Rethinking the urban South? Centering “unprecedented” risk and repair

As the climate crisis intensifies, those least responsible for its root causes are disproportionately affected by disaster, where loss and damage are the presumptive endpoints of unmitigated ecological breakdown, debt-driven precarity, and capital accumulation. This intervention contends that the uneven burden of climate risk introduces an ontological and epistemic interruption to the ways geographers interpret Southern urban theory. Increasingly “unprecedented” risks compel us to retheorize the South and what it means to think the “unthinkable” as a variegated politics of improvisation and duration mediated by force and resistance located through repair practices that both respond to and reproduce the climate crisis. We review established and emerging geography scholarship to outline this politics and rethink how the discipline approaches real-world urban questions.