Ordinary Cities

Abstract

Abstract Ordinary cities is a term coined, in human geography, by Ash Amin and Stephen Graham in an original article published in 1997. The article discussed the contemporary approaches in urban studies, which focused almost exclusively on cities that were represented as key command‐and‐control centers for globalized social, economic, cultural, and creative processes. The authors criticized this idea of the city, based on only a few extraordinary cases, adopting the metaphor of “ordinary city,” in order to take into account all cities, their diversities and heterogeneities, as vital elements in the development of urban theory. In its plural form, the concept was later adopted in postcolonial urban studies. Mainly due to the geographer Jennifer Robinson, the term “ordinary cities” has been used to deconstruct mainstream urban theory and to formulate a different methodological approach for a more cosmopolitan urban research.