The African Centre for Cities is pleased to announce it’s first Special Lecture for 2017. We will be hosting Prof Kevin Cox, who will be presenting a lecture on ‘Theorizing Urbanization: The Universal and the Particular in Question’.
Abstract
Over the last twenty-five years or so urban studies has witnessed increasing skepticism towards universalizing claims and a greater interest in the particularizing. Recent arguments for a view from the global South exemplify this. This raises the question of what the relationship between universalizing and particularizing tendencies might be. This is explored firstly through an exploration of how the two might be reconciled. Two case studies then follow. One focuses on the ‘view from the South’ controversy; and the other on the politics of urban development in the US and in Western Europe and a subsequent trans-Atlantic divide.
Bio
KEVIN R. COX, is Emeritus Distinguished University Professor of Geography at the Ohio State University. His major research interests include the politics of urban and regional development, geographic thought and South Africa. He is the author of numerous books, the most recent of which are The Politics of Urban and Regional Development and the American Exception (2016) and Making Human Geography (2014.) He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and the recipient of two awards from the Association of American Geographers, including one for distinguished scholarship. More information can be found on his website, Unfashionable Geographies, at https://kevinrcox.wordpress.com/.