban processes, phenomena and adaptation to contemporary crises take shape and mobilise in the full spectrum of urbanism across the globe, foreclosing opportunities to enrich critical urban theory and represent diversity in future urban development. Attending to smallness better represents the sociospaces that make up the majority of the global urban, and capture urbanity’s multiple nature. The flattening of urban space, relations and effects validates multiple sites, objects and subjects of research, and supports new(er) ways of doing urban research.

First, smallness enables engagement with sociospaces that are urban but are not cities, or places that have been overshadowed by cities. Urbanisms which are generally overlooked in urban studies are towns, villages and the peri-urban, although this is changing in critical urban planning (Agergaard et al., 2021; Brown, 2024; Follmann, 2022). Historically, suburbia, satellites, conurbations and metropolitan regions have been relegated as secondary to the city centre or popular cityscape, despite their stories, histories and conditions being important in understanding the urban (e.g. Maspero, 1994). Smallness does draw our attention to historically marginalised and othered urban sites that were not ‘big’ enough, and although it can be and is invoked to engage with these overlooked spaces, theorising about smallness would still see through territorial and semiotic hierarchies of knowledge. Thus, smallness is a prism with a different knowledge architecture to avoid superficial ‘representation’ of smallness and reification of largeness. Any settlement with urban characteristics, processes or effects should contribute to knowledge, forsaking doubt or anxiety on being urban ‘enough’. This draws our attention to the contribution from relational urbanisms such as census towns (Pradhan, 2017), the peri-urban and desakota (McGee, 1991), peripheries and subaltern urbanism, camp formations (Picker and Pasquetti, 2015), and temporary and informal settlements (Ding, 2022; Leitner and Sheppard, 2018).

Secondly, smallness can attend to relative smaller parts of the whole to reveal multi-level processes, practices and events of the urban, or allow for a rich account of an urban subject. For example, prior to Magnusson’s (2013) popular prompt to see like a city, earlier work had demonstrated that the particular, peripheral and small site of Clayoquot Sound also revealed manifest global processes and political order (Magnusson and Shaw, 2003). Similarly, smallness might also attend to a smaller physical or social site within an urbanism which manifests struggle, order, expectations and effects, such as city-making through popular rhetoric (Cavalcanti, 2021) or monuments (Nielsen, 2021). Small subjects and sites provide heterogeneity in thinking and approach, offering non-totalising and textured conceptual and empirical contributions, particularly relevant to resisting monolithic urban theory and development. Small research can be well-situated, through flatness of sites and objects, to follow an urban process, concept or theme across and through various sociospaces, to expand understanding of urban relations and mobility, for example, urban energy transitions taking place and differing in the rural (Naumann and Rudolph, 2020) or smart city implementation in remote communities (Spicer et al., 2021). Smallness will likely find a companion in qualitative, ethnographic and everyday urban research, where a minor act of walking can be appreciated as a mode of experiencing the urban, revealing choreography, rhythm and encounter in developing a sense of urban place (Matos Wunderlich, 2008; Van Eck and Pijpers, 2017). It is also worth remembering that largeness and smallness also exist in the imaginaries of practitioners and policymakers, thus a critique of sizeism could be extended to review biases and effects in planning and governance sites.

Thirdly, smallness may relate to growing discussions on how to do urban research differently, including innovations in modes of theorising (Lancione and McFarlane, 2021; Simone et al., 2023; Simone and Pieterse, 2017). Typical practices of largeness in urban research have tended to pursue major theorisation from major (cf. exceptional, paradigmatic, epochal) case studies, and theory perceived as being on top of a hierarchy ordering what is below (Roy, 2009). Since largeness is named as an important quality of the pragmatic problematisation of the urban, and smallness encourages self-reflexive awareness in doing research, it may lend itself to vocabularies that explore how urban knowledge is produced, one’s role in it, and reorienting practice (Thieme, 2024). Smallness may relate especially to dialectical ways of theorising that are not highly abstracted and disconnected from urban realities such as theorising from the ground up (Wolfe, 2020), embodied politics and activism (Lancione, 2019), everyday urbanism (Pieterse, 2008; Simone, 2017), inductive and casuistic case-based reasoning (Barnett, 2020; Duminy et al., 2014; Robinson, 2016, 2022), countertopographies (Katz, 2021), phronetic social science (Flyvbjerg, 2001), relational comparison (Hart, 2018), and middle-range theorising (Leitner et al., 2020). Smallness is an opening which fits into wider and more complete articulations of attending to nature, phenomenology, performativity, experience, the micro and maintenance. A small disposition encourages place-based, phenomenological and pragmatic knowledge in global urban development (Duminy and Parnell, 2020).

V Conclusion

Largeness, the disposition towards mass and significance, is salient in urban scholars’ spatial imaginaries and practices of distinguishing and ordering urbanity. This enunciation of latent dispositions towards the urban is not an exposé of a ‘fault’ to be corrected. Rather, it develops our affective notion of size and recognises what is at stake through our urban spatial imaginaries and conceptualisations (Barnett and Bridge, 2016). The pre-eminence of the city-site, a bias for researching the biggest cities and a tendency towards major theorisation in critical urban studies are manifestations of territorial(ising) and semiotic practices of largeness that can be observed through urban scholarship’s intellectual genealogy.

Important urban theoretical debates have argued for the need to change the where of urban research, to pluralise sites of urban inquiry and flatten hierarchies of knowledge production. Smallness offers a point of departure that can help urban scholars navigate new cartographies of urban research. Urbanity-as-largeness and largeness-as-significance have relegated small sites, processes, subjects and research practices to the liminal; thus, smallness, as an approach to urban inquiry, contests sizeism and the effects of largeness through a flat non-hierarchal disposition. This vista may enable new questions to be asked of the urban, validates every size of urbanism as ontologically and epistemologically equal, and it draws our attention to plural and potentially novel sites and subjects of inquiry. This vista will encourage urban scholars to cultivate a reflexive criticality towards their spatial imaginaries in support of the agenda to change the nature and practice of urban theory-generation.