Attending to the unsettled

How do critical urban researchers understand the possibility of social change when confronted with a situation that is as numbing as it is enraging? From the planetary climate crisis to the perniciousness of markets and technology to the dismantling of a (never just) global order, just change has rarely looked quite so foreclosed. Underpinning the hopelessness and anxiety of the current age is an apparent crisis of knowledge: how can we know the world in such turbulent times? How can we know how and what to commit to politically? How do we continue to believe in the potential of social movements to realize change? This article looks to the work of Roger Keil to take on a peripheral view—to focus on the edges of the urban, whether as physical territory, political economic process, or socionatural system. Giving in to the unsettlement and finding the possibility, it shows how an approach based on attending to the unsettled allows us to see and work through such disruptive conditions, and offers a renewed attention to the political in these times.