Contexts and contestations of crisis urbanism

Abstract

This commentary discusses Ross Beveridge, Roger Keil and Maryam Lashkari's theoretical development of ‘crisis urbanism’ that they regard as a concept, method and process. By drawing from diverse literature, they present a comprehensive theorisation that calls for understanding the poly- and permacrisis that are linked with the urban way of life. In this commentary, I raise questions about taking the abstraction of ‘crisis urbanism’ to different urban contexts where global crises unfold in place-specific ways. I, furthermore, emphasize how the crisis talk is inseparable from other dominant discourses of hope, care and radicality that diversify political agencies in cities today.

Whose crises, whose urbanism?

Ross Beveridge et al.'s (2026) article on crisis urbanism regard cities as ‘places and moments in crisis’. They suggest that ‘we are in a permanent crisis mode’, and that the effects and causes of the crises are condensed in cities. The importance of the topic is undeniable as various crises come together in new ways and need to be addressed by scholars from around the world. The emphasis on crises is in synchrony with the notions of the world going through ‘uncaring times’ (Sheringham, 2025: 266) and ‘negative times’ (Rose et al., 2021: 1), how crisis urbanism is intensifying also in the Global North (Brickell et al., 2017), or how cities are nowadays considered responsible not only for local matters but also for wicked global problems (Barnett, 2022).

Beveridge et al.'s (2026) article is rich due to the varied viewpoints it takes to crisis urbanism. Therefore, instead of approaching the topic from a totally new angle, I raise some questions that could be elaborated and investigated further: How does the notion of crisis urbanism limit and diversify our understanding of urbanism? How to avoid theorizing that is influenced by the urban life of dominant cities in the Global North? What kind of hierarchies and powers are built if such cities are set as a generic prototype of a city? Whose urbanism and crises are we talking about? What are the places and scales of crises? If the notion of crisis urbanism opens new avenues for understanding cities, to which direction does it guide us?

The authors highlight that in urban theory, it is crucial to understand that crises always lurk in cities, at least in the lives of some people and places. This means that crises should not be seen as ruptures or exceptions that are faced only in unlikely situations. Instead, different crises are present simultaneously, producing and being produced by urban lifestyles. The concept of polycrisis binds together crises of all kinds: ecological destruction; social, economic and health crises; food insecurities; geopolitical turmoils; democratic decline or violence of all kinds. Bringing together these and other types of crises has two effects: it advances realizing their interlinkages, yet prevents going to the details of the crises. Take, for instance, housing crises whose geographically restricted investigations include details concerning issues like affordability, evictions, homelessness, squatting or displacement. The wider starting point of crisis urbanism could be one way to expand these issues to the ‘urban logics of precarious housing […] that stretch across cities’, being at the same time unique and common (Brickell et al., 2017: 2), and enhancing the understanding of the linkages between crises.

The development of many crises fits into the conception of slow violence: they have mostly developed unnoticed – either out of sight or not taken seriously – and become realized when it is too late to prevent crises from happening (Nixon, 2011). As noted in previous scholarship, urban crises have been there all the time. They have just been experienced more permanently in the cities of Global South, whereas the crises have been more episodic and targeted to urban poor in the Global North (e.g., Brickell et al., 2017). The most drastic change that has happened is that the crises have taken more permanent forms and caused long-lasting effects also in the Global North, making the most privileged citizens more vulnerable to them.

Thinking of the concept and method of crisis urbanism in different parts of the world reveals the need for a plurality of perspectives. Most obviously, learnings from both the Global South and Global North are valuable in this. As a scholar from a Nordic country, I regard equally valuable the perspectives from peripheral urban contexts, middle-sized cities, and societies that are usually not in the core of urban theorizations. In these contexts, crises are actualized, lived and experienced differently than in larger Western cities from where the inspiration for theoretical development is most often drawn. Closeness to nature, low population density or the remnants of the welfare state model are among the reasons that produce crises that are experientially different. More than being details from a handful of cities, these experiences could diversify the conception of crisis urbanism and its actualization in different parts of the world.

Radically cared crises

Since crisis urbanism is about urban ways of life, the next step from Beveridge et al.'s theoretical text could be to explore everyday places, practices and politics with the four modalities that the authors suggest: chrono-politics, spatial-politics, statal-politics and epistemological politics of crisis urbanism. This would help to evaluate what the crisis theorization does for the understanding of urban life, how it can grasp power and politics in places, and how polycrises are embodied and lived. Here microscale exploration is important: as noted by Chris Philo (2021: 61), ‘even the smallest aspects […] may be loci of suffering’, or as Eleanore Jupp (2023) emphasizes, everyday life produces its own crises that are experienced as dramatic, yet lived through in everyday routines. This suggests that the most dramatic and experientially significant crises of everyday life might, still, be exceptional and episodic. The theoretically and methodologically interesting question is, how to relate these different aspects of crisis together: those of everyday life that might be related, for instance, to urban inequalities or social crises, and the perma- and polycrisis of global scale. These crises, after all, come together in the urban ways of living.

As noted by Beveridge et al., previous decades’ fashionable responses to crises – namely ‘resilience’ or ‘resilient city’ – focused on the results of crises, not so much on their causes. In Shaking Up the City, Tom Slater (2021) recently explained these problematics by starting with the etymology of ‘resilience’. The term refers to avoidance and can be seen as ‘an attempt to make people more tolerant of miserable situations and environments, in which the reach of realistic ambition is simply to survive’. Even though resilience might help to cope with the crisis, ‘it does not help people change the things they cannot accept’ (46). Emphasizing resilience, thus, normalizes crises and restricts seeing alternatives to it. Other responses to crisis urbanism are, thus, more relevant for theoretical development.

Beveridge et al. write that ‘the problems of the city cannot be resolved only within the city, and it will be necessary to engage the state’. Cities are, still, equally important, and so are the counterforces of communities and networks that reach beyond the borders of cities, neighbourhoods or states. Even though crisis talk has increased in cities, so have the discourses and actions of hope, care and democracy. Many cities are adhering to ways of advancing democracy, creating prefigurative practices, or practicing radical municipalism (e.g., Jupp, 2023; Roth et al., 2023). In addition to these formal counterforces, valuable are also the learnings from communities, such as alternative communities that have long-term experiences of urban ways of life and fight against crises such as those related to democratic decline, climate change, or housing affordability.

‘Radical care’, for instance, reacts to the logic of the pervasiveness of crises: it de-centres normativities, contests the logics of neoliberalism and capitalist practices (Sheringham, 2025), imagines and builds caring urbanism and urban futures, or emphasizes knowledge gained by lived experiences and creativity (Miraftab, 2023). The power of such care practices is in their exceptionality: they are not joyful experiments, or optimistically seeking for potential and possibilities that Rose et al. (2021: 2) criticize for being ‘disconnected from the reality of our time’, and ignoring the limits of human capability. The value of radical work is that it does not only resist the situation, but also aims to transform the situation and imagine alternatives for it. The most important is its intellectual work that creates alternative logics and new spatial imaginaries, and at the same time refuses to settle into the status quo of crisis (Olufemi, 2021; Quizar, 2022).

Limits of crisis urbanism

Whether thinking of crises or the ways to overcome them, one thing is sure: discussion on urban crises and responses to them is lively, and needs new theoretical and methodological approaches. Beveridge, Keil and Lashkari's article is a contribution to this debate, being a comprehensive report on how urban crises have been approached and how, based on scholarly literature, a new theorization of ‘crisis urbanism’ could unfold. Crisis urbanism is an all-encompassing concept, process or method that brings together diverse literatures and regards crises as ‘part of a wider condition of urbanity’. That way, crisis urbanism is somewhat difficult to comprehend: it remains abstract and placeless unless it is linked with the specificities of urban experiences of crises. The next step, I suggest, is to discuss the four overlapping modalities that the authors suggest, within actual cities. By learning how the chrono-politics, spatial-politics, statal politics and epistemological politics of crisis urbanism unfold in different urban contexts would reveal the aptness and limitations of this theoretical formulation, and would help to develop it to the direction where spatial inequalities, place specificities, political agencies and linkages across borders and scales could be addressed further.