Urban crisis reconsidered: Toward a right-sized lens of harm and resistance

This essay challenges dominant narratives of urban crisis that obscure structural violence and repackage systemic abandonment as isolated emergencies. Rather than treating crisis as a neutral descriptor, I critique how scholarly frameworks and institutional metrics reproduce epistemic distance – prioritizing statistical abstraction over lived realities. Drawing on a right-sized approach, I call for recalibrating scale, method, and responsibility in urban research. This framework insists that a crisis must be materially grounded, understood through the expertise of marginalized communities, and engaged as an ongoing condition of harm rather than a temporary disruption. I argue that scholars bear ethical obligations not only to analyse crisis but to embed themselves in the material and political contexts of crisis, cultivating reciprocal partnerships that generate actionable knowledge. By shifting from crisis as a discursive endpoint to an analytic of harm, accountability, and resistance, this essay advances a methodological and political corrective for urban research.