Ontological locationalities: Moving beyond North–South binary and interrogating what gets studied

Abstract

Recent calls in urban studies emphasize the need for inquiry to look beyond North Atlantic circuits of knowledge production, encouraging research to venture beyond the metropolis. These calls advocate engagement with empirical and theoretical insights from multiple elsewheres that have been conceptualized as peripheries. In this article, I contend that more studies from peripheries would not alter the North Atlantic knowledge hegemony, as the ontological locationality of these endeavours remain metropolitan. I argue that we first require distinctive formats, methods, and theories to discuss where our concerns arise from: it is crucial to recentre and re-contextualize uniquely positioned researchers within the particular circumstances of contemporary urbanization processes. Thereafter, I propose the possibilities for pluriversal urban theories and dialogues, to be able to at least start the process of dislocating the ontological hegemony of the metropolis, which embodies the power to decide what is there to be known from these peripheries.

Introduction

On the first day of July 2021, we woke up to a water-cut. It was the high heat of Florence's summer, with a 3-week-old infant in the house and no water to drink. There was a billing issue between the landlord who did not live in the building and the water suppling agency. As a result, our domestic water supply was abruptly cut off for three days without any notice, explanation, or alternative provision. The irony of this is that in Florence (Italy) water (both still and sparkling) are provided free of charge through public taps.

This incident reminded me of the case I was studying in 2015–2016 in Delhi (India). Rather than cutting the water supply, the technician stopped opening the valve during the stipulated hours. He had conflicts with the community and refused to go work in the area, leaving the community waterless. At that point, I was studying informal practices and the community's negotiations with the Delhi Water Authority made my case for informality as a practice (Palat Narayanan, 2019). The 2021 water cut experience, conjured me to revisit my 2015–2016 field notes to re-analyse how the community in Delhi coped and managed with their water cut.

There is, of course, a difference in position. I am privileged, could take a hotel room, and had the social means to make the lessor pay for it. However, this article is not about the access to water, but the formation of research concerns by recentring the researcher. We as researchers are trained to be objective, not let our idiosyncrasies govern or effect our research as much as possible, that is, be aware of our epistemological locationality. However, the ontological locationality, ¹ that is, where our research concern emanates from, is what I would like to discuss in the article.

When I went back to my fieldnotes, there were no details as to how the community in Delhi survived during the days when water was not there. The rich details of negotiations with the state officials, the organization of the community and political actions were in stark contrast to lack of specifics about the community's coping up during the period without water. Why/how did I as a researcher missed these details, is a probing that illustrates that the research-questions/concern and the resulting data collection/creation are subjectively constructed by the researcher. Or put otherwise, if my latest interest in coping without water resulted from my experiences in Florence, then how is Delhi my field? Or am I learning from Florence or Delhi (even though I am getting my data from Delhi)?

I would like to contextualize the above snippet within the recent calls for more research from the south (the diversity and contestation of this south withstanding) (Lawhon and Le Roux, 2019; Robinson and Roy, 2016; Roy, 2016). South here represents a varied set of locations/positions that are peripheral to urban studies’ endeavour to understand the world(s) (Palat Narayanan, 2021, 2022). Omission of these peripheries leads to partial or obscure understandings, which befits the call to study the less studied (Connell, 2011; Oswin, 2020; Roy, 2016). Using terms like non-west (Coetzee, 2021; Huyssen, 2008), global east (Müller, 2020; Shin, 2021), provincial (Beebeejaun, 2022; Houssay-Holzschuch, 2020), extensions (Simone et al., 2023) and south (Guma et al., 2023; Waisbich et al., 2021; Zaragocin, 2024), to list a few, researchers have argued towards a greater engagement with the peripheries (to use Connell’s (2011) formulation of metropolis-periphery).

In the article, I argue that more theorization or empirical studies from souths or peripheries would not be sufficient unless we investigate the ontological locationalities of these studies. Ontology or the question of what is there to know, is deeply political and located at the confluence of knowledge and power (i.e. the metropolis). In our push towards the southern turn, we should not forget the locational specificities of research concerns, which dictates what should be studied from these souths, or to borrow Taylor's (1989: 103) words, ‘Geographers like all members of humanity are shaped by their own geography…’.

Ontological locationality, in short, is the locationality of the research concerns, that is, it is a set of locational factors that dictate the relevance of research questions. Discussing the development of critical geography in Palestine, Falah and Abu-Zahra (2022: 20) has argued:

While Palestinian geographers have indeed ‘chosen’ what to do and what not to do, … much of this ‘choice’ has been - and continues to be - a response to their circumstances, in particular, of dispossession, denationalization and denial of their history, presence and rights.

The ‘dispossession, denationalization and denial of their history’, are external factors to the Palestinian geographers, that is, it is not their choice (to use Falah and Abu-Zahra's formulation). Thus, I use the term locationality and not location, to refer to the nexus of factors in and beyond the researcher's choice and evoke the same difference as between position and positionality. Further, an Israeli scholar researching from Palestinian locations may not necessarily have the same ontological locationality (c.f. Golan, 2002). Thus, the arguments I would like to make, in general, is beyond the geographically located differences of global North and South binary (or West and the rest). The story is much more complex than that (c.f. van Heur, 2024). In the following section, I will develop more on this complexity and the importance of ontological locationality, thereafter its possible future pathways.

Ontological locationality of research(ers)

Introducing the metropolitan locatedness of academic journals, Müller et al., (2024: 2) presented an impactful example ² :

Imagine you are getting off the train in a city you are researching for the first time. You do not speak the language, and the smells and sounds are new to you. Fortunately, two colleagues, both urban researchers, are waiting on the station platform to help you better understand how this city works. They ask you to choose which of them will be your guide. The first colleague, let us call them J, is a world-renowned expert in urban theory and professor at a prestigious Ivy League university. They do not speak the language, and the last time they visited this city was for a few days, during a conference, about ten years ago. The second colleague, Y, grew up in this city. They speak the language and are a professor of urban studies at the local university. Which would you choose to be your guide? Most people we asked this question chose Y… This paper shows, however, that the real guide in our field is much more likely to be J. It argues that this leads to an impoverished understanding of cities and outlines ways of changing this situation.

The above example very precisely captures the need to understand the knowledge imbalances and metropolitan biases in urban research, which was briefly discussed in the introduction. However, for this article, more than professors J and Y, my interest is in the researcher who just got off the train. By excluding the researcher, there is a seeming objectivity, wherein Y is preferable because, obviously, Y knows more than J about the city. Let us reinsert the researcher in this equation and assume their ontological locationality to be similar to that of J. (Although a mere assumption, however, since Js of the world publish in leading journals, are read more, discussed more by other researchers in the field, and decides on key disciplinary questions, it is a highly plausible assumption.) Then, what the researcher is interested to know about the city, would in all probability, be better encapsulated and explained by J. The researcher and J speak the same language, in that their research concerns are the same, thus their approach to understanding the city would also be similar. Contrarily, howsoever deeper, understandings of Y would not interest the researcher as much because that is not what they are studying or interested in. Müller et al. (2024) demonstrates that Js of the world overshadow the urban knowledge production even though the Ys of the world may know more about the multiple urbans. I would add that, what the Js of the world are saying is what the discipline wants to hear, while what the Ys of the world are saying are merely interesting particularities (c.f. Alatas, 2024; Roy, 2016). Therefore, the question this section focuses on is the ontological locationality of the researcher, rather than which researcher is studying what locations or how much they know about it.

There is merit in theorizing from the peripheries like Global South or what Nugraha et al. (2023) has termed overlooked cities, primarily because they are lesser studied locations. It is enriching for it contests the theories built using few cases from the metropolis, c.f., Ghertner’s (2015) pertinent critique of gentrification theory. However, it is equally important to enquire as to what is a periphery and what gets studied from these peripheries. Here I use periphery as a relational and hybrid term, that is, periphery is periphery only in relation to the metropolis. Theoretically thus, both metropolis and periphery are not fixed terms, their geographies, temporalities and scales change, for example, Shin’s (2021) argument on the peripherality of Eastern Europe (generally considered part of Global North) or Mukhopadhyay et al.'s (2020) discussion on the metropolitan nature of certain cities in the Global South, or my argument elsewhere about the metropolis and periphery coexisting in the same city (Palat Narayanan, 2021). Consequently, when we read the periphery and metropolis as relational, we can move out of the global North–South or more-studied less-studied binaries, and focus on what is being studied. Furthermore, as metropolis refers to the confluence of knowledge and power (Connell, 2011), theoretically, they hegemonize what gets studied from the peripheries (Alatas, 2022; Hountondji, 2009; Mbembe, 2020; Patel, 2019; Robinson and Roy, 2016; Roy, 2014; Sud and Sánchez-Ancochea, 2022).

If we understand the metropolis as a relational term, then, ontology located therein also has to be read relationally, ³ which is why in this article I use the term ontological locationality and not ontological location. I draw inspiration from discussions about positionality (Bandauko, 2024; Mackay and Bishop, 2022; Oswin, 2020); however, I would flag at the outset that the aim here is not to discuss the positionality of the researcher, rather to position the locationality of research concerns. Here, Sheppard's (2002) overlaying of geography and feminist theory becomes pertinent to understand positionality, which clarifies my use of the term ontological locationality. Outlining the relative nature, Sheppard (2002: 318) has argued:

My use of positionality is influenced by feminist theory, in which positionality was coined to describe the situated positions from which subjects come to know the world… Positionality and the societal and biophysical processes that influence it both shape and are shaped by space/time.

Sheppard’s (2002) use of subjective worlds does allow and deduce a pluriversal politics, but herein, I intend to argue the distinction between the positionality and ontological locationality. Positionality is how subjects come to know the world, while ontological locationalities are the situated positions from which subjects (researchers more specifically for this article) decide, what aspect of these worlds to render visible, that is, what to study/research.

The above discussion leads us to recentre the researcher in the research practice, that is, to enunciate where our research concerns are coming from. To recentre the researcher is to acknowledge and investigate what Mignolo (2005: 122) describes as the geo-political and bio-political nature of knowledge production:

…knowledge is geo- and bio- politically constituted. That is, geo-politics of knowledges derives from local experiences (as science derives from local experiences of Western capitalist countries) in which the geo-historical aspect accounts for the tension, negotiation, and violence in all the terrains touched by Western colonial expansion; while the bio-political accounts for the experiences, needs, angers, interests, and critical acumen of the ‘scientist’ or critical intellectual who feels in her or his body the colonial matrix of power and translates it into conceptual analysis and arguments toward the decolonization of knowledge (that is, one of the fundamental components of the colonial matrix of power).

Mignolo's argument become more pertinent here when juxtaposed with Roy's (2016: 201) complimentary emphasis to locate (urban) theory, which outlines the politics of research in general and theory in particular:

But I start with this rather personal story because, while I have made a case for paying attention to the ‘geographies of theory’…, such geographies are also necessarily biographies. Those biographies indicate the ‘politics of location’, a term I borrow from feminist poet Adrienne Rich …, within which we are centered or marginalized. To speak is to speak from a place on the map which, as Rich reminds us, is also a place in history. And yet theory is so often characterized by its disembodied voice and unmarked location. To embody urban theory, to mark its location, to trace its biography, is a crucial step in acknowledging and analyzing …the culture of theory: ‘the habitus that regulates ‘theory’ as a discrete set of practices’ in fields of academic knowledge.

The above-mentioned evasion or universal (without specific location) nature of theory remains in contrast to the locatedness of empirics. Empirics do discuss the geo-bio-politics of knowledge (Mignolo, 2005) and is spoken from a place on a historicized map (Roy, 2016). This overt enunciation allows for the evasion of ontological locationality, or to use the language of the above two quotes, the geo-bio politics of what is there to know or worth knowing is almost always evaded and written universally without locating it on a historicized map. To elaborate, let us come back to the idea of field, it is not only the location from where data is collected/produced (in a constricted sense) but also where the researcher must change to the role of recording ‘data’ objectively by transforming themselves into neutral beings. There is much emphasis on how to reduce the bias during fieldwork (Hitchings and Latham, 2020; Johnsen and Fitzpatrick, 2022). This approach, in an abstract sense creates a notion of knowledge that is field centred. That is, there is the field from where data is collected or constructed, this data then leads to theorization and production of knowledge. Thus, is the genesis of calls to diversify the fields and learn from the peripheries (hitherto less-studied fields). In this process, the biases of the researcher are acknowledged, leading to better and more objective collection of data. What this process evades is the formation of questions and concerns before the field research (or even archival research), which is dependent on the researcher's experiences outside of the field (howsoever peripheral the field may be).

Based on the discussion in this section, there are two aspects to the ontological locationality. First, the ontological locationality of the researcher, which leads to particular kinds of research and research concerns. Second, the hegemonic ontology located in the metropolis which is perpetrated as universal. These two are not mutually exclusive: research based on metropolitan ontology garbs as universal and the rest remains particular. This does not mean that the later is not encouraged, however, as Oswin (2020: 13) has forcefully articulated, ‘It demands that subalterns speak while allowing and encouraging hegemons not to hear’. This propensity is what in the first place has been critiqued for a southern turn, as Connell (2011: 44) has discussed:

…the very idea of theory involves talking in universals. It is assumed that all societies are knowable, and they are knowable in the same way and the from the same point of view. That this point of view originates in the metropole is not explicit. Indeed, this has to remain tacit – for if it were made explicit, universal relevance would immediately be called into question. [Contrarily] Intellectuals in the periphery cannot universalise a locally generated perspective because its specificity is immediately obvious. [bold mine]

Multiple ontological locationalities of the researchers could lead to multiple possible researches, what Simandan (2019) has explained as situated knowledge(s). However, the hegemony of the metropolitan ontology, only let certain of those multiple possibilities materialize (c.f. Connell, 2011; Patel, 2018). Probably to highlight these metropolitan tendencies, Gutiérrez-Aguilar (2012: 52) marks that ‘theory, as a privileged position from which to see things, is almost always constructed from the dominant social position’. In sum, the issue here is that the peripheries are studied using what is there to know of the metropolis, thus relegating the importance of more studies from these peripheries.

In this section, I discussed how the ontological locationality of the researcher dictates the research concerns. However, the hegemony of metropolitan ontology privileges only certain forms of knowledge. In the next section, I open the dialogue to move forward and think about research in pluriversal terms.

Possibilities for pluriversal urban theories and dialogues

This section is suggestive and aimed at tackling the issues identified in the previous section.

Metropolitan theory tends to be universal (Chakrabarty, 2000; Connell, 2011; Nigam, 2020), thus I position this article to move out of this tendency using pluriversality (Escobar, 2020; Ferretti, 2023). Pluriversality as Escobar (2020: 15) demonstrates is entangled with debates on ontology:

By showing ethnographically how a variety of realities are cancelled based on the assumption of a single ‘external reality’, we can begin to counter this ontological politics with a different politics based on multiple reals—that is, on radical ontological difference and pluriversality.

Here I draw from James and Steger’s (2023) work, who did a broad review of pluriversality in the globalization literature and argue them in phases. The final phase, pluriversal theory 3, which they link to Escobar's (see above) notion of ontological politics, is important for this section. Ontology is inherently political, and in this sense, what we study, that is, the research questions/concerns ought to be read as political. The discussions until now in this article make the case for promoting radical ontological differences and pluriversality, however, how to do it is what I am unsure of (thus this attempt to dialogue).

There are three key manners in which we can at least start to imagine possibilities for pluriversal urban theories and dialogues: formats, methods and theories. I will briefly develop them below.

Formats: Formats refer to the material output of our academic production, for example, journal articles, book chapters. While I agree with the diversification of academic production and dissemination of knowledge (c.f. Fall, 2021), here I would focus on writing. Discussing the metropolitan locatedness of research concerns in and from Africa, Hountondji (2009: 128) has argued:

Too often do we tend to investigate subjects which are of interest first and foremost to a Western audience. Most of our articles are published in journals located outside Africa and are meant therefore for a non-African readership. Even when we happen to publish in Africa, the fact is that African scholarly journals themselves are read much more outside Africa than in Africa. In this sense, our scientific activity is extroverted, i.e. externally oriented, intended to meet the theoretical needs of our Western counterparts and answer the questions they pose.

Hountondji’s (2009) straightforward critique is a critique of hegemonic metropolitan ontology. That is, what becomes scholarship is dictated by research questions and concerns of the metropolis. To this end, Müller et al. (2025) argue towards diversifying journal editors and editorial board members, thus broadening the ontological locationalities of the gatekeepers. This is indeed a step in the right direction, say if a certain international journal always tends to have more editors from Glasgow or Melbourne, it is important to diversify, however it is not sufficient. Insufficient because, diversity amongst authors or editors leads to the focus on positionality, which although important, is not sufficient to engage with ontological locationality (based on the discussions in the previous section). Furthermore, the terms of this diversification (gender, institutional affiliations, minority status, etc.) are pre-dictated from certain ontologies, most often metropolitan (c.f. Nayak, 2025; Toraif et al., 2023).

We could start to tackle the above problematic by looking instead at the diversity of what gets published. Editorial boards are starting to realize the need for a change (Moreno-Tabarez et al., 2023; Sawyer, 2022), but here I am arguing for a change that would allow discussions on ontological politics (c.f. Korf et al., (2013)), which needs explicit enquiry into ontological locationality rather than acceptance of diversity. I am signifying here for more meta-analysis of publications. For example, if a journal commissions yearly reports on what questions (in a broad sense) were discussed, in a few years we will start to see the trends. What I am suggesting here is not definitive, but more to acknowledge that we need to start discussing the formats of our knowledge production to undertake investigations on ontological locationalities.

Another way forward is to allow for space within an article to discuss where the research questions come from, similar to the methods section which discusses the choices and locations of empirics. However, the primary issue with discussing ontological locationality individually at the scale of an article is that it tends to become anecdotal and self-reflexive (as is the introduction of this article). There is a merit in doing this, which could productively lead to what Waisbich et al. (2021) has termed polyphonies or as Roy (2016: 201) has contended that ‘biographies indicate the “politics of location”’. However, herein I am aiming more to discuss the collective rather than individual, for example, what gets identified as relevant questions for urban studies (c.f. Rakhmani and Sakhiyya, 2024). It would be a pertinent discussion around the data on how many articles were rejected from an urban studies journal for it being not pertaining to urban studies or how many times bibliographies have been critiqued by reviewers for not including metropolitan authors. When contemporary literature is problematizing the notions of urban (Brenner and Schmid, 2015), what ontology allows for the exclusion of certain scholarship as not urban studies/research (c.f. Jazeel, 2018) or certain authors as insufficient for being references (Roy, 2016). Here again, more than the critique of publishing practice, I am arguing for first having a basis to understand the politics (explicit or implicit) of the formats we package our knowledge in.

Methods: I use methods to further problematize the discussions above on formats, most notably the need to outline/discuss ontological locationality. A linear line of thinking would be: there is an ontological hegemony of the metropolis, one reason is because we as researchers do not discuss ontological locationality, thus, a possible way forward would be to discuss ontological locationalities. However, the operation of hegemony is not linear, that is, the metropolitan hegemony operates in the way we think about ontological locationality itself. Take for example, how we verbalize our own experiences. Outlining the process of interviews and recounting of the past, de Silva (2014: 443) has argued:

Narrative draws on memory. Still memory is never a simple, factual recounting of past events. It is rather an account of emotional and cognitive experiences of specific events, filtered through cultural metaphor, myth and idiom. Such ideological tools allow both the listener and speaker to make sense of the event reminisced: to decide who was the victim, who the perpetrator and who the spectator. Thus, the act of remembering is never entirely a private or idiosyncratic exercise but one that holds larger, collective dimensions. Memory allows the speaker to construct a personal narrative, which is at the same time a social commentary on his life and times.

Read from de Silva's (2014) discussion, self-reflexivity is located and most often is rendered through the lens of the metropolis. Accordingly, the critique of metropolitan hegemony in itself is ontologically located in the metropolis, that is, the pertinence of discussions here emanates from the metropole (c.f. Vasudevan and Novoa, 2022). Making a similar argument on the use of South, Zaragocin (2024: 2) has discussed:

In my own scholarship, I have noted that I use the term ‘Global South’ mainly when I write in English and for a Global North-based audience. Rarely do I use the term Global South within Latin America and even less so when I reference decolonial spatial configurations such as Abya Yala and Améfrica Ladina. Much of the literature available on the geographies of the Global South is not being written or conducted from an understanding of the Global South within this part of the world.

Here, yet again, as a starting point, we may have to accept and always keep in the purview the metropolitan rootedness of metropolitan critique. Although self-reflexivity is constructed (as de Silva (2014) discusses) it could at the least start the dialogue (as Zaragocin (2024) discusses). This dialogue is necessarily metropolitan, however, paves the way to discuss methods that are radically against universalization yet globally relevant. Thus, we need a diverse set of methods to uncover ontological locationalities, as well as to allow for critically re-evaluating our knowledge production practices.

Theories: The discussion on formats (need for discussing ontological locationalities) and methods (the problems with discussing ontological locationalities), brings us to the third aspect of theories. We need to understand how to theoretically (in plural) grasp the ontological locationalities and the hegemony of metropolitan ontology. As seen from the above two discussions on formats and methods, metropolitan hegemony subsumes in itself its own critique. Thus, we need newer theoretical tools to understand ontological locationalities.

Connell (2011) has argued that the subjective understandings of the metropolis are rendered as objective, which paves the way for its hegemony. Thus, one possible starting point would be to move out of objectivity, as Gutiérrez-Aguilar (2012: 53) has argued:

A theoretical strategy to understand recent social movements and rebellions in their historical scope, in contrast to the classical meaning of the word theory, does not have the pretense of obscuring, in the name of some notion of objectivity, the subject that it theorizes. Rather, it seeks to present events and facts as practical productions and reflections of socially situated people, who in turn assume certain political intentions (whether such intentions are explicitly mentioned or implicitly understood). The theoretical strategy I propose is thus not embedded in a tradition that favors the production of objective knowledge but rather in that of a practical comprehension of the social event of rupture and resistance, including the challenges such events pose to the social order by those who produce it.

Gutiérrez-Aguilar's (2012, 2014) position radically challenges the universality of the metropolitan theory and argues for an alternative that is not based on assuming similar power, but stepping out of the structures externally assigned. This radical position allows for an understanding and appreciation of theory that is merely one of the many possible manners of theorization: laying the base for pluriversality.

In this section, I outlined three key manners in which we can start to engage with ontological locationalities. I presented them as one of the possibilities, albeit with a potential to be the initial ones. They are related to each other, for they complement and complicate, the solutions each of them tends to propose. They are not definitive, but I am assuming that they allow at the least for the possibilities for a dialogue to move forward. Most importantly, when they come together (or when read together) forms the base to call for pluriversality in urban studies. Of course, what this pluriversality would be, is not only a difficult question, but answering it would necessarily require to position the responder in the metropolis (to have a singular and dominant position). Pluriversal position would as an initial step allow for (at least theoretically) a plurality of research concerns (all equally pertinent) and an appreciation for not understanding the world in totality.

Conclusion

Marking a shift in urban studies, Roy (2016: 201) has argued almost a decade ago that ‘… theory is so often characterized by its disembodied voice and unmarked location’. Roy's assertion becomes further pertinent to conclude this article when read alongside Gutiérrez-Aguilar's (2012: 52) argument that ‘theory… is almost always constructed from the dominant social position’. My arguments in this article have been building on these two complimentary positions, to assert the location of theory, by way of ontological locationality, and to critique theory's construction from the dominant social position, by way of critiquing metropolitan locatedness of ontology.

In the first part of the article, I discussed the importance of ontological locationalities and its need in contemporary urban research. The second part is an invitation to dialogue on how to tackle this issue of both (a) identifying the ontological locationalities and (b) countering the hegemony of the metropolitan ontology. I suggested three starting points, (i) formats: discussing our knowledge outputs, (ii) methods: discussing the methods we can employ to understand ontological locationalities and finally (iii) theories: discussing the basis to move towards pluriversality. These starting points remain part provocations and part suggestions, intentionally written to problematize the issues at hand rather than offer clear solutions. That is, the idea behind formats, methods and theories is to create a rufflement, which would start carving out the way. The three starting points further converge in arguing towards a pluriversal position in urban studies. A pluriversal position, inherently means a move away from neat consensuses (c.f. Escobar, 2020; Mignolo, 2005) and countering of understanding the world in totality (c.f. Connell, 2011; Simone, 2022).

Throughout the article I mobilized Connell’s (2011) formulation of metropolis and periphery, which learns from the global North–South binary but disassociates from its fixed geographical connotations. Thus, allowing us to ask the question as to what the periphery is a periphery of, leading to understand both metropolis and periphery in relational terms. This then led to the discussion on ontological locationality, which was discussed using the rich debates on positionality. Positionality, shaped by multiple factors, regulates how we (subjectively) understand the worlds. However, ontological locationality regulates which of these worlds become worth studying or be termed knowledge (objectively). Metropolitan locatedness of ontology limits the research questions being asked, irrespectively of whether these questions are answered from metropolises or peripheries. In this theoretical impasse, the article suggests pluriversality as a way forward. Pluriversality, the acceptance of multiple worlds, theoretically eliminates the need to filter only certain worlds (from a wide array of worlds that multiple positionalities render), thus countering the metropolitan rootedness of ontological locationalities in urban studies. This does not relegate the metropolitan hegemony on ontology, but merely identifies it and calls for ways to collectively tackle it. Hegemony of metropolitan ontology has a direct impact on how we study and understand our world(s), how the state and the society act and how certain forms of practices become a norm.

As metropolis is the confluence of knowledge and power, it does follow the geopolitical and economic position of countries and regions. A pithy look at the countries from where authors of urban studies come from would make this clear. For example, ⁴ the majority of articles published under the category of urban studies before 2000 are by authors in USA, UK and Canada (in that order), to which, post 2000, China is added as second (before UK and Canada), tidily following the broad geopolitical and economic trends. I have avoided the geopolitical discussions in the article to keep the focus on research(er), which does not mean that factors that traditionally differentiated the North–South distinction between countries are not important. There are, of course, a multiple set of factors, that govern knowledge in general and ontological locationality in specific. Although, this article is very modest when it comes to large number of factors affecting knowledge production, it nonetheless argues to move beyond tokenism and start to develop measures to overcome this hurdle (c.f. Zhao, 2020).

Discussing the notion of south (as the other of metropolis), Sud and Sánchez-Ancochea (2022: 1144) has argued:

As academics and teachers, we have found it useful to trace the complex, multi-layered making of the South. These layers point to why the concept is ‘sticky’ and cannot be dislodged with the tokens we see around us. That is, changing a name, or including a representative from ‘the South’ at a conference, diversity event or on a reading list, is a step in the right direction, albeit a small one. Far greater efforts are needed to get to the heart of the matter, which is fundamentally the (re)production of a deeply hierarchical world, and the power that may be both enhanced and possibly challenged in the process.

It has been some decades that we are talking about the hegemony of the North Atlantic knowledge production circuits and it is indeed time to ‘get into the heart of the matter’.