October 11, 2025Open Access

Locating crisis

Key Points

A pluralised view of crisis reveals connections to urbanisation and social dynamics.
Crisis is positioned between significant events and everyday experiences in urban contexts.
The relationship between crisis and the state is essential for understanding urban social structures.
Empirical examples illustrate how crisis can be perceived in varied yet interconnected ways.

Abstract

In this short intervention, I reflect on how I have used the concept of crisis in my work over the past 15 years. I argue that a spatial and pluralised understanding of crisis is essential to make sense of the political, material, and discursive stakes of contemporary urbanisation, and offer a reading of crisis that sits between the eventful and everyday. I outline ways in which urban crisis can be understood apart from, yet constitutive of a concept of crisis ‘writ-large’, and demonstrate through brief empirical examples how locating crisis conjuncturally defines its relationship to the state and social reproduction of and in the city.

Locating crisis

Key Points

Abstract

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