Conjunctural urban geographies: Modes, methods, and meso-level concepts

Urban geographers have recently been developing “conjunctural analysis.” This paper contributes to this emerging project in two ways. First, it argues that the existing literature has overlooked a critically important theoretical distinction—between normative and rationalist analysis. Second, we develop three meso-level concepts—plasticity, composites, temporalities—to provide concrete guidance on doing conjunctural analysis. We use the example of U.S. municipal finance to illustrate the intellectual returns of this schema, arguing that this example also demonstrates the approach’s wider applicability. Through pairing these concepts with prospective methodologies, we move the conjunctural analytic beyond its currently nascent state.