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Our experience of teaching a graduate-student module entitled 'Global Cities' in Singapore forms the starting point for reflection on the limitations of the global- and world-cities paradigms. Otherwise varied strands of critique, we argue, may be understood in terms of a common tendency in Anglophone urban and regional research. We term this tendency 'metrocentricity'. While this intervention in many ways echoes important existing critiques (Robinson, 2006; Roy, 2009), it is intended to call attention in particular to the need for alternative practices or ways of doing urban and regional research. After identifying metrocentric tendencies, we consider how teaching and research might be (re)oriented both conceptually and methodologically beyond metrocentricity. In making this case, we invoke insights from feminist geographies that view research as embodied work. Valorizing the diverse, situated practices and engagements of a range of actors - including but not limited to academics - is a key starting point for less metrocentric urban and regional studies. Copyright (c) 2010 The Authors. Journal Compilation (c) 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

This special issue, papers presented at an Urban Studies Foundation-funded conference in Jakarta (March 2011), examines the current 'urban century' in terms of three revolutions. Revolutions from above index the logics and norms of mainstream global urbanism, particularly the form they have taken as policymakers work with municipal officials worldwide to organise urban development around neoliberal norms. Revolutions from below refer to the multifaceted contestations of global urbanism that take place in and around cities, ranging from urban street demonstrations and occupations (such as those riveting the world in early 2011 when these papers were written) to the quotidian actions of those pursuing politics and livelihoods that subvert the norms of mainstream global urbanism. It also highlights conceptual revolutions, referencing the ongoing challenge of reconceptualising urban theory from the South -not simply as a hemispheric location or geopolitical category but an epistemological stance, staged from many different locations butCorresponding author: Eric Sheppard, Department of Geography, University of California and Berkeley, Bunche Hall, Los Angeles CA 90095, USA. Email: esheppard@geog.ucla.edu always fraught with the differentials of power and the weight of historical geographies. Drawing on the insights of scholars writing from, and not just about, such locations, a further iteration in this 'southern' turn of urban theorising is proposed. This spatio-temporal conjunctural approach emphasises how the specificity of cities -their existence as entities that are at once singular and universal -emerges from spatio-temporal dynamics, connectivities and horizontal and vertical relations. Practically, such scholarship entails taking the field seriously through collaborative work that is multi-sited, engages people along the spectrum of academics and activists, and is presented before and scrutinised by multiple publics.

Capitalist value making is underwritten by the production and disposal of waste through a complex, often invisible economy of informal waste recycling. This infra-economy is anchored by nodes that process and circulate variegated forms of waste generated in cities and their adjoining hinterlands. Bholakpur, in the city of Hyderabad, India, is one such place. There are hundreds like it scattered around the country. Even as they perform the double function of reproducing the urban economy while inoculating it from the injurious effects of its own detritus, places like Bholakpur and the people who work and reside there are continuously abjected by civil society's propertied classes, which view them with anxiety and loathing, as a source of crime, nuisance and detriment. Thus, “waste” as concept-matter but also a locus where labor and ecology meet is a neglected but powerful site for a critique of both postcolonial capitalism and contemporary urbanization in countries like India.

The term ordinary city has been used by scholars of such strikingly different persuasions and commitments over the last decade that in academic exchange today ordinary city functions more like a trope than like an analytical term. In this commentary I argue that an attempt to isolate strands from this and critiquing them for their failure to engage with the another, decidedly more influential research programme-global and world city research -is to misread the very productive strands of research that the ordinary city has already spawned and to ignore the need to innovate and pursue newer research agendas that are suggested by contemporary global urban realities.

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COVID-19 and the lockdown have challenged urbanists to rethink many of their core practices. As we return to a ‘new normal’, it is important to articulate responses to present challenges through the manner in which we have taught Southern urbanism over the last decade. One of the early lessons of Southern urban practice was that the field had to be our primary site of pedagogy. It is important, too, to recognise and value what this experience teaches us about theory, knowledge and practice. Over the last decade, I have been among a small band of urbanists in India and across the world who have been attempting to craft new learning and teaching contexts where experience and sensory perceptions are privileged but not at the expense of abstraction and concept building. As we witness uncertainty of an unprecedented degree, it is only through praxis and concept-forming informing each other that new theory will emerge. It will not emerge from any single source. This democratisation of practice is the single most important outcome of the last 3 months.