For a new Dark Age in urban theory

Abstract

In ‘On Resisting the Seduction of Theory’, Robert Lake suggests theory is not fit for purpose. In this commentary, I suggest theory doesn’t mean what he thinks it means and that his envisioned alternative of ‘doing’ won’t, in the current moment, produce the results he seeks. In lieu, I propose that an ethics of both knowing and doing might be what urban academics most need right now.

As an early graduate student in Economic History about 15 years ago now, I remember reading with fascination about the curious case of the construction of European cathedrals in the early Middle Ages. ¹ This era is often pejoratively thought of as the ‘Dark Ages’, a time traditionally considered to be lacking in all the most important realms of cultural, political or scientific achievement, and long (mis)understood to be an age of ignorance and isolation. Contrary to this reputation however, a fair number of great, imposing cathedrals with impressive heights, arches, and other sorts of accoutrement one expects to find in European religious buildings date back to this era. They are of roughly similar style and age (give or take a few centuries) and are found scattered throughout many parts of Europe, indicating shared networks of knowledge and materials distribution. Yet they were also built during a time without access to the sort of architectural or mathematical theory their makers should have needed to construct such buildings. Brunelleschi hadn’t built his dome, Cartesian coordinates remained unknown, nor had the printing press been invented. But somehow here they are anyway, dotted throughout European landscapes despite scholastic puzzlement at their existence.

As I read Robert Lake's provocation, ‘On resisting the seduction of theory’, my mind kept returning to those theoretically improbable cathedrals. In what follows, I will use them to draw out a few different implications I believe they hold for Lake's argument that scholars of the urban should give up theory and make the ‘transition from knowing to doing’.

From Kuhnian to Klumian paradigms?

Lake's provocation takes up a longstanding philosophical debate on the role and responsibilities of theory within academic knowledge production writ large (e.g., Guba, 1994; Kuhn, 2012; Popper, 2002). He draws a compelling and high stakes picture of what is perhaps the foundational scholastic paradox: what is the relationship between theory and reality when it comes to finding ‘the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything’?

In the first half of his piece, Lake is at pains to explain just how utterly social theory has failed in this task. Rather than building upon successive advancements on the path to Truth and Understanding, Lake provides an (at times charmingly auto-biographical) sketch of the seemingly random evolution that theory has taken in urban geography and planning circles over the course of his own career before coming to the conclusion that broad theoretical acceptance is really, at heart, just a fashion contest and has nothing at all to do with Truth or Understanding in the ultimate sense. The latest urban theory to turn heads he says, will very likely have a progenitor already in possession of a bit of celebrity, who is able to put a well-turned phrase to its best effect, and who has a knack for being able to package it all in a timely context that resonates with their peers. We have reached a point that, for Lake, seems to be dangerously quixotic. A state of affairs captured by the tagline of Project Runway, a well-known fashion design competition hosted by supermodel Heidi Klum: ‘One day you’re in. And the next, you’re out’.

Ultimately, Lake argues attempts to represent reality or achieve social change through the application of theory are ‘futile’ at best and often disingenuous to boot, as increasingly extreme theoretical complexity leads to sublimating real world research and relations for ‘a false sense of engagement’ (p. 12). So, rather than continuing to pursue the vagaries of what's hot and what's not in urban theory, Lake urges urbanists to forgo their obsession with the latest theoretical trend and to change the ‘academic['s] project from representing the present to discerning ways of creating a better future’ (p. 12).

Going back to those cathedrals I opened with, in many ways their presence appears to support Lake's call to move from knowing to doing – to move from ruminating over capricious ideas to building something tangible in the world. For me however, their existence indicates that we need to rethink what we recognise as theory. Who is considered capable of theorising and whose work should be recognised as the outcome of a theory imbued project or process? The people who built those cathedrals weren’t trained architects, mathematicians or engineers, but rather guild-based craftworkers assisted by lay people. They didn’t have the benefit of theory as we know it today and perhaps didn’t completely understand why their processes worked the way they did. But they had ideas and insight gleaned from both shared and inherited knowledge, and years of everyday engagement with the tools of their trade. Through practising their craft they were able to build a sense of what edges can be pushed, which boundaries can be played with, what textures can be changed to create a new effect without spoiling the general purpose of the thing. That is to say they were working the same lines between abstraction and materiality we have come to recognise in the modern era as the theorist's field of play.

That these Dark Age cathedrals exist at all is evidence of the fact that theoretical approaches to engaging the materiality of everyday life have not ever been the sole domain of academia. As Jamaal Wright (2017) has put it elsewhere: ‘the public is intellectual’, too. Understood in this light, I suggest that what Lake presents as a strict separation between knowing and doing doesn’t really exist. To take another example, the late nineteenth century settlement house movement the paper discusses as an early case-study of moving from knowing to doing is undeniably simultaneously both a theoretical project about improving the urban condition and a social practice, complete with fallible human beings trying to bring about beneficial change. Further, while I agree with Lake that what he perceives as a mercurial churn of theory may indeed hold a fair degree of whimsy and cynosure of celebrity, I also see the incorporation of perspectives previously historically excluded from serious theoretical treatment. Many of these projects, whose rising star Lake seemingly attributes to the vagaries of theoretical fashion -like racial capitalism, postcolonialism and ‘three or four waves of feminism’, for example, were in existence prior to their academic debut, in the form of inherited knowledge and generations of accumulated insights of people working to break the conditions of their oppression. As such they are themselves fundamental contributions to Lake's ‘doing’ project of creating a better future.

To sum up my points, moving from knowing to doing is not possible in the way that Lake lays out because there is always already theory in ‘doing’ projects (like the Dark Age cathedrals and 19th century settlement houses) and, conversely, there is always already doing in ‘knowing’ projects, a point I return to below. For me it's a good thing that ‘theory, like hemlines changes with fashion’, as Lake writes, because while not all changes in hemlines are significant, sometimes they very much are – as, to say the least, the connected (but not causal) histories of women's hemlines and the enduring fight for our bodily autonomy bears witness.

From cartesian anxiety to ‘anxieties of affluence’

‘Of course I know you’re a Socialist. So am I. I mean we’re all Socialists nowadays. But I don’t see why you have to give all your money away and make friends with the lower classes’. – Hermione Slater in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, George Orwell (1936)

I started out with guild-based craftwork in the Dark Ages to show how and why I think there is always theory in ‘doing’, and that one of the benefits of theoretical churn, at least for me, is an increased exposure to different forms of knowing that are embedded in various social practices and projects. In the short amount of space I have left, I want to turn to the other side of this relationship and talk about the implications for academics regarding the proposition that there is also always doing in theory. I have already gestured to this in terms of the underlying sources of insight inherent to racial capitalism, postcolonialism and feminist approaches, but now I want to provide a serious consideration of what sorts of ‘doing’ would be mobilised under Lake's call.

One of the most profound implications of Lake's proposal is the ‘requisite change’ on the part of the scholar, who must ‘relinquish the arrogance of aspirations to Truth or Understanding and…embrace humility in the face of uncertainty and indeterminacy in the world’ (p. 13). Here Lake is challenging urban scholars to overcome their own sense of Cartesian anxiety, to forgo ontological certainty in exchange for simply working toward making the world a better place. A project I unabashedly support. Cartesian anxiety is not, however, what I think is at the heart of the scholarly tendency toward theoretical fetishisation. Or at least, it is not the entire story.

In making the move from knowing to doing, Lake is asking a broadly affluent crowd (tenured and tenure-track, research intensive academics) to philanthropically cross-class boundaries in a downward direction, like the settlement house movement organisers did in the 19th century. In fact, when read through the lens of the socio-economic class composition of academia writ large, Lake's proposal contains an uncomfortable amount of noblesse oblige, as indeed, the settlement house movement also seems to have done. Let me pause to make a temporary aside: Despite received wisdom that higher education is a mechanism for class mobility, it has become pedagogical best practice to warn ‘first-gen’ graduate students that the more advanced the degree they seek becomes (or the more elite the institution they find themselves in), the more their peers will possess increasing amounts of personal and/or family resources, far exceeding their own. Further, as any first-gen or ‘blue-collar scholar’ will tell you, it is exceedingly uncomfortable much of the time to cross-class boundaries. It is an isolating, alienating and regularly (if unpredictably) socially embarrassing experience that permanently changes those of us who go through it in ways that are sometimes hard to reconcile with our sense of self.

Returning now to the point at hand, that is a huge social-psychological barrier to overcome for anyone, and Lake's provocation to do so for altruistic reasons becomes even more complicated considering that denial of affluence is a now well-known hallmark of the affluent (Friedman et al., 2021; Phillips and Lowery, 2020; Sherman, 2017). For example, when I make a mess of things with more affluent colleagues, typically the only one hurt or embarrassed is me (and potentially my career prospects). At worst, I have made a peer or manager feels awkward or thinks less of me. Crossing class-boundaries in the opposite direction however, particularly when the denial of affluence expresses itself during fraught moments of fieldwork, it is often community interlocutors who are forced to absorb the repercussions of the affluent academic's failure to reconcile their theoretical working-class identity with social reality.

Things are getting weird

Whisper networks have long shared horror stories about how (unacknowledged as such but relatively affluent, typically white) scholars who seek fieldwork experience with marginalised social groups sometimes (probably unwittingly but that is irrelevant) cross ethical boundaries with their host communities in ways that perpetuate historical violences rather than mend them, or that ethnographically centre their own experience of a social world that isn’t meant for them to share or to interpret (e.g., Goffman, 2014). Crucially, these disastrous encounters further create ideal excuses for other affluent academics who find it difficult or anxiety-inducing to talk to people they do not already share a social language with, to retreat into comfortable corners of theoretical debate or perhaps choose to focus on understanding the role of experts or urban elites, those more likely to already be their socio-economic peers. ‘I don’t want to risk my reputation saying or doing the wrong thing’ is an unspoken fear that belies unexamined class-difference. ‘Better to let someone already from that community do that kind of work’.

In my view, these unexamined dynamics also play a formative role in the production of a bizarre historical moment in which ‘insider’ status has obtained such a vaunted epistemological position that it has given rise to the astonishing trend in which (affluent) white scholars adopt racialised identities to claim intellectual authority over their subject areas (e.g., Rachel Dolezal, Jessica Krug, CV Vitolo-Haddad). ² More invisibly yet more broadly pernicious in its effects, notice that these sorts of ‘anxieties of affluence’ (Sherman, 2017) create opportunities for other less- or non-marginalised scholars to easily excuse themselves from discussing processes and experiences of marginalisation at all in their own courses and research. Relatedly, in recent years many academic units have also found themselves feeling compelled to hire scholars from marginalised backgrounds to teach and research exclusively about marginalisation, so no one else in the unit really actually has to, anymore. ³ Now that a predictable (and predicted) revanchist backlash to such hiring practices has begun, these new (and of course, still marginalised) colleagues are the ones who are exposed to a high degree of professional risk, while those who have always had the right to choose between either embracing or withdrawing from uncomfortable research questions or institutional practices remain largely safe from scrutiny (see Ahmed, 2012 for more).

This is how ‘knowing’ projects are also, always, forms of ‘doing’. And it's why, when Lake suggests we move from knowing to doing, I balk, thinking of the mayhem to follow in the wake of unexamined affluents seeking to do good in the world. I am admittedly painting with a very broad brush and of course there are exceptions to everything I’ve discussed, but the main thing I want to communicate is that we have to figure out ways to identify and improve the forms of doing embedded in our approaches to knowing. I have focused here on why it's important to expand our register of what actually constitutes theory, both in terms of who can do it and how it is constructed. As a first step, those of us concerned with making urban worlds better places might look to reinvigorate debate on the ethics of knowing and doing in the urban. This is a topic that has not really ever disappeared (e.g., Derickson, 2015; Peake et al., 2025; Roy, 2016), but a lively debate in the context of the dark days to come given our current era of rising revanchist neo-fascism and DEI gone wrong, is desperately needed. Many thanks to Robert Lake for re-opening that conversation at such a vital juncture.