for the extremely helpful suggestions and kind advice they provided while finalizing this article. I would also like to thank the two anonymous IJURR reviewers for their supportive and inspiring comments.
Across the different vernaculars of the world's urban majorities, there is renewed bewilderment as to what is going on in the cities in which they reside and frequently self-build. Prices are unaffordable and they are either pushed out or strongly lured away from central locations. Work is increasingly temporary, if available at all, and there is often just too much labour involved to keep lives viably in place. Not only do they look for affordability and new opportunities at increasingly distant suburbs and hinterlands, but for orientations, for ways of reading where things are heading, increasingly hedging their bets across multiple locations and affiliations. Coming together to write this piece from our own multiple orientations, we are eight researchers who, over the past year, joined to consider how variegated trajectories of expansion unsettle the current logics of city-making. We have used the notion of extensions as a way of thinking about operating in the middle of things, as both a reflection of and a way of dealing with this unsettling. An unsettling that disrupts clear designations of points of departure and arrival, of movement and settlement, of centre and periphery, of time and space.
Within the enduring effort to rethink geography from multiple viewpoints and new conceptual categories, critical geographers have recently sought to ‘decentralise geopolitics’ (An, Sharp, and Shaw, 2021, Dialogues in Human Geography, 11(2), 270) by proposing alternative analyses that can tackle the Eurocentric stance that has largely defined the field. This paper contributes to this decentralising effort by bringing to light, historically, an anti‐imperial discourse that took the form of a proper geographical invention. Specifically, the paper analyses the thought of the Mexican intellectual José Vasconcelos – who acted as Secretary of Public Education in the aftermath of the Revolution (1921–1924) – and argues that Vasconcelos' discourse represents a ‘subaltern’ intervention against the imperial presuppositions of the new‐born discipline of geopolitics. The paper contends that Vasconcelos' thought constitutes a conscious attempt, although clearly imbued with ‘postcolonial’ tensions and contradictions, to challenge the ‘scientific’ basis of the emerging geopolitical discourse at that time. By analysing Vasconcelos' geographical and geo‐social imagination through his recuperation of the myth of Atlantis and the idea of Cosmic Race, the paper illuminates an early operation of ‘subaltern geopolitics’ (Sharp, 2011, Geoforum, 42, 271) that aimed to contrast the new wave of Western imperialism which, intensively nurtured by socio‐environmentalist narratives, defined the turn of the twentieth century.
The book "The Urban Enigma: Time, Autonomy, and Postcolonial Transformations in Latin America" (Vegliò, 2020) is a historical work which, as the title aims to highlight, explores episodes of urban transformation across the Latin American region. I wrote this book having a question that had been persistently circulating in my mind, which was (and still is) rather simple: What is Latin America? What is this global region of the world that is named as such and that, perhaps paradoxically, contains an openly racial/colonial adjective within it? How this region of the world has been socio-spatially produced and, crucially, understood
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