Global development and urban studies: tactics for thinking beyond the North–South binary

Abstract

Recent calls to shift from an “international” to a “global” development paradigm have sought to challenge global North–South binaries. This has provoked lively debate, with criticisms focusing on two issues: the empirical question of North–South convergence since 1990, and the political-theoretical basis of the proposed paradigm. In response, this paper draws on innovations in postcolonial and comparative urban studies to propose three “tactics” for thinking globally about development: thinking from the South to understand the North; comparing across difference; and exploring transnational flows, circuits and relationships. These tactics demonstrate how it is possible to disrupt geographical binaries while also addressing the two major criticisms of the global development approach. First, they demonstrate that establishing convergence is not a prerequisite to thinking about development across the global North–South distinction. Second, they are informed by critical theoretical approaches that animate a deep commitment to transforming the structural causes of inequalities globally.

I. Introduction

The launch of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by the United Nations in 2015 represented a continuation of the approach established with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of setting quantitative targets to measure development progress internationally. However, they also represented a departure in one very important respect: whereas the MDGs were largely formulated by donor governments to be implemented in lower-income countries,⁽¹⁾ the SDGs were explicitly framed as “universal goals and targets which involve the entire world, developed and developing countries alike”.⁽²⁾ This change in global policymaking foreshadowed a lively debate over the proper geographical scope of academic development studies. In an article first published in 2017, Horner and Hulme pointed to changing patterns of inequality to question the global North–South binary and called for a shift from an “international” to a “global” development paradigm in which the South is no longer the exclusive focus of development scholarship.⁽³⁾ However, critics of this proposed shift have questioned the empirical basis of Horner and Hulme’s argument and asserted the continued salience of the global North–South distinction.⁽⁴⁾ In addition, concern has been raised about the (lack of) political-theoretical substance of the proposed global development paradigm, and whether such a shift is compatible with a critical approach to development studies.⁽⁵⁾

This paper is a response to the international/global development debate written by two researchers operating at the intersection of the fields of development and urban studies. Both authors are based in the Global Development Institute (GDI) at the University of Manchester in the UK. While our primary research interest is urban development in the global South, both authors have also developed a scholar-activist interest in addressing urban inequalities in the UK. In both cases, and echoing recent trends in urban studies discussed below, our knowledge of urban inequalities in the global South has shaped our engagement with similar issues in cities such as London and Manchester.⁽⁶⁾ The call to think about development across the global North–South binary thus resonates with our own professional and political practice. In addition, GDI has been at the centre of the international/global development debate, and our departmental colleagues include both critics and advocates of the proposed global development paradigm.⁽⁷⁾ While we find thinking globally about development is productive in our work on urban inequalities, we are also sympathetic to the criticisms levelled at the global development paradigm as it has previously been articulated. Rather than dismissing these criticisms, therefore, we seek to move the debate forward by demonstrating that the problems they identify are not necessarily an obstacle to thinking globally about development. For us, global development is best understood not as an all-encompassing paradigm, but as a creative approach to thinking comparatively and relationally about development processes in ways that disrupt geographical binaries.

Written from this particular positionality, this paper argues that innovations in urban studies can inform efforts to think about development processes beyond the global North–South binary. To this end, it proposes three “tactics” that are drawn from postcolonial and comparative urban scholarship: thinking from the South to understand the North; comparing across difference; and exploring transnational flows, circuits and relationships. Furthermore, it argues that these tactics can advance the debate around the geographical scope of development studies by addressing the two major criticisms of Horner and Hulme’s proposed global development paradigm: the empirical question of North–South convergence, and the political-theoretical basis of the new paradigm. While such tactics draw primarily on innovations in urban studies, they also resonate with longer-standing traditions within development studies that analyse North–South relations in order to understand ideas, practices and processes of development. The article begins by introducing the international/global development debate and explaining how drawing on urban studies approaches to thinking beyond the North–South binary can move this debate forward. Next, it reviews innovations in postcolonial and comparative urban studies that have challenged the hierarchical geographical binaries that have traditionally characterized urban theory production. The rest of the article draws on these urban studies approaches to propose the three tactics for thinking globally about development. The article concludes by calling for greater interdisciplinary exchange between the fields of development and urban studies with a view to enriching both.

II. The International/Global Development Debate

The current debate over the proper geographical scope of development studies was prompted by Horner and Hulme’s call for a shift from an “international” to a “global” development paradigm.⁽⁸⁾ According to these scholars, the field of international development that emerged in the mid-twentieth century has been structured around a focus on inequalities between a “developed” or “rich” global North and a “developing” or “poor” South. However, they argue that changing patterns of global inequality since 1990 require a rethinking of the geography of development beyond this North–South dualism. Reflecting on global trends in indicators of income growth, human development and carbon emissions, they point to a pattern of “converging divergence” in which inequalities between Northern and Southern countries are becoming less significant, while disparities within countries are growing everywhere. Horner and Hulme conclude that these trends necessitate “a shift in thinking from an international development to a truly global development, albeit where the global South would remain a key – although not sole – focus”.⁽⁹⁾

Building on Horner and Hulme’s agenda-setting contribution, several authors have argued that the character of twenty-first century social, economic and environmental crises requires a shift to a global development paradigm. Horner argues that the rigid binary thinking that underpins international development should be rejected in favour of an approach that is sensitive to the universal character of problems such as climate change.⁽¹⁰⁾ Similarly, Oldekop et al. claim that the COVID-19 pandemic reinforces the case for global development on the grounds that many rich Western countries have experienced comparatively poor health outcomes, and that this “clearly exposes the falsity of assumptions that the global North has all the expertise and solutions”.⁽¹¹⁾ Finally, advocates of this approach caution that shifting from “international” to “global” must go beyond a mere rebranding of development studies. Rather, it should entail a substantive shift in thought and practice away from an exclusive focus on the global South, as well as action to address entrenched power inequalities between Northern and Southern actors.⁽¹²⁾

Horner and Hulme’s proposed global development paradigm came under intense critical scrutiny in eight articles published in the 2019 Forum issue of the journal Development and Change. The arguments articulated in these articles largely fall into two categories: debate over the empirical question of North–South convergence, and criticism of the apparent lack of a critical political-theoretical basis for the new paradigm. Regarding the former, Forum contributors drew attention to uneven development progress in the global South, beyond the exceptional case of China, as evidence for the continued salience of the rich/developed/North–poor/developing/South distinction.⁽¹³⁾ Horner and Hulme were also criticized for treating indicators such as per capita income and the Human Development Index as unproblematic measures of development, while neglecting alternative dimensions such as unpaid socially reproductive work and access to social protection.⁽¹⁴⁾ In addition, their choice of 1990 as a baseline for measuring North–South convergence was questioned on the grounds that it ignores the gains lost in many Southern countries in the 1980s due to the imposition of structural adjustment programmes.⁽¹⁵⁾ More recently, Behuria has drawn attention to uneven access to COVID-19 vaccines as further evidence of the durability of North–South inequalities, concluding that “the foundational logic of Global Development – ‘converging divergence’ – jars with reality”.⁽¹⁶⁾

Regarding the political-theoretical basis of the global development paradigm, Horner and Hulme’s account of changing patterns of inequality was criticized by Forum authors for describing development outcomes rather than analysing causal processes.⁽¹⁷⁾ Their conceptualization of global development was accused of failing to engage with critical approaches such as feminism, Marxism and postcolonialism, leading to a neglect of questions of gender, race, class and power.⁽¹⁸⁾ Furthermore, the failure to acknowledge the ongoing importance of capitalism and (neo-)colonialism in reproducing uneven geographical development raised concerns that the proposed paradigm was inconsistent with an earlier and ongoing critical development studies tradition.⁽¹⁹⁾ Based on these concerns, several authors questioned the political orientation of the global development approach, highlighting the risk of implicitly condoning neoliberalism by reproducing what Büscher termed the “generic development storyline” of economic growth and poverty reduction since 1990.⁽²⁰⁾

In response to the criticism of converging divergence, Horner and Hulme emphasize that they do not claim that convergence has been achieved, rather that it is a 25-year trend after two centuries of divergence.⁽²¹⁾ In addition, while acknowledging that the claimed decline in North–South income inequalities is contentious, the duo assert that convergence in human development and climate indicators and growing within-country inequalities are less so. In response to the criticism of their political-theoretical approach, Horner and Hulme argue that converging divergence can be theorized as a product of economic globalization, manifested in the emergence of global value chains and the shift in industrial production (and carbon emissions) from North to South. However, they acknowledge that “much more needs to be done to justify global development as an overarching approach”.⁽²²⁾ To this end, Horner advocates a relational geographical analysis that recognizes the increasing interconnectedness of global North and South, while remaining sensitive to the tension between the universal and the geographically specific.⁽²³⁾ Horner identifies recent debates within urban studies about the universality of theory as an example of how this tension can generate insights into development processes across the global North and South.⁽²⁴⁾

Our paper draws on innovations in global urban scholarship in order to address the two major criticisms of the global development paradigm. In the process, it builds on Horner’s observations about the potential synergies between urban studies and a global approach to development studies.⁽²⁵⁾ It does not seek to defend the global development paradigm as previously articulated by dismissing the criticisms discussed above. Rather, it addresses these criticisms in order to demonstrate that the problems they identify are not necessarily an obstacle to thinking globally about development.

The first part of the argument concerns the debate around the empirical question of North–South convergence. We argue that, while debating trends in global inequality is valuable on its own terms, establishing convergence is not a necessary precondition to adopting a global development approach. Instead, a global urban studies provides the tools for thinking comparatively and relationally about development problems across diverse and unequal contexts. Rather than minimizing North–South inequalities to justify comparison, these approaches are grounded in an explicit engagement with the historical legacies of capitalism, colonialism and imperialism in producing uneven geographical development. This engagement demonstrates that recognizing historical-geographical difference is not a barrier to thinking comparatively and relationally in order to identify commonalities, differences and interrelations between development processes in the global North and South. Indeed, difference can be a catalyst for comparative analysis. A global development approach, then, is compatible with a commitment to addressing historical North–South inequalities through redistributive movements such as the international campaign for climate reparations.⁽²⁶⁾

The second part of the argument concerns the political-theoretical basis of the global development approach. We argue that innovations in global urban studies can, and should, inform the theoretical and political orientation of this new approach to development studies. Theoretically, postcolonial and comparative urban studies have been informed by feminist, Marxist and postcolonial epistemological approaches. As such, they share a theoretical orientation with the critical development studies tradition. Politically, these epistemological approaches animate a deep commitment to understanding and addressing inequalities produced by capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy and racism as they manifest in diverse urban contexts. In addition, as we demonstrate below, thinking globally can inform transnational solidarities by identifying commonalities between place-based struggles in both the global North and South. For these reasons, thinking globally is compatible with a critical approach to development studies and can advance what Hickey and Mohan call “a radical politics of development”.⁽²⁷⁾

While the tactics proposed in this article are drawn primarily from urban studies, we do not suggest that thinking globally is entirely novel to development studies. Rather, these tactics resonate strongly with several currents of thought in the history of development studies. First, paying attention to development problems in the global North is consistent with the longer history of development studies, which pre-dates the mid-twentieth century invention of international development. Critical scholars have traced the origins of contemporary development thought and practice back to the concerns about surplus populations, poverty and disorder associated with the emergence of industrial cities in nineteenth century Europe.⁽²⁸⁾ For example, Escobar describes how scientific planning became a discipline used both for governing newly urbanizing populations in the global North and national modernization projects in the global South.⁽²⁹⁾ Second, exploring North–South interconnections builds on the rich traditions of development scholarship, such as dependency theory, that emphasize how centre–periphery relations produce uneven development under conditions of global capitalism.⁽³⁰⁾ Critical development scholars have long emphasized that the South cannot be understood as an autonomous region, but rather is integrally shaped by Northern corporations and governments which have sought to re-make the South to address their economic and geopolitical interests, despite efforts to reclaim alternative development pathways at the time of decolonization.⁽³¹⁾ Given this history, the tactics proposed below speak to concerns that are central to the field of development studies.

III. Postcolonial and Comparative Urban Studies

As researchers with a stake in both development and urban studies, we observe that the international/global development debate has striking parallels with recent debates over the geography of urban theory production. Twenty-first century urban studies is notable for a rich body of work that theorizes the contemporary urban condition from the experiences of the rapidly urbanizing global South. This literature has identified various characteristics that are specific to Southern urbanism, including: the production of space through the intertwining of formal and informal practices by a diverse range of actors; urbanization without large-scale manufacturing and the dislocation of capital and labour in urban economies; infrastructures as incremental, heterogeneous and dependent on the everyday activities of urban inhabitants; and the importance of popular practices of auto-construction and repair to addressing urban housing needs.⁽³²⁾

This Southern turn in urban theory is a relatively recent development: universal claims about the urban have traditionally been developed according to the experience of a small number of Northern cities, while cities elsewhere were relegated to the status of empirical “case studies” to be measured against established theories.⁽³³⁾ Over the past two decades, however, postcolonial urban scholars have sought to challenge the hierarchical distinction between the global North and South that has determined dominant understandings of which cities were legitimate sites of theorization. This scholarship builds on earlier traditions of researching across North and South, as demonstrated by Castells’ study of how urban social movements in Europe, Latin America and the United States seek to change modalities of urban development.⁽³⁴⁾ The outcome of this movement has been the flourishing of postcolonial and comparative approaches that provide the tools to question, rethink and develop alternatives to established theory by drawing on the experience of a greater diversity of cities globally.

In her influential book Ordinary Cities, Robinson argued that twentieth century urban studies was largely divided between research on “modernity” in Northern cities and “development” in Southern cities, with the two concepts defined in opposition to one another.⁽³⁵⁾ As a result, theories of urban modernity had largely taken cities in the global North as their primary reference point, while research in Southern cities largely focused on questions of urban poverty. According to Robinson, the twentieth century enterprise of international development played an important role in the reproduction of this divide:

“With long roots in colonial paternalism and a rise to prominence in the context of decolonisation and powerful neo-imperial ambitions on the part of wealthy nations, developmentalism has functioned to make the experiences of cities in developed and developing, or underdeveloped, contexts appear incommensurable.”⁽³⁶⁾

Instead of this hierarchical categorization of cities into developing and modern, Robinson argued that all cities should be understood as “ordinary” and therefore included in the same field of analysis. The major implication for the practice of urban studies is that Southern cities are equally valid sites for generating theories of urban modernity.⁽³⁷⁾ However, another – perhaps overlooked – implication of Robinson’s argument is that the concept of development is also relevant for understanding inequalities in Northern cities, leading her to advocate “a reframing of urban development as a series of challenges that face the wealthiest and poorest of cities”.⁽³⁸⁾

Importantly, the argument that all cities should be considered both developing and modern is not an attempt to deny or minimize difference. Rather, Robinson’s postcolonial approach seeks to recognize “difference as diversity rather than as hierarchical division”, and that “all cities are distinctive and unique rather than exemplars of any category”.⁽³⁹⁾ In addition, Roy argues that the project of postcolonial urban theory is premised on a questioning of universal claims about the urban, and the centring of “historical difference (i.e. difference constituted through the long histories of colonialism and imperialism)” as “a fundamental and constitutive force in the making of global urbanization”.⁽⁴⁰⁾ While postcolonial urban scholarship’s rejection of North–South binaries seeks to challenge hierarchies in knowledge production, therefore, this is not premised on minimizing or denying geographical inequalities and uneven development rooted in historical processes of colonial exploitation and dispossession.

Significantly, the inclusion of all cities in the same field of analysis as “ordinary” renders them all potentially comparable. As a result, postcolonial urban theory has inspired a new wave of comparative urban research. Robinson argues that assumptions about “the fundamental incommensurability of different kinds of cities” (for instance, when considered as “developed” and “developing”) have traditionally limited the possibilities for comparison in urban studies.⁽⁴¹⁾ In response, she advocates a postcolonial approach to comparison, defined broadly as “thinking through elsewhere”, in which comparing across difference becomes the basis of theoretical innovation.⁽⁴²⁾ A variety of approaches to urban comparison have emerged in the wake of postcolonial urban theory, including: “generative” approaches that examine shared features between cases as the basis of theorization;⁽⁴³⁾ relational geographical approaches that explore how cities are constituted through inter-urban connections;⁽⁴⁴⁾ and Marxist approaches that think through the dialectical relationship between particular urban contexts and more general processes and structures.⁽⁴⁵⁾

Challenging restrictive geographical binaries is at the heart of this new wave of urban comparison. In the introduction to a journal special issue on urban comparison, Robinson celebrates the fact that the collected articles “move beyond geopolitically imprecise propositions of ‘southern’ urbanism to embrace the wider comparative agenda of thinking with the diversity and the profound interconnectedness of the urban globally”.⁽⁴⁶⁾ Within the area of housing studies, Aalbers has called for a relational comparative approach that challenges global North–South and East–West binaries that are premised on the essentialization of difference. Such an approach seeks to explore “common trajectories” between the political economy of housing in different contexts.⁽⁴⁷⁾ According to Aalbers, however, identifying inter-urban commonalities in terms of actors, markets and regulations “does not imply that differences do not matter, but that differences are constructed at multiple dimensions rather than primarily along a north/south or east/west axis”.⁽⁴⁸⁾ By taking difference seriously while also problematizing geographical binaries, postcolonial and comparative approaches to urban studies demonstrate that establishing convergence is not a precondition to thinking across and beyond the global North–South distinction. In what follows, and inspired by Robinson’s discussion of different “tactics” for comparison, we propose three “tactics” drawn from urban studies for thinking globally about development.⁽⁴⁹⁾

IV. Tactic 1: Thinking From the South to Understand the North

A growing body of research challenges binary thinking and subverts conventional epistemological hierarchies by drawing on theory developed in the cities of the global South to understand urban development problems in the global North. This approach recognizes that the conditions of Southern urbanization are paradigmatic of, rather than exceptional to, twenty-first century modernity.⁽⁵⁰⁾ Roy argues that thinking from the South seeks to “bring ‘Third World’ questions to bear on ‘First World’ processes” in order to “unsettle the normalized hierarchy of development and underdevelopment”.⁽⁵¹⁾ This unsettling of geographical hierarchies is evident in the work of Silver, who draws on Southern urban political ecology research to understand water pipeline decay in Camden, New Jersey:

“From high leakage rates to undervalued labour involved in maintenance, to the existence of improvised, non-networked infrastructures, to the spectre of unsafe drinking water, toxic outflows and ongoing disruption in supply . . . what we have come to know as the infrastructural South can be found in Camden. The case showed assumptions concerning infrastructure as a universal, safe and fully functioning system in global North contexts should no longer be taken for granted.”⁽⁵²⁾

Both Northern and Southern scholars have practised thinking from the South by employing theories of urban informality to understand urban poverty, homelessness and citizenship in the US and UK. Within the US, Ward argues that unserviced neighbourhoods in Texas housing hundreds of thousands of residents, primarily migrant workers, should be understood as an example of informal self-help in the absence of state-financed social housing.⁽⁵³⁾ In addition, Roy and Sparks both explore how an informality lens can reveal the forms of political agency being practised through the squatting of empty buildings and establishment of “tent city” encampments by homeless people in cities such as San Francisco and Seattle.⁽⁵⁴⁾ They argue that these practices of democratic self-governance and self-help can be understood as akin to the forms of citizenship practised by informal squatters in the global South.⁽⁵⁵⁾ These informal practices disrupt the hegemonic American paradigm of “propertied citizenship” that frames urban poverty and homelessness as a pathology to be managed through criminalization and welfare state discipline.

Within the UK, Lombard draws on McFarlane’s concept of “informality as practice” to analyse the dynamic interplay of structure and agency in the proliferation of “beds in sheds” (outbuildings used illegally as rental accommodation).⁽⁵⁶⁾ The discursive construction of this phenomenon in the UK has largely focused on the role of agents such as “illegal immigrant” tenants and “rogue landlords”, leading informality to be understood as a product of culture rather than structural inequalities. However, exploring the interplay of structure and agency in the production of informality reveals that both tenants and landlords are responding to structural constraints such as social and affordable housing shortages, the growth of the private rental sector, low wages and welfare and immigration reforms. These insights demonstrate that concepts such as “informality as practice” “have the potential to resonate beyond the ‘Southern’ contexts with which informality is most commonly associated”.⁽⁵⁷⁾

Looking beyond established urban theory, Gillespie et al. draw on research on the biopolitics of surplus populations in the global South to theorize the relationship between austerity policies and urban displacement in London.⁽⁵⁸⁾ While displacement in cities of the global North has conventionally been understood as a product of neighbourhood gentrification, homeless Londoners are increasingly being displaced as a direct result of welfare state restructuring and the categorization of certain social groups, such as the unemployed, as the “undeserving” poor. Due to the inability of established theories of gentrification to explain this new form of displacement, Gillespie et al. looked to debates in development studies about the biopolitical reproduction of populations rendered surplus by capitalist processes of accumulation by dispossession, as with the peasantry in rural Asia.⁽⁵⁹⁾ Doing so enabled an original theorization of urban displacement in London as “the spatial expression of a biopolitical shift away from the post-war role of the welfare state in reproducing those populations who are surplus to the requirements of capital”.⁽⁶⁰⁾ This theorization problematizes distinctions between “insured” life in the North and “non-insured” life in the South by revealing that the UK welfare state is increasingly characterized by a shift away from social insurance and public welfare towards the promotion of self-reliance and individual responsibility.⁽⁶¹⁾ As this example demonstrates, the tactic of thinking from the South to understand the North can generate new insights into global development problems by breaking down theoretical silos and unsettling hierarchical binaries.

V. Tactic 2: Comparing Across Difference

A second way in which urban scholars are challenging binary thinking is by undertaking comparison across contexts that would conventionally be considered incommensurate due to their different levels of development.⁽⁶²⁾ Following Robinson’s call for a new approach to comparative urbanism that takes “any case, any city, any urban outcome” as its starting point, there is now an emerging body of comparative research that examines the commonalities, differences and interconnections between urban development processes in Northern and Southern contexts.⁽⁶³⁾ This is evident in the work of urban scholars associated with the Relational Poverty Network (RPN). RPN builds on “relational poverty” research by the Manchester-based Chronic Poverty Research Centre (CPRC), which analysed how poverty is actively produced through political-economic, social and cultural processes of “adverse incorporation and social exclusion”.⁽⁶⁴⁾ However, whereas CPRC has largely focused on chronic poverty within Africa and Asia, RPN employs a relational comparative approach to examine the production and contestation of poverty across the global North–South distinction.⁽⁶⁵⁾

An example of urban RPN research is Sheppard et al.’s comparison of poverty and informality in Jakarta and San Francisco.⁽⁶⁶⁾ The authors recognize that these cities are located differently within the “global historical conjuncture of neoliberal urbanism” in which cities are compelled to compete with each other to pursue “world class” status: “If San Francisco can be seen as located close to the core of this phenomenon, Jakarta is squarely in its post-colonial periphery, meaning that their conditions of possibility for achieving world class status are very different”. Despite their very different positionality, however, Jakarta and San Francisco “are experiencing remarkably similar politics of relational poverty that revolve around issues of urban informality”.⁽⁶⁷⁾ In both contexts, informal shelter (Kampung settlements in Jakarta and homeless encampments in San Francisco) is key to the survival strategies of the poor. Informal settlements in both contexts can be understood as “spaces for more-than-capitalist practices that can push back against capitalist hegemony” through collective forms of solidarity and mutual support.⁽⁶⁸⁾ However, both cities are dominated by the production of housing for the wealthy and middle class, leading to unaffordability and displacement for the poor. In addition, displacement in both contexts is justified through the discursive framing of poverty and informality as disorderly and out of place. Despite “experiencing a common process of relational impoverishment with respect to housing opportunities”, however, there are important differences between the cities, as Sheppard et al. point out.⁽⁶⁹⁾ For example, differences in wealth explain why state capacity to manage the housing crisis is greater in San Francisco than Jakarta.

Robinson argues that comparisons can emerge out of the personal journeys of researchers,⁽⁷⁰⁾ something evident in Potts’ study of the global urban housing crisis.⁽⁷¹⁾ Drawing on her own experience of travelling regularly between Southern Africa and the UK, Potts challenges the “almost binary approach to the study of urban housing in the Global South versus the Global North”.⁽⁷²⁾ While researchers tend to address the problem of informal housing through the lens of “development” in the former, in the latter the focus is largely on formal market and state provision. Potts’ comparative approach enables her to identify the common dynamic at the root of the housing crisis in cities as different as London and Harare: formal capitalist markets cannot deliver decent housing that is affordable to low-income city dwellers. It follows that the only way to address this fundamental contradiction between housing as a source of profit and housing as affordable shelter is through state intervention to provide subsidized housing at scale, either alone or in partnership with community initiatives such as cooperatives. While comparison enables Potts to identify the “common trajectories” driving the housing crisis in cities globally,⁽⁷³⁾ her argument does not imply North–South convergence. Instead, she recognizes that differences in the severity of the affordability crisis and the extensiveness of informality between Northern and Southern cities are a direct outcome of the lack of large-scale social housing provision in the latter. However, these differences are historically contingent rather than inherent – housing poverty was widespread in Northern cities prior to twentieth-century welfare state expansion, and problems such as overcrowding are becoming increasingly commonplace again as a result of neoliberal policies of marketization and privatization.

An early example of North–South comparison is evident in Castells’ aforementioned study of urban social movements, which draws together examples from Europe, Latin America and the US.⁽⁷⁴⁾ More recently, scholar-activist collaboration with feminist social movements in Argentina and the UK formed the basis of Gillespie and Hardy’s comparative study of urban struggles over “infrastructures of social reproduction”.⁽⁷⁵⁾ Despite the numerous differences between the cities themselves, several commonalities exist between sex worker union organizing in Cordoba and a housing campaign led by homeless women in London. Both movements are led by stigmatized women who initially mobilized around their status as mothers to challenge this stigma. However, as both groups of women became increasingly active in wider social movements, they shifted to identifying primarily as trade unionists and housing rights campaigners respectively. In addition, while both movements originally emerged to contest state oppression (police harassment of sex workers and displacement of homeless women), they have shifted to demanding access to vital infrastructures of social reproduction (health care, education and housing) from which they have been excluded due to their marginalized status. Beyond these commonalities, Gillespie and Hardy identified important differences in the strategies adopted by these movements. In the context of the UK’s universalist welfare state, housing activists in London placed greater emphasis on demanding access to existing public infrastructures by occupying empty social housing units. By contrast, in the context of Argentina’s uneven and stratified welfare state, sex worker union activists in Cordoba placed greater emphasis on co-producing new infrastructures with local government, securing public funding to establish a social centre with a kitchen, nursery, classroom and clinic. Rather than overlooking uneven geographical development, therefore, comparison can provide an insight into the role that “historical difference” plays in shaping diverse urban struggles.⁽⁷⁶⁾

VI. Tactic 3: Exploring Transnational Flows, Circuits and Relationships

A third approach to disrupting North–South binaries employed by urban scholars is the exploration of transnational flows, circuits and relationships that shape urban development across the globe. This approach builds on the tradition of relational geographical thought that moves beyond an understanding of cities as bounded entities to emphasize what Ward terms “interconnected trajectories – how different cities are implicated in each other’s past, present and future”.⁽⁷⁷⁾ In addition, it reflects a growing concern with conjunctural analysis as a means to understand the dialectical relationship between particular cities and general structures and processes.⁽⁷⁸⁾ The urban policy mobilities literature exemplifies this approach in its focus on how so-called “best practice” policies and models mutate as they travel between, and interact with, various cities.⁽⁷⁹⁾ For example, Peck and Theodore examine how the conditional cash transfer poverty alleviation model originally emerged in Mexico before travelling North to influence social policy in the US through initiatives such as the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families programme.⁽⁸⁰⁾ They argue that this policy mobility demonstrates the blurring of boundaries between welfare policies in the global North and South, resulting in an emerging transnational consensus characterized by an “emphasis on work, on investing in human capital, on temporary assistance and on co-responsibility between the state and its citizens”.⁽⁸¹⁾

Shifting the analytical lens from policy to finance, Goldman adopts a relational conjunctural approach to explore how cities in India, Spain and the US have all been transformed through interconnected processes of “speculative urbanism”.⁽⁸²⁾ In each context, global finance has partnered with the state to extract huge profits by investing in “world class” urban infrastructure, while the risks associated with speculation are offloaded onto less powerful social groups. Fernandez and Aalbers argue that housing financialization in the global South has assumed a fundamentally different, “subordinated”, form, as the expansion of mortgage lending has been driven by the recycling of excess liquidity from the global North following the 2008 financial crisis.⁽⁸³⁾ In contrast, Goldman’s account of complex, multi-directional capital flows challenges this hierarchical understanding of the geography of urban financialization:

“Private equity firms based in Singapore, Shanghai, and Mauritius mobilize capital from all over the world to purchase infrastructural assets in Europe, Asia, and the USA. East and South Asian firms are buying up undervalued firms in the USA and Europe as well as land in East African countries and Brazil. This complex map of liquid capital is much more convoluted than an easy portrayal captures of Northern winners and Southern losers.”⁽⁸⁴⁾

Tracing inter-urban financial flows in this way can destabilize assumptions about hierarchical distinctions between North and South.

Scholars working across the North–South divide have identified the importance of studying inter-urban circuits of transnational migration for understanding twenty-first century cosmopolitanism. In contrast to accounts that emphasize the marginalization of Africa in globalization processes, Myers discusses the contribution of the East African diaspora to artistic and cultural life in US cities, revealing “the stretched and straddling geographies of urban Africa in the early twenty-first century”.⁽⁸⁵⁾ Building on her longitudinal study of asset accumulation and poverty reduction in Guayaquil, Moser undertook research with Ecuadorian migrants in Barcelona to understand the importance of transnational mobility to urban livelihood strategies.⁽⁸⁶⁾ Doing so enabled her to document transnational asset accumulation strategies that incorporate “the assets that migrants bring with them, those they accumulate while abroad, and finally, those that are transferred back, directly or indirectly to their city of origin”.⁽⁸⁷⁾ This analysis provides insights into the linked flows of capital and people (from Guayaquil to Barcelona, and sometimes back again), and the ways in which immigrants navigate and change identities of illegality within stratified labour markets and segregated neighbourhoods. These transnational methodological approaches reveal the entanglement of Northern and Southern urban geographies under conditions of contemporary globalization.

Attention to the racialized character of urban inequalities reveals that Northern cities cannot be understood without acknowledging their historical entanglements with processes of colonialism and imperialism. Danewid argues that the 2017 Grenfell Tower disaster reveals how global cities such as London continue to be shaped through their relationships with “(post)colonial peripheries”.⁽⁸⁸⁾ Highlighting the “racialised poor” status of the majority of the victims, she situates London’s unequal urban geography within a global “cartography of imperial and racial violence”.⁽⁸⁹⁾ Danawid draws on Césaire’s notion of the “boomerang” effect of colonial violence to locate Grenfell historically by exploring the circulation of racialized spatial segregation and policing practices between colonial urban areas and global cities such as London.⁽⁹⁰⁾ This relational approach challenges the tendency to analyse inequalities in Northern cities without taking their postcolonial histories into account: “more than a purely domestic problem of widening class inequality under neoliberalism, the makings of Grenfell were inherently global-colonial in character”.⁽⁹¹⁾

Just as cities are shaped by transnational circuits of policy, finance, migration and colonial violence, so they are also remade through inter-urban relationships of solidarity between grassroots social movements. This is evident in a horizontal learning process between women-led organizations in low-income communities in Manchester and Nairobi. Muungano wa Wanavijiji is the Kenyan affiliate of Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI), an international network of federations of the urban poor which organizes women in informal settlements into savings groups as the basis of engaging with state actors to co-produce poverty reduction.⁽⁹²⁾ The visit by members of Muungano to the University of Manchester to teach international development students in 2017 led to a series of exchanges with local women community activists. The outcome was the establishment of a federation of savings groups across Greater Manchester and the north of England.⁽⁹³⁾ Despite significant differences between the two contexts, activists from Manchester and Nairobi identified commonalities in their experiences of urban poverty, including the leading role played by women in social reproduction and community organizing work, and the challenge of accessing adequate shelter in the context of highly commodified housing markets. In the words of Sharon from Manchester: “We’re all in the same boat. We’ve got the same issues as Africa’s got. None of us have got the answers but we can all struggle through to try and get them”.⁽⁹⁴⁾ This sense of common struggle has formed the basis for transnational solidarity and for SDI’s organizing methodology to travel from South to North, disrupting geographical hierarchies of expertise implicit within the international development paradigm in the process.

VII. Conclusion

Horner and Hulme’s call for a shift from an international to a global development paradigm has sparked lively debate over the proper geographical scope of twenty-first century development studies.⁽⁹⁵⁾ Changing patterns of inequality, and the increasingly interconnected and universal character of crises such as climate change and COVID-19, have led some to argue that development scholarship should no longer focus exclusively on the global South, even if lower-income countries rightfully continue to be its primary focus.⁽⁹⁶⁾ However, critics of this approach have challenged the empirical basis of the “converging divergence” thesis in order to argue for the continued salience of the North–South distinction in determining development studies’ geographical scope.⁽⁹⁷⁾ In addition, concerns have been raised about the political-theoretical underpinning of the proposed global development paradigm, and whether it is sufficiently grounded in critical theories that analyse the role of capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy and racism in the reproduction of global inequalities.⁽⁹⁸⁾ In sum, the proponents of global development stand accused of weak empiricism and a lack of engagement with deeper structural processes of change. Rather than attempting to defend the global development paradigm (as previously articulated) by dismissing these criticisms, we seek to move the debate forward by demonstrating that the problems identified are not necessarily an obstacle to thinking globally about development. To this end, we draw on innovations in postcolonial and comparative urban studies to propose three “tactics” for thinking globally about development processes: thinking from the South to understand the North; comparing across difference; and exploring transnational flows, circuits and relationships. These tactics emerged from a movement to challenge the dominance of Northern theory in urban studies, and they demonstrate that it is possible to challenge North–South binary thinking while also addressing the two major criticisms levelled at the global development approach.

First, the three tactics proposed in this paper demonstrate that establishing convergence is not a prerequisite to thinking about development across the global North–South distinction. Instead, the field of urban studies offers tools to think beyond geographical binaries to identify commonalities, differences and interrelations across diverse and unequal contexts. Furthermore, rather than minimizing North–South inequalities to justify comparison, postcolonial and comparative urban scholarship is grounded in an explicit engagement with the significance of processes such as capitalism, colonialism and imperialism in producing uneven geographical development. This demonstrates that recognizing the ongoing significance of what Roy terms “historical difference” is not a barrier to thinking globally.⁽⁹⁹⁾ While the question of North–South convergence is important in its own right, therefore, undue attention has been paid to it when discussing the merits of a shift from international to global development.

Second, the three tactics proposed in this paper are informed by feminist, Marxist and postcolonial theoretical approaches that animate a deep commitment to understanding and transforming the structural causes of inequalities globally. As the example of horizontal learning between Manchester and Nairobi demonstrates, thinking beyond the North–South binary can inform transnational solidarities by identifying unexpected commonalities between struggles for social justice in diverse contexts. These tactics, taken together, address Ziai’s call for a critical approach to global development⁽¹⁰⁰⁾ and demonstrate how thinking globally can advance “a radical politics of development”.⁽¹⁰¹⁾

This paper has argued that the debate around the proper geographical scope of development studies can benefit from a greater engagement with innovations in postcolonial and comparative urban studies. We are not suggesting that urban scholars have nothing to learn from the field of development studies. We consider both disciplines to be enriched by a complex trans-disciplinary engagement – the long-standing normative and reflexive traditions within development studies inform our engagement as urban scholars with disadvantaged individuals and groups, while the contribution of critical theoretical approaches to analysis and practice is central to both disciplines. In addition, as Goodfellow and Kelsall et al. demonstrate, development studies research on “political settlements” has the potential to enrich understandings of how clientelistic relations between different social groups shape urban development processes and create openings for urban movements to achieve progressive change.⁽¹⁰²⁾ As these synergies suggest, there is much learning to be gained from further interdisciplinary exchange between global development and urban studies.