%0 Journal Article
%T The urban under erasure: Towards a postcolonial critique of planetary urbanization
%A Rajyashree N Reddy
%J Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
%@ 1472-3433
%D 2018
%R 10.1177/0263775817744220
%X In my engagement with the planetary urbanization thesis, I make three main interventions: (1) I emphasize the pioneering contributions that postcolonial and relational geographical approaches have made to planetary thought long before the recent planetary turn in urban studies; (2) I underscore the disconcerting ethico-political implications of planetary urbanization's will to map the ¡°extended landscapes¡± of urbanization and its reduction of contemporary planetary condition to the imperatives of capitalist urbanization; and (3) I offer the deconstructive strategy of writing ¡°under erasure¡± that puts both the city and urbanization under erasure to highlight the blind spots of planetary urbanization. Then to demonstrate the value of writing under erasure, I focus upon waste ¨C as both material and semiotic artifact of capitalist urbanization ¨C and offer a ¡°supplementary reading¡± of Bangalore that sketches the multiple constitutive outsides of the city, which in turn make empirically evident the stakes of planetary urbanization's occlusions. I conclude by suggesting that proponents of planetary urbanization and urban studies more broadly embrace writing under erasure as a useful epistemological orientation to build better theories of the urban
%K Writing under erasure
%K postcolonial urbanism
%K planetary urbanization
%K Bangalore
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0263775817744220