Essays reevaluating and challenging the critiques of the urban studies field

This volume revisits the tradition of critical scholarship characteristic of the urban studies field. Urban scholarship has had detractors of late, particularly in mainstream political science, where it has been accused of parochialism and insularity. Critical Urban Studies offers a sharp repudiation of this critique, reasserting the need for critical urban scholarship and demonstrating the fundamental importance of urban studies for understanding and changing contemporary social life. Contributors to the volume identify an orthodox perspective in the field, subject it to critique, and map out a future research agenda for the field. The result is a series of inventive essays pointing scholars and students to the major theoretical and policy challenges facing urbanists and other critical social scientists.

"…this volume demonstrates that urban studies is not a stagnant discipline. Rather, the authors excelled at challenging a number of different orthodoxies to rethink approaches to and about mainstream politics and policies … all researchers involved in urban issues of a wide range of disciplines will find this book of use." — Journal of Planning Education and Research

"The essays in Critical Urban Studies advance the enterprise of critical urban studies. They challenge a wide range of prevalent orthodoxies and illuminate several new directions on which subsequent critical scholarship and practice can build … The inventive essays will inspire future urban scholars and activists to further advance the theory and practice of critique in even deeper and more transformative directions." — SirReadALot.org

Jonathan S. Davies is Reader in Public Policy at the University of Warwick and the author of Partnerships and Regimes: The Politics of Urban Regeneration in the UK. David L. Imbroscio is Professor of Political Science at the University of Louisville and the author of Urban America Reconsidered: Alternatives for Governance and Policy. Together they coedited Theories of Urban Politics, Second Edition.