Urban geography II: Crisis-thinking and critical urbanism

Abstract

Crisis-thinking has become increasingly central to critical urban thought and practice. In this report, I reflect on what the proliferation of ‘crisis-thinking’ might do to how the urban is conceived, researched, and politicised. What might it enable, and what might it make us less able to see and do? What might the growth of crisis-thinking, and in particular of polycrisis-thinking, do to how we see urban possibility? I close with a reflection on what it might mean to imagine a critical urbanism without crisis-thinking.

Introduction

In 2010, Stuart Hall and Doreen Massey met to discuss the current crisis. The crisis of neoliberalism, of how ideologies and logics of financial capital and marketisation were riding roughshod over democracy and becoming installed as the common sense even in the wake of the financial crisis. While financial capital was central to this crisis, they went on to discuss how Hall’s Gramscian conjunctural analysis demonstrated that the crisis was at once ideological, political, cultural, and economic.

While the ‘complex articulations of different social forces’, as Hall put it (2010: 63) was hegemonic, structuring what Massey called ‘the framework within which we think’ (p62), this hegemony was nonetheless partial and contestable. There were alternatives in play. At the end of the conversation, for example, Massey pointed to the environmental movement. A movement, she argued, that was shifting the conversation from ‘a’ crisis to ‘a multiplicity of crises – financial, oil, and climate change crises’ (Hall and Massey, 2010: 70; my emphasis). This is a different way of thinking about crisis, she continued, because in thinking about multiple crises it calls forth unlikely alliances, including across social movements, trade unions, small businesses, manufacturing and policy.

There are two themes from this conversation between Hall and Massey that I interrogate in this reflection on crisis and urban geography. First is the sense that the possible emerges fundamentally as a relation to crisis. It is in this relation that we find the seeds of change, in that act of naming, analysing, and critiquing crisis. I will work with but also question this position. The second is the shift from ‘a’ crisis to a ‘multiplicity’ of crises. In the almost two decades since this conversation, this shift has become all the more central to how we think about crisis, and certainly to urban crisis. What this shift does to the first theme – how we think the possible in urban research – is an important question.

The term ‘crisis’ has become increasingly central to critical urban thought. In a 2025 forum in Geographica Helvetica, Hanna Hilbrandt and Julie Ren reflect on the ‘ubiquity of world crises…in health, climate, economy, finance, war, and energy’. In another collection, Mark Davidson and Ross Beveridge et al. (2025) introduce a special issue in Dialogues in Urban Research examining the multiplicity of crises currently unfolding in cities, increasingly captured through the rise of terms like ‘polycrisis’. In a recent paper, Beveridge et al. (2025: 2) depart from the position that ‘we live in an age of urban crisis’, identifying ‘crisis urbanism’ as a way of understanding the current conjuncture as ‘an emergent social-political situation, shaped and conditioned by crisis discourse, arising from the interweaving and intensification of crises with urban ways of life’:

“If the urban and crisis have always been closely linked, current times suggest that we have entered a new conjuncture where interlocking polycrises (of climate, pandemic, politics, economy, social life) are engendering a permacrisis of political stasis and ‘hyperpolitics’ (Jäger, 2023), realigning and recalibrating asynchronous temporalities of risks and impacts, growing wealth and dispossession, fragmenting and homogenising urban space.”

These interventions add to the chorus of critical urban research diagnosing a time of multiple crises, often articulated through inter-linked terms like ‘polycrisis’, ‘metacrisis’, and ‘permacrisis’ (e.g. Dimitrakou and Ren, 2025; Dorling, 2025; Fields and Hodkinson, 2018; Harb, 2025; Moore, 2015; Tooze, 2022; Weaver, 2017, 2025). As several urban scholars have noted, in addition to analysing actually existing crises, the proliferation of crisis-thinking has its own epistemic, methodological and political agency and consequences (e.g. Hilbrandt and Ren, 2025; Temenos, 2025).

In this report, I reflect on that agency and its potential consequences. The question I want to pose is: what might crisis-thinking be doing to how we think about, research and politicise the urban? What might it enable – and what might it make us less able to see and do? What does the shift from crisis to multiple crises do to how we think the possible? And, notwithstanding the very real nature of multiple, overlapping and profoundly uneven crises, what might it mean to imagine a critical urbanism without crisis-thinking?

Crisis-thinking

There is nothing new in talk of crisis in critical research. Indeed, the terms ‘crisis’ and ‘critical’ are themselves entangled by a shared etymological root in the Greek krínō, to judge or decide. While they are distinct terms with different meanings and roles in urban research, they also share a structure of thought in that both depend on a diagnosis and a response that seeks a different and better direction.

Across a disparate history and body of work in the tradition of critical urban thought, widely defined, there is recurring return to crisis as both endemic to the urban and as an event within it. Crisis has been approached as endemic to the ways in which capitalist urbanization operates, including in its demands for surplus capital, class inequality, and uneven development and how they play out across spatial scales including the city (e.g. Harvey, 1982, 2012; Smith, 1996). There is a history of urban feminist scholarship examining crises of urban labour, reproduction, mobility, health, and environment (e.g. Bassam, 2025; Castán Broto, 2024). There is, too, a long history of intellectual-activist use of the term ‘crisis’ in the city. Consider, as just one example, the US magazine, The Crisis, founded in 1910 by W.E.B. Du Bois and others, exploring the conditions, struggles, politics and culture of Black American life.

More broadly, crisis-thinking was a recurring feature of 20^th century public and intellectual debate, with different relations to the urban over time (Beveridge et al., 2025; Finn, 2026). In his classic Critique and Crisis, historian Reinhart Kosselleck (1959) positioned crisis as constitutive of Enlightenment Europe and suggested that this continued into the present. For Kosselleck, the evident fact that moral public demands could never be satisfied by political authority meant there was inevitably a continual questioning of the order of things and a failure to deliver in response. This, he suggested, produced a structural and permanent crisis of varying levels of intensity over time. In this reading, crisis is not necessarily a bad thing. It is a moment of judgement and decision about the existing order, where non-decision is itself seen as illegitimate (as in the Greek term krisis).

We find a similar notion of crisis in Ruth Wilson Gillmore’s (2007) Golden Gulag and (2022) Abolition Geographies, where crises are neither necessarily ‘good’ or ‘bad’, nor are they necessarily enabling or incapacitating. Instead, they are moments when, following Hall and Gramsci, dominant social formations cannot be reproduced in the current social relations and so new conditions and processes come into play, including in the case Gillmore's arguments new forms of carceral expansion or abolitionist struggle (Hall and Schwarz, 1985; Hall et al., 2026 [1978]). Of course, Gillmore shows how crises often end up being used to service dominant forms of power and to reproduce often profound social damage. They emerge as highly uneven and differentiated moments shaped by historical social and racial logics, institutions and political economies and policed through profoundly unequal relations of power, including violence if necessary.

More generally, across the 20^th century, even where the term ‘crisis’ was not explicitly used, crisis-thinking repeatedly emerged in intellectual and public debate. This is hardly surprising given the historical context of world wars, the rise of fascism, a global influenza pandemic, the depression, the Holocaust, the Cold War, the existential threat of nuclear war, huge transformations in capitalism including the upheavals of de-industrialisation, contestations over colonialism and imperialism, the decline of powerful institutions like Christianity, deepening inequalities including in relation to the civil rights movement and apartheid, the rise of postmodernity, the 1970s oil shock and the role it played in catalysing neoliberalism, and more. The work of some of the century’s most influential thinkers – Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno, Jurgen Habermas, Elias Canetti, and Max Weber, to name just a few – even if they were not necessarily frequently using the term ‘crisis’, was rooted in a profound sense that transformations in capital, culture, and political authority continually produce crises of different kinds.

More recently, the term ‘polycrisis’ has become a widely used term to capture the overlapping and inter-related nature of crises. The term goes back three decades to Edgar Morin and Anne-Brigitte Kern’s 1993 book Terre-Patrie (Homeland Earth), published in French and then in English in 1999 as Homeland Earth: A Manifesto for the New Millenium. Morin and Kern argued that the complex interaction of a set of crises – post-Cold War geopolitical transformation, deepening globalisation and economic shifts, and ecological stresses – should be thought and analysed together rather than in isolation. If modern thought tended to isolate the treatment of social and environmental issues, the world, they suggested, was changing in such an inter-connected way that this kind of thinking was increasingly irrelevant, limiting our ability to see how crises interact and amplify one another.

‘Polycrisis’ became further popularised by, amongst others, historian Adam Tooze (2022). Writing in the wake of financial crises and the COVID-19 pandemic, he stressed the need to focus on interacting and amplifying crises (Delannoy et al., 2025). We have inherited a notion of ‘crisis’ that is both a diagnosis of the present – an endemic feature of capitalism, of debates on the legitimacy of truth and knowledge, and of the recurrence of crisis events – and a lens on the present and how it changes through interacting crises.

Crisis, in this inheritance, is inevitable and manifold, recurring in different and sometimes overlapping ways so that, for example, crises of legitimacy intersect with crises of labour, overproduction, climate, war, or inequality. In critical geographic scholarship it is a way of thinking that has become increasingly prevalent. Writing 15 years ago, a year after Hall and Massey’s conversation, Wendy Larner (2011: 319) wrote in Dialogues in Human Geography that ‘it is now widely accepted that this is a period of crisis’, pointing to the intersecting geographies of the financial crisis, climate change, and transformations in geoeconomic and geopolitical power.

If there is nothing new, then, in talk of multiple and overlapping crises, what is distinct about the present moment is the degree and intensity with which polycrisis-thinking has become generalised. The central driver here is the planetary climate crisis, which is read as at once a foundational and multi-dimensional threat, increasingly spilling over into and thereby amplifying other crises. Those other crises typically include emboldened authoritarianisms and attacks on democracy, geopolitical violence, rampant inequalities and their intersections, and the various legacies of the financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, generating a pervasive sense of compounding crises (e.g. Agha et al., 2024; Ali et al., 2022; Bruff and Tansel, 2014; Can and Fanton, 2022).

The urban has been variously positioned as a spatial forefront, causal factor and sometimes potential solution to polycrisis. For example, writing about the ‘growing recognition that we are living in a period of persistent and overlapping crises – and that cities are at the forefront of both experiencing and responding to them’, Beveridge and Davidson (2025: 265) point to the recent spate of ‘wildfires, floods, earthquakes, war, state breakdown’, alongside the COVID-19 pandemic, the global housing crisis, attacks on democracy and the pervasiveness of ‘post-truth’ politics (see, e.g. Ali et al., 2022; Long and Rice, 2021; Madden, 2023). Beveridge et al. (2025) usefully distinguish between four modalities of ‘crisis urbanism’ that operate dialectically: the chrono-politics of crisis urbanism (the different temporalities, rhythms, speeds and experiences of crises), spatial-politics of crisis urbanism (the uneven unfolding of crisis in the urban), statal politics of crisis urbanism (the rescaling of state crises onto the city, especially through neoliberalism), and the epistemological politics of crisis urbanism (how and which crises do we see and know?).

The urban is not, in this growing literature, a passive recipient of polycrisis. An important element in the debate is the attention to urban geographical diversity and its role in constituting crises. In a recent piece in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, for example, Filipe Magalhães (2025) argues that economic crises play a central role in urbanization in Latin America. These crises emerge from a variety of causes over time, from dependency on commodity markets or capital flight to higher inflationary tendencies, financialisation, and structural adjustment policies (this echoes Beveridge et al.’s [2025] arguments about the rescaling of state crises onto the urban scale, including through neoliberal urbanism [e.g. Peck 2012]).

Crises in Latin America are more frequent than in the global North, Magalhães argues, and often more intense and long lasting, and can have profound impacts on tax revenues, public services such as health, education and transport, spending, investment and subsidies, debt borrowing and interest rates, the frequency of recession, privatization drives, employment, pay and labour conditions, planning, industrial base, and the built form including housing and informality (and see Ortiz, 2024). The consequences are lived out in further crisis conditions, akin to those described by Brickell (2020) in her study of the intersections of forced eviction and domestic violence in Cambodia as – following Lauren Berlant (2011) – ‘crisis ordinary’. Crises exist not just at the macroeconomic scale but in the spatially uneven development of the city, in the struggles of home and everyday life, and in thoughts of the future (these conditions are also, of course, increasingly features of urban conditions in the global North, as Brickell also shows in her work with Brickell and Nowicki (2025) on debt, poverty and violence in the UK).

Meanwhile, writing from Beirut, Mona Harb (2025: 293), argues that ‘crisis here is not an exception; it is the everyday grammar through which the city is governed, inhabited and imagined’. As with Magalhães and Brickell, Harb connects structural conditions and everyday life and argues that crisis is not an exception but constitutive of the urban as idea, experience, form and process – a permacrisis wrought by intersections of political economic failure, war, currency collapse, debt default, pandemic, and chronic disinvestment, and which has become the condition of ‘ordinary governance’ (Ibid). Crisis, she argues, ‘is endemic to the capitalism-urbanisation nexus, but its mediations – political-economy regimes, historical territorialities, social networks, donor circuits – are context-specific’ (p297).

The preoccupation with crisis as not simply impacting the urban but integral to its very production and reproduction is not only an urban academic one. For example, in its 2026-29 Strategic Plan, UN-Habitat departed from the position that the ‘world faces a storm of converging crises related to poverty eradication, crises emerging from climate change, disasters and conflict, and the environment’ (UN-Habitat, 2025: 7). At the same time, and as Cristina Temenos (2025: 215) has argued, urban areas are ‘increasingly ill-equipped’ to respond to the multiple crises they face, given decades of neoliberal withdrawal from public provisioning and the erosion of local state capacity.

Moreover, forces on the political Right are increasingly shaping interpretations of crises conditions and responses to it. On the one hand, Anacláudia Rossbach (2025: 3), Executive Director of UN-Habitat, can write that ‘we are living through a global housing crisis’. On the other hand, parties on the political Right – Reform in the UK, Republicans in the US, or AFD in Germany, to cite just three – also identify a housing crisis, but with a very different diagnosis and response. In their 2024 published ‘Policies’, for example, Reform UK wrote: ‘Britain has a housing crisis… Foreign nationals must go to the back of the queue. Not the front’.

Socially regressive responses to crises are not shaped by the political Right alone. For example, urban climate interventions do not only take the form of progressive interventions, but also of new processes of displacement, social value, and injustice (Bulkeley, 2023; Castán Broto et al., 2020). The Anthropocenic city is not a neutral terrain of socially inclusive technocratic resilience but a site of social and spatial stratification, often building on historical inequalities in race and class (Cox, 2024). For example, critical urban research has identified a ‘green resilience paradox’ whereby interventions often benefit already economically, racially, or otherwise privileged urban groups, including forms of ‘green gentrification’ that can displace vulnerable households and generate new ‘hazardscapes’ (Castán Broto and Robin, 2021; Diep et al., 2023; Meilinger and Monstadt, 2023; Tozer et al., 2022).

This larger context prompts a number of important questions for urban geography. If crisis-thinking can be co-opted, what then might be the potential for that to occur with polycrisis-thinking in a time where the Right is in ascendancy in many parts of the urban world? Moreover, polycrisis-thinking has the potential to overwhelm an understanding of the present, play an outsized role in our thinking about what might be possible, undermine the likelihood with which we might see progress, and paralyse thought and action. If crisis is about judgement and decision-making, and therefore a potential spur to action and new thought, it can also engender a hopelessness and inaction. Does that likelihood become greater when we shift from ‘crisis’ to ‘polycrisis’ thinking?

Seeing crisis: The urban and the possible

In this section, I consider three potential implications arising from polycrisis-thinking in critical urban research, including what it might be doing to how we conceive, research and politicise the urban. The first relates to how the urban is conceived and researched, the second to the kinds of crises we ‘see’ and the kinds of urban that might emerge through the lens of polycrisis, and the third to where polycrisis-thinking might leave the question of urban possibility.

Crisis and radical relationality

As noted above, for some critical urbanists the cities they work on do not so much contain or ‘host’ crises but are instead constituted by them (e.g. Harb, 2025; Magalhães, 2025). More generally, it increasingly seems that an indeterminate threshold of urban thought has been passed in which crises are forming the urban present and future. In this moment, the urban is not only reshaped through recurring periods of capitalist crisis, nor is it simply the spatial arena in which crises take shape. It is, more, crisis itself: its very fabric and social and environmental relations and conditions are produced and reproduced primarily in crisis. In such a moment, a new radical relationality could take hold whereby the critical urbanist’s primary task is to identify the ways in which the urban is folded into different kinds of simultaneous and amplifying crises. If so, this would be a notable shift in critical urban thought and research.

Housing, to take just one example, is increasingly conceived and researched as at once a problem of neoliberalism, inequality, climate, health, finance, mobility, identity, migration, asylum, race, gender, and digital technology. Changing climatic impacts are reshaping real estate economies and the geographies of unequal housing provision and speculation, while digital platforms play growing roles in determining real estate data, including practices of data mining and extraction, risk-assessment algorithms, tenant screening, facial recognition, surveillance, and gentrification (e.g. Faxon et al., 2024; Fields and Rogers 2019; Shaw, 2020). Understanding housing is increasingly a question of moving between and integrating not only a crisis of unequal production and affordability but also of climate and technology and how they permeate race, class, gender, and sexuality.

This radical relationality brings a new intensity to an old methodological question: that when presented by the sheer diversity and relationality of the urban, what should be prioritised? Hillary Angelo (2025: 275) has put this problem this way:

I am attracted to the idea that there’s always a polycrisis; there are frequently multiple crises in a given situation, and it makes sense that understanding them would be part of the analysis of any conjuncture. A possible con: an analytic oriented toward an exhaustive account of all the crises (and their multiple causes) of a moment in its full complexity and specificity is perhaps less useful for, and even at odds with, an analytic goal of diagnosing primary causes - particularly of problems that persist across time - and, therefore, of crafting strategies for fundamental structural change.

Is, then, the role of the critical urbanist to establish key causes, issues and strategies amidst the radical relationality of crises? Or is it to show that beyond what appears to be a ‘primary cause’ or concern, there are other crisis processes in play that ought to be simultaneously attended to, and perhaps even as a basis for more effective strategy and change? Or is it to move between these two positions, between a politics of ‘this’ and a politics of ‘and’?

If polycrisis-thinking continues to gather pace in critical urban thought, we may see a collapse of the distinction between conceptualisation (what is the urban?), methodology (how should we research it?) and politics (how might we intervene in it?). This is not necessarily a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ thing, but it will mean new conceptual directions and methodological dilemmas, or perhaps the intensification of ‘old’ dilemmas. This extends to at least two other related issues. First, the institutional practices that underpin critical global urban research (Hilbrandt and Ren, 2025). As Neha Swami (2024) has suggested, if it comes to pass that polycrisis-thinking leads to short-term research projects that are also more responsive to external funder agendas, there is the risk that this agenda serves to further reinforce global inequalities in research resource and knowledge flows, rather than more engaged and longer term global research partnerships based on deeper forms of co-production and equitable learning.

Second, the challenge of interdisciplinary dialogue becomes potentially more important in a context of radically relational polycrisis, including, for example, between climate science, ecology, computer science, disaster studies, disease epidemiology and public health. In a recent piece on the role of critical urban theory in relation to planetary crisis, for example, Kian Goh (2025: 2) argues for ‘a reflexive, delimited and open approach to the urban and planetary’. What Goh calls ‘a “meshwork” of frameworks’ involves not a flattening of perspectives into a seamless theoretical whole, but instead paying ‘attention to interfaces between urban frameworks and other ways of seeing that may elucidate processes of planetary significance’ (Ibid. 10).

Seeing crises

There is a politics of visibility that accompanies crisis-thinking. There are worlds of quieter urban crises that go relatively unheard, and which are overlooked or marginalised in accounts of cities and urban change. Polycrisis-thinking itself can contribute to this, given the potential contradiction between, on the one hand, the injunction to multiply the forms of crises that we account for, and on the other hand the converging focus around a particular set of crises, especially climate, political authoritarianism, and geopolitical violence.

Take, for example, the urban sanitation crisis, a set of conditions that I have long thought deserve far more attention. Almost one in five people globally lack even basic sanitation, and more than a third of the urban population is forced to live without safely managed sanitation (WHO/Unicef, 2025). Millions of people are forced to regularly use open space in lieu of actual sanitation, under bridges, at garbage grounds, by railway tracks, along riverbanks and shorelines, in fields and disused wastelands. As the world continues to urbanise, it is the poorest neighbourhoods that are growing fastest, and it is here that the sanitation crisis is at its most acute. Cities are expected to grow by another 2.5 billion people by 2050, placing huge demands on already woefully insufficient sanitation, water, and waste systems, with all kinds of permeating social and environmental impacts that are becoming intensified by climate change including flooding, heat and drought (Islam and Lipu, 2025; McFarlane, 2023; Red Cross, 2025).

This is not a crisis that is being ignored exactly, but if you look through the list of crises that are typically captured by urban ‘polycrisis’, there is a kind of stable consensus, more or less, around what should be included and, by extension, excluded. Not a surprise, perhaps, given that those issues – climate, war, authoritarianism, deepening economic precarity, housing, pandemic risk – demand such focus, energy and critical thought and response. But any spotlight cast entails areas of shadow, concerns that fall from view or perhaps never quite make the dominant script. I am not suggesting here a politics of replacement, as if ‘substituting’ one less visible crisis for another and adding that to the list of polycrisis would address the issue, but instead raising two questions that might be useful for further reflection. First, what might be the limits to the plurality of polycrisis thinking, and with what consequences (and here, see Temenos, 2025, on pluralising crises)? And second, are crises that are adjacent to, or even distant from, the spotlight of polycrisis-thinking deserving of less attention in diagnoses of our current conjuncture?

In her history of early 20^th century Black American urbanism, Wayward Lives, Saiditya Hartman (2021) brings together a range of powerful narratives of urban life amidst crisis conditions. At the core of Hartman’s book is a politics of visibility. She shows how Black women and girls, the second and third generations post-slavery who were looking to forge new lives – freer lives – in cities like Philadelphia and New York, imagined and lived out identities, lifestyles, and socialities that were ‘wayward’, queer, disruptive and excessive, refusing to be chained in by crisis conditions of appalling violence, exploitation and precarity, and the policing of those conditions by the state, racism and dominant moral cultures. In the relatively hidden geographies in which life was lived out amidst crisis – the dancehalls and tenement corridors, the clubs and bedrooms, the streets and doorways – social worlds, profuse life, schemes and dreams, meaning and love refused the rendering of bare life and brought other urbanisms, however partial and circumscribed, into being.

As Hartman reminds us, the question of which (and whose) crises we see, and which we conceptually and politically privilege, has always been with us. For Beveridge et al. (2025: 11), in their reflections on crisis epistemologies, the ‘persistent occurrence of worldwide acts of violence targeting gendered, sexualized, and racialized bodies demands critical reconsidering of the ‘grand narrative of crises’ by turning toward everyday urban life’. If this politics of the visible is a necessary accompaniment to critical urban research, the growing role of polycrisis-thinking is likely to make that politics yet more salient and vexed.

Finally, at stake in pluralising how we see crisis is also a question of how we name crisis as a specific form. There remains a tendency to group forms of crisis together and it would certainly help the larger debate to find more precise language for how we think about and differentiate forms. For example, short-term emergencies are not the same thing as urgent issues or concerns. Economic upheavals, technological transitions, periods of instability, or political disruptions are not necessarily crisis points, or at least crisis may be a relatively minor part of their character or perhaps only feature for a period of time. Crises after all are at once spatial and temporal, and have – as Beveridge et al. (2025) have argued – a ‘chrono-politics’ that can fold past, presents and futures, and the different speeds of change, into distinct crisis conditions. There is the risk that crisis becomes too generalised, too ‘catch all’, and while that might mean a useful short-hand it might also mean losing specific articulation of the issues at hand and how to respond to them. This is a question that requires careful reflection, and especially so with terms like polycrisis or permacrisis.

Seeing urban possibility

All of which takes me to a third and final question: how might polycrisis-thinking relate to how we locate urban possibility? The urban question has always been, to one extent or another, a dialectic of crisis and possibility. At different times, the former threatens to overwhelm the latter, and certainly our current moment can feel like such a time. It can be difficult to see progressive possibilities in the face of the planetary threat of climate change, or the total devastation in Gaza, a genocidal attack that breaks a sense of the possible, notwithstanding vital forms of resistance, solidarity and support (Yiftachel, 2022; Ziadah et al., 2025). As I write this the US-Israel attack on Iran is unfolding with a different set of radical uncertainties and potential consequences.

While the term crisis is connected to judgement, decision-making and action, it can also generate an understandable sense of overwhelm and even hopelessness. But if critical urban research is an archive of the profound damage to cities and urban life, it has also shown how throughout history, cities – as dense and translocal heterogeneities where questions of rights, justice, difference and equality have been so visibly at stake and contested – have always generated resources, ideas and imaginaries of progressive and radical change. Ideas and actions that have led to vital victories, from affordable public housing programmes to investments in the urban fabric in poor communities to extensions in childcare, schooling, civil rights, better labour conditions, and ways of living well together across cultural and political difference.

To return to Hartman’s (2021) Wayward Lives, we might refuse the growing story that the urban is so-many crises. Rather than imagine urban possibilities and imaginaries to be the small fragments of urban life, we might see them as writ large, as copious and profuse, a ‘chorus’ (to use Hartman’s term) of practices, knowledge and way(ward) routes forward that might be the seeds of different urbanisms. An urban replete less with the colonising discourse of multiple and overlapping crises, but of possibility and imagination.

If crises of different kinds attack and undermine the dense heterogeneities and connective possibilities of the urban condition, those same conditions are nonetheless the progenitors of the possible (Magnusson, 2011). To return to the example of housing, digital technologies may well be increasingly used to deepen processes of property speculation and housing inequality, but they are also being used to undermine and contest these dominant forms. Erin McElroy (2020, 2024), for instance, points to alternative ‘propertied futures’ of collectivism being pushed by different actors, such as the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project in the United States or, in Romania, the work of groups like the Common Front for Housing Rights, feminist social centres, or art, theatre, cyber projects, and community-building, through to transnational solidarities that connect projects of urban, racial, and technological justice.

For Michele Lancione (2019), we might locate resources of urban possibility by constructing ‘weird alliances’ and by looking in ‘other places’ for a politics of housing. Building from feminist and decolonial epistemologies, Lancione looks for possibility not in the conventions of how ‘the political’ registers in political economies of housing or in celebratory explorations of resilience, but in a ‘politics of life’, of being and becoming (Lancione, 2023). He points to the value of working with the ideas and practices that emerge amongst everyday dwelling on the urban margins (and see Thieme, 2025; Lancione and Simone, 2021; Simone, 2004, 2022). This is a profoundly geographical project, rooted in attending carefully to difference, detail, margins, and disruptions – ‘listening to their propositions, and reimagining our political horizon from there’ (Lancione, 2019: 284).

There is a world of ways in which residents and activists across the urban world have recomposed the imaginaries and practices of housing amidst crisis, from occupying vacant properties in São Paulo, or practices of makeshift squatting in Berlin that develop alternative urban imaginations and models of housing and home (Bossuyt and D’Ottaviano, 2025; Vasudevan, 2017), to the underground tunnels near Bucharest’s main train station, where Lancione observed how home was made through improvised infrastructures, play, care, cooking, shared resources, connections to informal markets, and more (and see Power and Mee, 2019).

Or, consider what has been termed the ‘popular economy’ and its role in sustaining and contesting life amidst crisis conditions, from household maintenance or local infrastructural labour to providing mutual aid and small-scale economies that disrupt the lines between production and consumption, and form new intersectional solidarities (Gago, 2017; Mitchell et al., 2004; Peake et al., 2021; The Urban Popular Economy Collective, 2022). The growing focus on reparative urbanism is another resource here. For Beveridge et al. (2025), the politics of repair is a vital response to crisis but one that must also be ‘directed towards a different city, one held together not only by different values, but by a different vision of itself and a wide repertoire of political practices to advance it’. This is repair both as care and as a remaking of the urban, whether as material form, democratic practice, or ways of everyday living (e.g. Carstensen-Egwuom, 2024; Knuth, 2018; Pieprzak, 2025).

I opened this piece by recounting a conversation between Stuart Hall and Doreen Massey (2010). There, possibility was located both in response to the crisis – in their case the crisis induced by neoliberalism – and in the ways that activists were pushing other crises, such as climate change, onto the public and political table. The work mentioned above from Lancione, Simone, Thieme, Vasudevan, and others goes a step further, because here possibility is not only located within or in response to crisis, but in the textures, tissues and spaces of everyday living, knowledge and practice. Spaces that are, to be sure, shaped by crises of different kinds, but from which possibility emerges from a hinterland of relations that exceed crises, amongst forms of living that have their own histories, resources, ways of being and knowing, and ideas and aspirations for the urban future. The possible may, of course, be thought primarily in its relation to crisis, but it need not only be, and in fact restricting the possible to a crisis relation may mean missing or marginalising all kinds of possibilities that move along different tracks.

In many of these accounts possibility emerges from the periphery, not only as a spatial location but as position of power, or what Doreen Massey (1993) called ‘power geometry’. Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2022: 143) identifies this position as a kind of desakota – reworking Terry McGee’s (1991) description of urban-rural entanglement in Southeast Asia – a betweeness in which people find themselves both abandoned and, sometimes, open to new ways of being and organising individually and collectively, including into ‘novel resolutions’. A desakota in which ‘people use what is available to make a place in the world’, and where place – as Wilson states elsewhere, in an interview for Truthout news – is also the making of freedom (Hayes and Gilmore, 2022: no page): ‘What I find the most exciting about being a geographer is thinking about how we make the world and make the world and make the world…This is just ‘geography think.’…It occurred to me, I don’t know, 20, 25 years ago, to realize that freedom is a place. That it’s not like a destination, it’s the place that we make’.

At stake here – and this seems to me both important and currently overlooked in much of the debate around polycrisis – is the urban imagination itself: the capacity to speculate, envision, dream, story and experiment about urban places, possibilities and futures. In polycrisis conditions the imagination may seem a luxury or an indulgence, but as Ruha Benjamin (2024) has argued, the imagination as both individual expression and collective experimentation can be the spark of the new or alternative, an energising force in the beat of the possible, emergent from all kinds of peripheries. In Imagination: A Manifesto, Benjamin (2024) asks why our imagination of the possible has become so constrained in the face of multiple crises.

Why, she asks, is it possible to imagine radically different material conditions driven by AI, robotics and bioscience, when at the same time radically different social and ecological futures are so breezily derided and dismissed as naïve, fanciful, romantic or hopeless? Does polycrisis-thinking help or hinder here? Rather than ‘dour pessimism’, Benjamin (2024: 23) – ever alert to the risk of fetishising the imagination or to invoking a naïve hopefulness – argues that the ‘radical imagination can inspire us to push beyond the constraints of what we think, and are told, is politically possible’. That ‘we’ is especially important for Benjamin: with whom are we imagining, from where are we imagining, in relation to what, and who gets to decide?

Conclusion: Critical urbanism without crisis?

While crisis-thinking is not new to critical urban thought, there is a new pervasiveness and intensity to it in the form of polycrisis, where climate, war, authoritarianism, and rampant inequalities are especially prominent. There has been a qualitative shift in thinking the urban-as-crisis in different ways from different positions and places, and it becomes important to ask what this saturation of crisis-thinking is doing to how we conceive, research, and politicise the urban. My hope is that this piece contributes to that larger conversation.

In closing, it is worth asking what the alternative might be. What might critical urban thought look like if it were to give less agency to crisis? Not, of course, to stop attending to the very real global conditions of crises of different kinds, or to shift from one view – that the urban is falling apart amidst crises – to its opposite, that the urban is flourishing, if only we could see it better. Instead, it is to ask what it might do to make the language of crisis smaller in critical urban thought, to give it less air in the atmospherics of critical urbanism. Perhaps, in addition to scarcity, loss, damage, and emergency, we might see an urban more replete with possibility and imagination, a profusion of ideas and practices that not only work to support social and environmental progress, but from which we might learn and imagine?

Of course, critical urban research has always been attentive to difference, change and alterity, so my question here – an urban without crisis – is an exaggerated one. Nonetheless, it is a provocation that I think is worth holding onto and thinking with. To ‘make small’ crisis-thinking in our imaginaries, conceptualisation, methodologies, collaborations and politics is not to naively embrace an urban world without actually existing crises, or to deny their existence and profound importance. Nor is it to ignore that it is much easier to countenance such a question in some places and conditions than it is in others, where the very question of survival is at stake each and every day. It is, instead, to ask what such a ‘clearing’ of conceptual and political space might open out. What ways of seeing and thinking and acting might emerge, come up for air, and receive more space to breathe? An urban geography less constrained by crisis-space and yet more attuned to possibility-space? The question here is not only whether crisis-thinking can spill over into a kind of intellectual and political pessimism and overwhelm – though I think that possibility is real enough – but a deeper one about whether the material and imaginative worlds of possibility that have always characterised the urban might be somewhat slipping from view?

For all that the resources for maintaining everyday life, for thriving in the city, for thinking and acting differently, and for building alternative urbanisms, are so often depleted or shattered, they are also at the same time very often fundamental to what makes urban spaces what they are. They are at once held in structural relation to crises but excessive to them, opening out hinterlands of experimentation, imagination, and ways of being and knowing. These take shape in all kinds of spaces, as we know – everyday spaces of homes, streets, squares, parks, and so on; amongst community centres and gardens, cooperative housing, mutual aid networks and solidarity cafes dedicated to repair or refuge; campaign organising and protests, myriad online spaces of alliance building, and forms of artistic experiment; within Universities, think-tanks, social movements, and many municipalities, and so on – yet might they be more readily overlooked in the vortex of crisis-thinking? Does a generalisation of crisis-thinking help or hinder the larger critical urban project of locating, seeing, naming, documenting and working with these forms to further conceptualisations, imaginaries and directions for better urban geographies?

A critical urbanism without crisis thinking is, again, a provocation rather than an actual destination. It is to imagine a critical urbanism that begins and stays with options, openness, and examples of and resources for urban world-making, where the connections, alliances, and spaces for big and small change are ready-to-hand, and where the potential of meaningful social and environmental change is central to the atmospherics of urban thought and practice. In polycrisis times, this seems to me an imagination worth staying with and pushing at.