Crisis and the urban imagination

Abstract

What are ideas like ‘polycrisis’ doing to how we think and research the urban? How might we ensure that discourses and conditions of polycrises do not erode our collective sense of possibility? How might we remain attentive to the politics of visibility of crises, i.e. to those crises we choose to see and those that might remain obscured but which are worthy of greater attention? In this short piece, I consider these three questions and their relation to the larger imperative of staying alert to how the designation of crises can not only populate, but colonise the critical imagination.

Introduction

Crisis is, to be sure, an overused term these days. It is both increasingly prevalent and put to work to describe a wide range of conditions of different temporal and spatial dimensions: an event, a chronic condition, an endemic feature of capitalism, and a moment radical uncertainty during significant change in distinct domains, including the social, economic, ecological, organisational, medical, personal and so on. The designation of a ‘crisis’ might act to politicise or depoliticise a situation, might generate action or demotivate, might provoke progressive or regressive responses and might be loud and visible or quiet and hidden (Dimitrakou and Ren, 2025). Most significantly, crisis-thinking features increasingly through the neologism of ‘polycrises’, a loose term for both the interconnected and co-location of multiple crises, particularly the confluence of climate, pandemic, war, authoritarian trajectories, inequality, and the sense of generalised uncertainty and destabilisation that accompanies all of that.

We could of course be more specific and precise with our language. There are likely to be many cases where the term ‘crisis’ might be better substituted with other terms – ‘problem’, ‘challenge’, ‘dilemma’, ‘impasse’, even ‘issue’ – and it is surely important to be mindful of how using the term might itself serve to disrupt or provoke thought and action in ways that we might not wish. But as much as it is wise to attach a clearly marked ‘handle with care’ label to crisis-designation, what is more pressing is confronting the more straightforward realisation that, put simply, crises are deepening and multiplying. If the term crisis is being put to work to describe more and more of what we see around us, including in relation to the urban, it is not because it is being miscategorised or as a result of a sloppy use of the term. Rather, it is because in so many domains, including urban life, cities and urbanisation, we are at a turning point. We are increasingly witnessing conditions of emergency and disaster, however unevenly those conditions are felt and distributed.

Nonetheless, it is important that we collectively discuss what it is that ideas like ‘polycrisis’, and the thinking and approaches that accompany generalised crisis-thinking, might enable and close off for critical urban research. To that end, in this short piece, I will set out three questions for urban research. First, have discourses and conditions of polycrises had the cumulative effect of changing how we understand and research the urban? Second, how might we ensure that discourses and conditions of polycrises do not erode our collective sense of possibility, and closely related to this, how to avoid the active hijacking of crisis-talk by the political Right? And third, how might we remain attentive to the politics of visibility of crises, i.e. to those crises we choose to see and those that might remain obscured but which are worthy of greater attention? Across these three questions is the larger imperative of staying alert to how the designation of crises can not only populate, but colonise the critical imagination.

Crisis and the urban

The first of those three questions, then, is whether the presence of overlapping and interconnected crises has changed how we understand and research the urban. Have we reached a point at which a material and imaginative threshold has been crossed, in which the urban has shifted from a container of crises to one produced, experienced and imagined through crises? There is a growing sense that when we research any one issue in the city, the presencing of multiple crises seeps into how we think and research that concern. So that, for example, the crisis of housing, which of course is always already a relational concern, is now all the more deeply intertwined with other crises – climate, authoritarian impulses, finance, mental health, race and class, gender and sexuality, the right to the city and so on. The sense of polycrises generates an imperative to always be moving onto something else, even as we stick with the one site, subject or question, so that an issue like housing has become a different kind of conceptual, political and research problem. We might say something similar for other urban domains – infrastructure, land, governance, health, public space and so on.

In other words, rather than seeing ‘crisis’ as an idea that is separate from the ‘urban’ and imagining that our task is then to work out how the two might relate to one another, there is instead a deeper, more co-constitutive relationship between the sense of intensifying and proliferating crises impacting the urban, and how we then understand and research the urban. This line of thinking relates to, but is distinct from, the critical Marxist tradition of positioning crisis as inherent to capitalist urbanisation, because what I am pointing to here is a co-location of multiple crises of different kinds simultaneously – from ecology and war to precarity, inequality and health – that then become constitutive points of departure for thinking the urban in general and in its different forms and expressions.

Crisis has always been to some extent or another inherent to thinking and acting in and on the urban and urbanisation. The potential shift I am pointing to here is, then, one of extent; a generalised conceptual and political sense of a watershed or threshold passed, rather than a qualitative shift. What it poses is nonetheless a significant challenge: how might we think, research and politicise the urban under conditions of polycrises? If this is a question we are collectively only beginning to pose, debate and respond to, it is likely to become more pressing in the years ahead.

Crisis and the possible

If the first question above is about what polycrises might be doing to how we think the urban, the second question I want to raise is an imperative to be vigilant about the colonising effect of crisis-thinking. How do we avoid talk of polycrises overwhelming our collective and individual sense of the possible? At worst, crisis can entrain a sense of hopelessness and withdrawal. As urban history has shown, the political Right needs no invitation to occupy that space by attempting to discursively and materially diagnose the problem, solution and future. Too often, it is marginalised groups – migrant communities, asylum seekers, those living in precarious and popular neighbourhoods of different kinds, and so on – who become the objects of blame for this or that crisis (housing shortages, budget deficits, job scarcity, infrastructure dysfunction, strained public services and so on). I do not believe we should be afraid to use the term crisis to describe the litany of deeply serious conditions connected to cities and urbanisation processes today, but it is equally important to be critically vigilant as to how those in power and on the Right (very often the same people, of course) put discourses of crisis to work, and even how our own crisis-talk can inadvertently play into those hands.

One way to think about this problem is to recognise that cities and the urban condition have always been, to one extent or another, caught in a dialectic of crisis and possibility. At different times, the former threatens to overwhelm the latter, and certainly our current moment can feel like such a time, yet cities are always capable of surprise, difference and excess. Cities produce solidarities, alternative thinking and experiments, new ways of seeing and acting, and are replete with small and large gestures and interventions to make life better for more of the people more of the time. It is difficult to imagine such progressive possibilities in the face of the tragedies of total devastation in Gaza, where the very idea of the urban is at stake and each day brings horrifying stories. We are faced with a crisis in the form of a genocidal attack that seems to break a sense of the possible, notwithstanding vital forms of resistance, solidarity and support (Yiftachel, 2022; Ziadah et al., 2025). If crises of different kinds place the deep and dense heterogeneities and connective possibilities of the urban condition at stake, those same conditions nonetheless remain progenitors of the possible.

It is surely vital to find ways of documenting, understanding and supporting those forms and moments of progressive change, large and small, and in ways that take us positively further forward than discourses of resilience and endurance in the face of crises can do, important though those processes nonetheless are. An important resource here is the urban imagination, the capacity to speculate, envision, dream, story and experiment (Benjamin, 2024). Individual and collective urban imaginations can be colonised by crises, but they can also be provoked by it in new ways. Who do we imagine with? How do we work beyond the academy, including with those bearing the brunt of crises of different kinds, to imagine alternative presents and futures for the city and urbanisation? And how might we nurture those imaginaries collectively, attentive to the challenges that any collaboration and partnership brings?

In crisis conditions, the imagination may seem a luxury or an indulgence, but as Benjamin (2024) argues and as the long history of thought and research on the geographical imagination, including in cities, reminds us (Gregory, 1994), it is in the face of crisis that the power and importance of the imagination – as both individual expression and collective experimentation – to spark the new and keep the beat of the possible must be protected and nourished. In thought and practice, the progressive urban imagination is a resource for disrupting and exceeding the colonisation of crisis-talk.

Crisis and visibility

This takes me to my third and final question: how might we remain attentive to the politics of visibility of crises, i.e. to those crises we choose to see and those that might remain obscured yet worthy of greater attention? There are worlds of hidden and quiet crises in our cities, forms of slow violence and sudden collapse, intensifying struggles and threats to the most basic of life supports, that suffer additionally by being unheard, overlooked or marginalised in our accounts of cities and urban change. Crisis-talk itself can contribute to this, where particular crises – especially climate or skulking political authoritarianisms – dominate the urban imagination and urban research agendas.

My context for raising this is the growing inequalities in cities globally in access to decent sanitation conditions. This is a set of issues that I have been working on for over two decades, ever since conducting PhD research in low-income neighbourhoods in Mumbai and having people continually raise the issue of decent toilets, waste removal, clean water, drainage and the like. I have never hesitated in calling the global conditions of sanitation inequality a ‘crisis’. Indeed, when I brought this research together in a 2023 book, Waste and the City, the subtitle was The Crisis of Sanitation and the Right to Citylife (McFarlane, 2023). In what sense a ‘crisis’? In its lived everydayness and multiple surfacing. For the urban poor and marginalised in particular, the absence of good quality reliable sanitation – from toilets and water to the safe removal of waste, drainage and treatment – poses a fundamental threat to health, well-being and the capacity to thrive in the city. It keeps kids out of school, adults out of work and communities struggling every day to safely answer the most basic of needs.

The scale of the crisis is staggering. Almost one in five people globally lack even basic sanitation, and more than a third of the urban population is forced to live without safely managed sanitation (WHO/Unicef, 2025). Millions of people are forced to regularly defecate in open, under bridges, at garbage grounds, by railway tracks, along riverbanks and shorelines, in fields and disused wastelands. As the world continues to urbanise, it is the poorest neighbourhoods that are growing fastest, and it is here that the sanitation crisis is at its most acute. Cities are expected to grow by another 2.5 billion people by 2050, placing huge demands on already woefully insufficient sanitation, water and waste systems, with all kinds of permeating social and environmental impacts that are becoming intensified by climate change (including flooding, heat and drought). As I write this, in the last few weeks, we see reports of how sanitation inequalities intersect with, for example, climate and with histories of violence and displacement. Just two recent examples: in Pakistan, monsoon rains impacted multiple regions and flooded toilets, pits and tanks, spreading waterborne disease like dysentery and cholera through lower-income neighbourhoods and villages, while in Bangladesh, it was found that the 49,000 toilets provided to over a million Rohingya refugees in Cox's Bazar are woefully insufficient – often broken, unsafe, located in dark and distant areas and nowhere near enough – with profound health and social consequences (Islam and Lipu, 2025; Red Cross, 2025).

When I use the term crisis to describe these conditions, it is in relation both to the extent of the issues and their radically networked and multiplying nature. Sanitation is most obviously about toilets, but it is increasingly also about climate, and it is also at the same time about intersectionality, governance, budgeting, engineering, health, microbes, education, labour, war, displacement and more. In a time of polycrises, it has become more radically relational still. To be sure, the urban sanitation crisis is not ‘invisible’. There have been concerted efforts by many governments, international agencies, activists and researchers to draw attention to it. Yet, it is nowhere near as central in urban thinking, debate, research and politics as it surely needs to be. Which kinds of crises do we choose to focus our critical attention on (and worth noting here that the terms ‘crisis’ and ‘critical’ share a common route)? Those that happen to be topical, and which are occupying much of the media attention? Those that seep into everyday life in incessant and pernicious ways but which typically lack the topical urgency or eventfulness of other crises? I see this question of the politics of visibility of crises as a highly challenging and important one. It can only be answered collectively, by learning from one another about the nature and struggles of everyday life in the often neglected and hidden spaces of the city. At a minimum, the question of ‘whose crisis?’ is one I would suggest we might be attentively and carefully asking in a more sustained way.

Conclusion

These three questions – how is crisis-thinking changing the urban, impacting our sense of the possible, and effecting how we designate and ‘see’ different kinds of crises? – are just that: questions. They are provocations for debate and reflection. Sometimes, the asking of the question matters as much, perhaps more, than the answers. What questions can do is allow a ‘stepping back’ and a pause, a space through which to think carefully not just about crises themselves, but about how crisis-talk is working away at how we think, see and research the urban and the possible. It is for this reason that I see these three questions as fundamentally about the urban imagination, as much as they are about particular research domains (housing, sanitation, etc.) and the agendas we pursue. I see crisis-thinking as a vital lens on our times, but it is also – like any powerful trope – generative of thought itself, shaping the questions we ask, the problems we see, the ways we pose solutions, the research approaches we develop, even how we imagine the urban and its presents, pasts and futures.