Urban crisis: Everywhere and nowhere, all at once

A decade ago, I published an article that explored the evolution and uses and abuses of the “urban crisis,” offering a genealogy of the concept. Since that time, the apparent crises besetting cities, and indeed the globe, have apparently proliferated. Indeed, if scholars such as Adam Tooze are correct, we are currently living through a “polycrisis,” a term that has entered the academic and popular discourse to capture the sense that we are bedeviled by a series of intersecting disasters – wars, disease, ecological catastrophe – that are planetary, even cosmic, in scope. In my original article, I raised two major concerns about the concept. The first has to do with what might be termed the “politics” of the term; the second relates to the analytical coherence of the urban crisis frame. In this essay, I will return to these concerns before reflecting on how scholarship might be improved by a more judicious use of crisis language.