THE URBANOLOGISTS COME TO TOWN : Professional Life and Work in the Urban Solutions Industry

Abstract

This article charts the upsurge of an eclectic global community of professionals new to the field of urban policy and governance, animated by playful and celebratory attitudes towards cities and urbanization: the urbanologists. It contributes to debates in critical urban theory and critical ethnographies of technology to problematize innovation in contemporary society and economy. Exceeding the strictures of technocratic and technical practice, urbanological approaches are evocative of a distinctive context of global urban governance. Drawing on twenty‐three months of multi‐sited ethnographic data, the analysis explores urbanology as the dominant ideology of mainstream urban governance across the global North and South. Doing so discloses four dimensions of urbanology: a performative fetishization of urbanization; a motivation to break down institutional and sectoral barriers in urban governance; a projectification of urban space; and a persistent obfuscation of questions of inequality, politics and history. It explains, ultimately, the prevalence of scattershot solutions, short‐termism and the strategic avoidance of accountability as power is exercised over cities from afar to systemically circumvent transformative possibilities. Such an approach to global urban governance amounts to a form of crisis‐management that is motivated, above all, to contain and displace difficult global challenges onto the spatial scales of the urban.