Relational Urbanity: Perspectives of a Global Urban Society beyond Universalism and Localism

Current debates in urban studies are questioning the theoretical and empirical adequacy of the term city for understanding urban dynamics, North and South. A related concern is the arbitrariness of delimitations of expanding, interwoven and hyper-connected agglomerations. Established regionalizations of urban areas or cities are thus fading away in more than one sense, demanding conceptual and methodological consequences. Building on these debates, the paper stresses the relevance of societal or socio-spatial dimensions of urbanity. The need to contextualize them across scales finds its expression in the term global urban society. Taking this idea further, we propose a research programme centred on a conceptual and empirical investigation of a relational urbanity.