1 - Introduction

Summary

“Cities are at the frontier of development; they are where people go to chase their dreams of a better life for themselves and their families”, said Juergen Voegele, the World Bank's Vice President for Sustainable Development, when presenting the bank's analysis Pancakes to Pyramids: City Form for Sustainable Growth (World Bank 2021; Lall et al. 2021). This is one of many statements that demonstrate how, in the last two decades, the idea that “the city has triumphed” (Glaeser 2011), has become the credo of most of urban studies, the publications of international organizations and business consultancies. Gone are the days of the “ ‘hate literature’ on cities” (Taylor 2004: 3) that produced urban dystopias such as Planet of Slums, in which Mike Davis (2006) portrays the big cities of the Global South as an evil, as an obstacle to rather than as a means of development. Today, the notion that cities, both in the North and South, boost innovation, productivity and efficiency, and that they are therefore engines of economic growth and social development is a given. The acknowledgement of cities’ extraordinariness (cf. Taylor 2013), of urbanization's “efficiency-generating qualities via agglomeration” (Scott & Storper 2015: 4), of cities “as innovation machine[s]” (Florida et al. 2017) and “mothers of economic development” (Jacobs 1997), and of the “urban ability to create collaborative brilliance” (Glaeser 2011: 8) are prevalent. Not even postcolonial scholars, critical of the universalization of ideas originating in the Global North (e.g. Robinson 2006), have challenged the notion of the “almost universal positive association” (Brockerhoff & Brennan 1998: 82) between urbanization and economic development. It is not surprising, then, that Andrew Kirby (2012: 3) concludes from his bibliometric analysis of social science journals that the “study of cities is in many ways a study of human development”. “Development” is one of the words most frequently associated in urban research with the words “urban”, “city” or “cities” (in 2010). Accordingly, the economic power of cities has become something of an idée fixe among development agencies (e.g. World Bank 2009a; World Bank Institute 2010) and consulting firms (e.g. Dobbs et al. 2011).