A new core theory course for master’s students taught for the third time in spring 2025 argues that the list of ‘great’ cities needs to be rethought. Given the diversity of urbanisms around the world, it would be a disservice to limit one’s perspective to theoretical notions originating in Europe and America.
In recent decades, there has been a spike in criticism of the Euro-American bias of many histories and theories of urban planning that have prioritised Western experiences. South African-born geographer Jennifer Robinson, for example, has launched a relentless critique of the geographies of urban planning history, highlighting the persistent divide between ‘First World’ cities, which are seen as models that generate theory and policy, and ‘Third World’ cities, which are seen as problems that require diagnosis and reform. In opposition to what she calls ‘the regulating fiction of the First World global city’, Robinson calls for a more geographically balanced history of urban planning that can overcome this ‘asymmetrical ignorance’. This tendency to centralise knowledge production is part of a canonical tradition that claims that new approaches are formed in a few ‘great’ cities – think of Rome, Venice, London, Paris, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles – all of which are located in Europe or North America. Given that most of the world’s urban growth over the past 70 years has taken place elsewhere, why is it that theories of the city are still too often focused on Western ideas?
Global Theories of Urban Design
Following in the footsteps of scholars like the Indian-born Ananya Roy, the course ‘Seen from the South’ (in future, ‘Global Theories of Urban Design’) argues that we need new geographies of theory that can take seriously the experience of non-Western cities. At the same time, we understand that it is impossible to fully ‘know’ non-Western urban theories from our vantage point in Europe. Therefore, the course focuses on developing our ability to listen to, interact with, and co-produce knowledge with scholars in the non-Western cities under study. Thus, fundamental to the course are the invited guest lecturers who introduce current research on urban issues in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Oceania, provide socio-political context for the required reading, and supplement the guided class discussions with additional perspectives via carefully chosen further reading. That said, there is no intention in this course to lump all these Southern experiences together under one umbrella. On the contrary, as the literary theorist and feminist critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has outlined, it holds that we need to come to ‘a more complicated sense of non-European spaces, their developments, their dynamism, and their enduring significance.’
Dr Cathelijne Nuijsink is Senior Lecturer at the Chair of the History and Theory of Urban Design at ETH Zurich, where she is developing new historiographic methods that enable histories of architecture in the latter half of the twentieth century to be written in a way that is more inclusive, interdisciplinary, and polyvocal. During the academic years 2022–2024 Nuijsink was a Postgraduate Associate in The History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art (HTC) programme at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), conducting the SNSF-funded research project ‘Unlocking the “Contact Zone”: Toward a New Historiography of Architecture’. Nuijsink was recently awarded an SNSF-return grant for the academic year 2024-2025, allowing her to continue developing her MIT-initiated research project at ETH Zurich.
