Urban crisis? Reconstructing a ubiquitous concept

Abstract

The concept of crisis is ubiquitous in urban studies. It is contested and debated across the multi-disciplinary field and in the public sphere. Recent research builds on longstanding debates about how to use the concept with greater precision and efficacy. Employing Janet Roitman's concept of anti-crisis, this intervention argues for recognising the boundedness of the concept, and for working more reflexively with and against it.

Introduction

Crisis is everywhere. The concept is stretched this way and that throughout the traditions and practices of urban research. The idea that the survival of human and non-human life on Earth is in peril has become mainstream in scientific thinking. Extinction is part of everyday vocabulary, a plausible ecological fate (Davidson and Kemp, 2024). For many among the global majority, the apocalypse is already here, both as an experience of repeated ruination and as a political demand, from below, to annihilate the institutions producing ‘apocalypse from above’ (Davidson, 2025). The sense of apocalypse that is beginning to permeate the decaying Western capitalist core is more recent: war, hunger, disease, extreme heating, resurgent nativism and mass displacement, not to mention falling profitability, accumulation crises and secular stagnation, are the zeitgeist.

What can this conjuncture/epoch be other than a meta-crisis or poly-crisis? Perhaps it is ‘just capitalism’ (Holgersen and Blackwell, 2025)? If crisis is everywhere and everything, all the time, what use is it? Do ubiquity and imprecision render the language so banal that we need alternative vocabularies? Would stepping outside the concept, if momentarily, help clarify its utility for urban theory? But, if we are uncomfortable with the ubiquity of crisis-talk, what can we say instead?

Urbanists have begun to address some of these questions. This intervention seeks to take the debate a step further, employing the work of Janet Roitman, Anti-Crisis (Roitman, 2013), as a provocation. It suggests that the notion of anti-crisis can enable us to work reflexively with and against the myriad conceptualisations and diagnoses of crisis in our field.

Who owns the urban crisis?

The vocabulary of crisis is ubiquitous in urban studies and urban life, capturing a vast array of perspectives from the experience of physical and emotional stress and privation, to the structural contradictions of capital, spatial fixes and switching crises, the political-economic decline of Western hegemony and the study of social explosions that erupt into the political arena, with greater or lesser lasting impact (Davies, 2025).

Originally credited to fantasy fiction writer Michael Moorcock (1963) and introduced to the social sciences by Marshall Berman (1996), the term ‘urbicide’ has become markedly more popular in the past 15 years as a crisis marker describing phenomena from the envisaged obsolescence of flood zones like Miami (Wakefield, 2022), to the urbicide-genocide in Gaza. For Wakefield, the significance of urbicide is that it substitutes the pervasive risk-naturalising (and anti-crisis) concept of ‘resilience’ with a planner's prognosis for ‘urban doom’ that necessitates extreme interventions. It captures the widespread sense that urban crises are escalating and becoming unmanageable, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic (UN-Habitat, 2022).

It is important to acknowledge that a crisis is wielded adeptly across the political spectrum (Weaver, 2017). At stake is who gets to decide the terms – who inaugurates and ‘owns’ these crises (Bayırbağ et al., 2017). Hence, the battle over whether the climate emergency requires drastic measures to prevent further heating, and impose the costs of heating onto the rich (Connolly and Grove, 2021), or whether the real emergency is the threat to ‘white’ working class jobs and livelihoods posed by the campaign against fossil fuels, and the influx of immigrants ‘dirtying’ our cities and polluting the environment (France 24, 2019). In 2022, reports Holgersen (2025a), ‘polycrisis’ became a Financial Times word of the year ‘and was reportedly on everyone's lips at the 2023 World Economic Forum’. The difficulty in defining and claiming political ownership of such a capacious concept is self-evident.

Holgersen (2025a) calls crises manufactured by pro-systemic forces and the radical right ‘pseudocrises’. The 15-minute city was one seemingly innocuous concept that led to moral panic about authoritarianism and population control in urban planning. This panic was raised against what seemed (to this writer) nothing more than another managerial fad, attempting to sanitise injustices of (sub)urbanisation in a way that could readily function within an orthodox political-economic framework, like the ‘smart city’. The idea of the 15-minute city is that people should be able to meet most of their daily needs – work, school, shopping, health care, leisure – within a 15-minute walk or bike ride from home, a manifesto that calls for liveable, sustainable urban design (Moreno et al., 2021). Who could possibly object to that?

The aspiration quickly encountered a fierce backlash from conspiracists alleging that it threatens control of movement through measures like ‘climate lockdowns’ (Marquet et al., 2025). In some cities, this crusade had a major impact. In Oxford (England), death threats to council workers were made, and planners dropped the language (if not the underlying policy goal) as ‘toxic’ (Horton, 2024). Here, the far right manufactured and, in some cities, gained political ownership of a crisis. Such episodes are deemed ‘pseudo-crises’ by Holgersen (2025a) because they are detached from underlying material conditions. Yet, they have powerful material effects. Crisis for threatened council workers must have felt real enough. Yet, the unexpected politicisation of the 15-minute city also presents an opportunity to re-frame geographical injustice as a crisis, for example, phenomena like Baltimore's demographic ‘black butterfly’, the result of racist planning and urban development for over a century (Pill, 2020). Is a ‘true’ 15-minute city possible without recognising and rectifying the human crises that arise from Baltimore's spatial injustices? The concept of the 15-minute city shows how the summoning, narration and ownership of crisis is always a political struggle.

Deconstructing crisis

Urban theorists have taken up the challenge of problematising our deployment of crisis-talk, addressing the ubiquity, polysemy and lack of analytical specificity in the concept. One approach is to distinguish crisis from not-crisis, crisis from normality or political-economic fast-time from slow-time (May, 2017). Colin Hay (1999) introduced the metaphor of punctuated evolution to distinguish the slow accumulation of pathologies within a system, from the manifestation of system crises in politics. These occur when pathologies can no longer be contained as latencies and explode into the political arena. It is the terms of political contestation that define a social crisis: narration and articulation. The most potent of these crises, Hay argued, produces historical tipping points, propelling a political-economic system onto a new course. Defeats inflicted on the organised working class in the early 1980s were an important and necessary tipping point in the advance of neoliberalism in the UK and the USA.

Holgersen and Blackwell (2025: 1529) build on Hay's approach, also drawing from Roitman (2013), arguing that features often described in the language of urban crisis, such as the cost and quality of housing, ‘might just be capitalism’. They argue for a more precise conceptualisation of crisis as a social paroxysm, which gets away from the structural tendency towards accumulation crises. The working class usually loses out during slumps, they argue, which provide an opportunity for capital to restructure. In this sense, crises of profitability are not ‘opportunities’ at all. The social paroxysm is much more likely to occur in the midst of war, state crisis and the conspicuous defeat of a ruling class. Holgersen (2025b) argues that shocks are not to be conflated with crises either. Capitalism has significant ‘bouncebackability’ as it demonstrated following Donald Trump's April 2025 tariff announcement, which led to a short-lived stock market crash followed by a sharp spike in share prices. The same occurred after the much greater initial shock of the COVID pandemic and lockdown in 2020. Capitalism recovered, and the costs were successfully offloaded, leading to a huge increase in urban poverty across the planet (UN-Habitat, 2022). This is not to say that these events were structurally insignificant or will not have long-term ramifications, but that they did not lead directly to a crisis in the sense of either economic meltdown or social paroxysm.

More radically, Holgersen and Blackwell (2025) argue that we need new ways of thinking about crises. Twentieth-century (European) crisis conjunctures were relatively clearly demarcated, at least with the benefit of extended hindsight. Where revolution gave way to reaction in Russia after 1917, and economic collapse to fascism in Germany, the great depression and WW2 ushered in Fordism-Keynesianism in Europe and the USA. The crises of Keynesianism in turn created opportunities for neo-liberalisation, already well established as an idea in intellectual circles and through the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005). There is no reason, however, to expect that these relatively clear-if-messy conjuncture shifts will be replicated in the 21st century, an expectation implicit in the popular neo-Gramscian language of ‘interregnum’. The idea of the interregnum posits a period of relatively ‘stable disequilibrium’ (Thomas, 2009: 215) between full-blown crises and either side of an ordered, productive accumulation regime (or more optimistically, revolutionary transformation). However, thinkers on the interregnum are clear that there is no necessary forward move or resolution (Stahl, 2019). Periods of extended stagnation and iterative decline are not unusual in historical terms either (Davies, 2021). Whither, then, the concept of urban crisis and its cognates?

Boundaries and exteriors to crisis?

Following Janet Roitman (2013), one answer is to more clearly recognise boundaries between the concept and its exteriors. Roitman argues that periodisation of the kind common in interregnal or conjunctural thinking (Ó Rálaigh, 2025) can lead to misdiagnoses and unrealistic expectations, especially if imbued with an implicit commitment to the idea of historical development and progress. She therefore argues that we need to go further than recognising the contested character of ‘crisis’, to acknowledge how it serves as ‘an enabling blind spot for the production of knowledge’, with ‘unremitting and often implicit judgment about latencies, or errors and failings that must be eradicated and, hopefully, overcome’. She asks:

How did crisis, once a signifier for a critical, decisive moment, come to be construed as a protracted historical and experiential condition? The very idea of crisis as a condition suggests an ongoing state of affairs. But can one speak of a state of enduring crisis? Is this not an oxymoron (Roitman, 2013: 2)?

Following Roitman's logic, crisis arguably continues to serve as a ‘transcendental place-holder’, providing us with a secular philosophy of contingency and redemption (Roitman, 2013: 94–5). Roitman's concern is not to dispense with crisis, but rather to ask what the language obscures, such as the tendency to produce teleologies of error, restitution and progress, and consider what might be gained by reading history and events through other lenses. She does not propose alternative master-concepts, but rather encourages us to consider different worldviews and render the epistemological work of crisis-talk more transparent. What, Roitman asks (2019), are the ‘possibilities generated by suspending the concept of crisis as a foundation for narration and critique’?

Roitman's main target is the way that elites invoke crisis to sustain authority. In the case of Chad, deemed a governance failure by the international community, she shows how the manufacture of ‘fiscal crisis’ was used to impose neoliberal rules of ‘good governance’ and stigmatise local traditions and practices as a deviation from the ‘proper’ trajectory of state development. This form of domination is familiar in research on austerity urbanism, where debts and deficits are narrated by elites as fiscal irresponsibility, spending beyond our means, instead of resulting from a system that is built from its foundations on debt, borrowing and ‘fictitious capital’ (Harvey, 2012).

Roitman extends her critique to Marxism, which, through temporal concepts like conjuncture and interregnum, tends to accentuate latent potentialities for rupture, whilst concealing the productive potential in existing practices that make life possible in the here and now. Though Roitman eschews alternative or complementary master-concepts, her approach has distinct affinities with thinkers who look at cities and societies through a more granular, less historically portentous, and more present-centred lens (e.g. Bailey et al., 2017; Clark, 2012; Holloway, 2005).

Rethinking the ‘crisis of neoliberal globalism’

What difference might an anti-crisis perspective make? I here critically reflect on my own recent work (Davies, 2021, 2024, 2025), itself replete with talk of crises, interregna and conjunctures. As someone immersed in these concepts, I consider how stepping beyond crisis might offer a productive complementary framing. Recent work is framed by the argument popularised in critical urban studies that neoliberalism is ‘dominant but dead’ (Smith, 2008), and challenged by the contending but often overlapping worldviews of neoliberal globalists, anti-austerity egalitarians and reactionaries. These conflicts are producing hybrid and variegated experimentations with authoritarian and illiberal state capitalism(s), sometimes triangulated with (racialised) redistributive rhetoric (Alami and Dixon, 2024; Stahl, 2019).

Davies (2021) calls this period the ‘crisis of neoliberal globalism’, understood as a structuring tendency arising from tendential exhaustion in neoliberal accumulation regimes and repertoires of political control. The research, which explored austerity governance and resistance in eight cities, concluded with a taxonomy encompassing each of the cities and the relations of their local states (in the Gramscian sense of the term) to this conjunctural framing. The result was a grouping of three regime types derived from the intersections of five common factors present in the urban governance arena. These were consolidating austerity regimes, fading austerity regimes and evolving regime alternatives, such as the (now former) new municipalist state-civil society administration in Barcelona (Bua and Davies, 2023). None of these regime types problematise the initial characterisation of a crisis in neoliberal globalism, but rather show how cities are working with and against it.

Observing a ‘crisis of neoliberal globalism’ produces a set of meanings translated into an analytical framework for comparing disparate, de-centred case studies of urban austerity governance from a conjunctural perspective. This approach sought to cast light on broad urban geographical trends. But, what could be gained in such a study from deconstructing the underlying premise? It could readily be argued in the ‘minor Marxist’ key (Bailey et al., 2017) that positioning the cases in and against the crisis of neoliberal globalism obscures local nuances, practices and preoccupations that might have little to do with neoliberalism or crisis, and that the framework over-dramatises the period and neglects the importance of the everyday (Holloway, 2005).

However, the research did de-centre austerity, exploring what the concept meant locally among local state and civil society actors. We discovered that austerity had vastly different meanings and circumscribed applicability across the eight cities (Davies et al., 2022). This de-centring was fruitful, because not all cities recognised the problematic of austerity in the way that we initially thought they would. Those who did often meant quite different things by it. A similar manoeuvre could put the crisis itself on the table, inviting respondents to problematise and assess the value of the concept in thinking about their cities. With whom does crisis-talk resonate? Who steers clear of it and why? Where does political “ownership” of the concept reside? Respondents might deliberate on what kind of urban politics follows from crisis or non-crisis framings. As with austerity, this approach could contribute to revealing the empirical boundedness of the concept and other concepts invoked by respondents against or alongside it. It could capture new perspectives on the potentialities and actualities of change in urban life, and disclose the temporal orientations of different actors towards past, present and future. In addition, an anti-crisis vantage point problematises the historical framing and future-thinking built into the underlying conjunctural perspective, however carefully qualified this might have been with conditionality and provisionality.

Conclusion: with and against urban crisis

This counterfactual thought experiment on a crisis-focused research project illustrates how stepping outside the concept could open up new, potentially fruitful problematisations, albeit without necessarily invalidating the old ones. The concluding proposition is that urban crisis is best thought of as a boundary concept (Leigh Star, 2010) with an exterior that, in these ‘turbulent times’, can elude us as critical urbanists. Those doing ‘boundary work’ aim to enlarge or restrict the influence of concepts, obscuring or revealing theoretical and empirical worlds that lie beyond them. If nothing else, stepping outside urban crisis, if only momentarily, holds out the potential for more reflexivity and precision in how and why we use it.

The tactic of de-centring crisis could also be useful in conjunctural analysis, interpreted by Peck (2024) as an explicitly political search for crisis-potentiality. Peck (2024: 468) argues that the normative orientation of conjunctural research is towards ‘moments of crisis, contestation, and sociopolitical urgency, and to sites where new explanations are needed’. The analytical orientation, meanwhile, is to ‘discrepant, unsettled, or anomalous situations presenting at the limit of, or as challenges to, extant understandings’. Following Roitman, however, an equally productive form of conjunctural analysis might be to search out what ostensibly seems that it *should* be in crisis, but is not. Understanding tactics, strategies and practices of normalisation remains a crucial task in exploring the reach and limitations of systemic power, and in working reflexively with and against favoured conceptual frameworks.

There are likely no satisfactory taxonomic or conceptual solutions with which to conclude the debate about when to invoke or steer clear of crisis. However, engaging with Roitman (2013) illustrates how we can fruitfully reframe crisis as a boundary question simultaneously considering limits to the concept, the means by which crises are routinely repressed, and positively seeking out dynamics of ‘becoming’ in the interstices of crisis-latency and crisis-manifestation. Problematising crisis in this way could make it an even more productive lens for urban theory.