Can urban research be cumulative?

Introduction

Urban research spans multiple disciplines and therefore lends itself to theoretical diversity. Concepts, theories and debates routinely travel across geography, sociology, planning and political economy. New urban problems also force us to revisit inherited frameworks, asking what older theories can still explain under altered historical conditions. Recent issues of Dialogues in Urban Research illustrate these dynamics. In Issue 4:1, Justus Uitermark (2026) reassesses and reconstructs the Chicago School, bringing urban scholarship from the 1920s into dialogue with contemporary debates. In this issue, Wilson and Boyle (2026) revisit Neil Smith's (2005) concept of the revanchist city, asking what explanatory purchase it retains today. Both forums show that theoretical innovation does not proceed through the simple abandonment of prior approaches. Rather, urban research accumulates theory over time.

This accumulation is a sign of intellectual vitality, but it is not the same as cumulative knowledge. As we cycle through theories and accumulate our corpus, there is a growing need to assess what we can explain about urbanization. Uitermark's reflections on the Chicago School provide a useful model for this task. He rejects the idea that the School's associations with positivism and ecological thought should consign it to history, instead identifying those parts of the inherited tradition that remain informative and relevant. A similar move is attempted in this issue, where Wilson and Boyle curate essays asking what Smith's revanchist city thesis can tell us about contemporary cities.

Both forums critically engage inherited theoretical frameworks. They therefore invite a broader question: what would an organized framework for this type of theoretical development look like? Answering this question requires acknowledging that urban research lacks shared practices for evaluating, comparing, and reconstructing the theories it produces. We therefore have theoretical plurality alongside weakly articulated evaluative standards (see Abbott, 2001; Calhoun, 1995; also see McFarlane, 2021). The problem, then, is not theoretical plurality itself, but the weak evaluative practices through which plurality is converted into cumulative explanation.

Urban research has a past

Uitermark's (2026) essay on the Chicago School begins with the following sentence: “Students and scholars within urban studies tend to see the Chicago School of sociology as a vestige of the past” (10). This is suggestive because the Chicago School is often positioned as a superseded framework: important to the history of urban research, but no longer an active explanatory resource. Such positioning echoes Kuhn's description of scientific revolutions as “non-cumulative developmental episodes” in which older paradigms are displaced by newer ones (1970: 92). Yet the recent reassessment of the Chicago School complicates this narrative. Robert Sampson (2026), agreeing with Uitermark, argues this is the wrong approach. The Chicago School, Sampson suggests, should be critically evaluated and deployed:

“If nothing else, its core ideas and methods, properly reconceptualized, give us tools to explore the vast social changes continuing to transform urban, suburban, and rural areas worldwide.” (48)

Theoretical accumulation is here being permitted with the caveat that critical reconstruction accompanies it. Under this epistemological model, explanations can persist under certain types of conditions: they must be criticized, revised, displaced, rediscovered, and periodically reconstructed under new intellectual and political conditions.

It is striking that all the contributors to Uitermark's forum feel the need to justify this approach. The commentators all reject the notion that associations with environmental determinism, positivism or methodological cityism should not bar us from epistemological engagement. This stance suggests that urban theory rarely develops through clean paradigmatic succession. So, when Uitermark argues for a “creative, critical engagement with [its] manifold lineages”, the Chicago School's theories become productive and not archeological objects. For Uitermark, it is quite possible to abandon the Chicago School's problematic assumptions about race, natural order or ecological equilibrium precisely because we are not captured by some paradigmatic context.

In this issue's forum of Smith's revanchist city concept, we can identify a similar orientation. Revanchism is being re-situated and remade. A theory that emerged from Giuliani-era neoliberalism (see Holtzman, 2021) is reconstituted and reapplied within new conjunctures characterized by authoritarian populism (Montgomery, 2026), digital surveillance (Berglund, 2026; Wyly, 2026), platform capitalism (Lawton, 2026) and intensified urban inequality (Miller et al. 2026). Smith's interpretive framing is therefore not replaced, but rather adapted and evolved.

This reflective framing and reconstructive gesture could certainly be applied across the field, to ideas like neighborhood effects (Sampson, 2026), uneven development (Yeung, 2019), and even more recent additions like comparative urbanism (Robinson, 2011) and gentrification (Lees, 2024). But, as Uitermark's (2026) forum paper makes clear, such a shift would require us to think differently about how theory develops over time.

Certain historical assumptions seem built into contemporary urban theory debates. At one level we find assumptions about paradigmatic shifts rehearsed in textbooks and manifest in commentary. At another level, we find older concepts not being decisively falsified or abandoned. This situation certainly has its contradictions and suggests that we do not have routine practices for identifying weak explanations. This has given the field overlapping theoretical vocabularies that are not reliably brought into dialogue.

This situation is partly driven by our research subject. Urban processes are historically contingent, spatially differentiated, and institutionally layered (Sayin et al. 2022; also see Barnes and Sheppard, 2010). This demands the rapid development and deployment of theory. However, for the historical and geographical multiplicity of urbanization to be comprehensible, some shared concepts and understandings are required. An absence of these concepts and understandings is exactly why it is difficult to return to theories developed in the 1920s or 1990s. Too easily, such moves can be rejected as romantic or the misguided deployment of long-rejected paradigms. As our recent issues demonstrate, such dismissals would be immensely counterproductive.

Three models of knowledge accumulation

Questions over how to effectively accumulate knowledge have long occupied philosophers and historians of science (Chalmers, 2013; Hacking, 1983a, 1983b). While urban studies rarely engage directly in these debates, there is a strong tradition of epistemological reflection across the field (see Brenner and Schmid, 2015; Robinson, 2011; Roy, 2005). But within this reflective literature, there is an absence of discussion about how our theories should be evaluated. It is therefore worth a brief engagement with philosophy of science to trace out three basic ways in which theoretical accumulation is subject to evaluation, giving us a reference point for thinking about our practices. Of these models, Ramsey's analytical pragmatism is especially useful for urban research because it treats theories neither as final truths nor as discarded paradigms, but as revisable instruments for organizing expectations under uncertainty. Urban research rarely encounters theories that are simply confirmed or refuted. More often, we inherit partially persuasive explanations whose credibility changes across cases, conjunctures and rival accounts.

Accumulation Through Refutation: Karl Popper's (2002) writings centered on an attempt to provide the foundations for scientific knowledge. Rejecting the Vienna Circle's science-through-verification approach, he built out a framework of conjecture and refutation (ibid.). Scientific knowledge, he thought, could be built by subjecting hypotheses to testing. Those hypotheses that could not be proven wrong (i.e., falsified) could be considered contingently “true”. Weak theories were therefore weeded out through a constant process of testing and criticism. Popper's model remains broadly accepted across the sciences (Fuller, 2007), even if his work is rarely subject to direct and/or widespread engagement.

Popper's philosophy emphasizes clarity and evaluation. He imagines knowledge building as a process where competing explanations are evaluated based on their ability to evade falsification. Knowledge therefore accumulates through the sustained creation of theories that evade falsification. Although conceptually simple, Popper's philosophy is difficult to implement. His prescriptions are certainly challenging for urban studies, where theoretical practices and the urban process itself move quickly (Robinson, 2011). We rarely outright reject theories, even when limitations become clear. More commonly we shift perspective, move to different levels of abstraction, and/or repurpose frameworks to explain emergent urban trends. Updating and evolving are therefore more common than refutation and rejection. This has the advantage of moving theoretical development forward quickly, but the downside of reinforcing theoretical accumulation without evaluation.

Accumulation Through Paradigm Extension: Thomas Kuhn, and later Imre Lakatos (2015), gives us another model of knowledge development. Here Popper's strict rejection-via-refutation is replaced with a more accommodative model of knowledge development. Kuhn (1970) recognized that research programs adapt over time, but that core assumptions and theoretical orientations tend to persist:

“Normal science consists in the actualization of that promise, an actualization achieved by extending the knowledge of those facts that the paradigm displays as particularly revealing, by increasing the extent of the match between those facts and the paradigm's predictions, and by further articulation of the paradigm itself.” (Kuhn, 1970: 24)

Whereas Popper (2007) thought falsified theories should be outright rejected, or at least severely doubted, Kuhn saw something different happening. Scientific communities don’t, Kuhn argued, operate with Popper's strictures. What you find is that frameworks remain flexible enough to accommodate critique and variation, meaning reinterpretation is much more common than replacement. It is only when accommodation reaches its limit that a paradigm shift occurs; accommodation is the norm, revolution the exception.

Our forums on the Chicago School and revanchism can be interpreted in Kuhn's accommodative tradition. In Uitermark's (2026) paper, he does not advocate for a return to Park's ecological thought or Burgess’ spatial modeling. Rather, he proposes that we retain the parts of this project that remain valuable within today's existing epistemological assumptions. We therefore do not reject the Chicago School because parts of the work are now easily refuted. Instead, we reconstruct parts of the theoretical offering to accommodate it. Similar moves could be interpreted in the revanchism essays, where a descriptor of late twentieth-century New York is adapted to have purchase in a world increasingly defined by authoritarianism, surveillance, and punitive urban governance.

Of course, Kuhn recognized there are limits to accommodation and reconstruction. He thought that only so many anomalies could be incorporated until the entire paradigm breaks down. At this point, a scientific community will compare the failing framework with another, and many (according to Kuhn, mostly younger scholars) will then opt for a new paradigm which has its own set of rules.

If we narrate the history of urban studies as shifting paradigms, Uitermark's intervention must be read differently: as an appeal to work produced within a supposedly superseded framework. The question then becomes unavoidable: does retrieving the Chicago School expose the limits of a paradigmatic account of urban theory, or does it amount to reviving a framework the field has already rejected? If we answer affirmatively to the second question, Kuhn thought any such move would be rejected by those working with the “new” paradigm. For any scientific field, the experience of paradigm shifts therefore constitutes a block on reinterpretation and reconstitution; the “old” is barred from (re)entry into the “new”. Steve Fuller (2004) describes this Kuhnian reading of scientific progress as an “Orwellian historiography” where “ideas and people that not long ago appeared progressive are now deemed reactionary” (23).

Accumulation Through Reconstruction: Popper and Kuhn famously disagreed on how scientific theories accumulate. For Popper, accumulation is linear and critical: knowledge advances through the continual refutation of inadequate conjectures. For Kuhn, accumulation is discontinuous and historical: paradigms accommodate anomalies until crisis makes replacement possible. A third approach, associated with pragmatist and post-positivist traditions, understands theories neither as isolated conjectures nor as paradigms awaiting revolutionary overthrow.

Thinkers such as Donald Davidson, Frank Ramsey, and, to a lesser extent, Willard Quine, treat theories as components of broader interpretive and explanatory frameworks. On this view, Popper's model of discrete falsification must be revised, because individual claims can rarely be tested in isolation. But Kuhn's revolutionary model must also be qualified, because theoretical frameworks are not only abandoned when they fail. More often, knowledge accumulates through reconstruction: the reworking of explanations in light of new evidence, altered contexts, and rival accounts. The key distinction, then, is that reconstruction does not treat theory change as simple elimination or wholesale replacement. Rather we see theory change as the disciplined adjustment of explanatory frameworks so that they remain comparable, criticizable, and consequential. Ramsey gives this reconstructive position its practical edge by shifting attention away from whether a theory survives as an all-or-nothing proposition. His approach asks how much confidence we should place in a theory, for which purposes, and under what conditions.

Quine's (1951) holism understood knowledge as part of our web of beliefs. Such is the complexity of this web, the idea that an entire paradigm can become crisis-ridden is hard to imagine; some connected bits remain active and unquestioned within the web. The epistemological isolation required to think about a “paradigm shift” is simply impossible for Quine. Frank Ramsey (1991) further deflates Kuhn's revolutionary view of science. Ramsey's Peirce-inspired pragmatism asks: what does calling something a paradigm shift help us understand?

Knowledge, for Ramsey, is a tool to aid explanation, so he asks if thinking about something using Kuhn's lens helps us compare theories and revise our understandings (i.e., improve these tools for engaging in the world). Here, Ramsey would likely reject the dispensing of theories that Kuhn's framework endorses. If theories are instruments for organizing our expectations in a changing world, why should we assign them to prior discredited paradigms?

Ramsey asks not if theories fit our paradigm, but rather what degrees of belief we can have in them. Translated into urban research, this means we would not ask whether the Chicago School, revanchism, or any other urban theory is valid in general. We would ask where each explanation remains credible, what it helps us expect, what it fails to anticipate, and how its plausibility changes when placed beside rival explanations. If a theory is unconvincing, we simply adjust our degrees of belief, reconsidering our inferential habits and associated assumptions. Whether or not something like the Chicago School's corpus aligns with a paradigmatic framework becomes an unproductive question. Better to assess, says Ramsey, what practical rule of judgment a theory gives us: if we encounter this kind of urban process, what should the theory lead us to expect, investigate, or doubt?

Ramsey is therefore close to Quine in his resistance to ideas like paradigmatic rupture. He is also resistant to Popper's refutations, insisting that we operate under conditions of uncertainty that tend to assign us to degrees of belief and not scientific truths ¹ . Ramsey's view of knowledge accumulation is therefore that we should continually be revising our explanations in order that they give us a more likely chance of achieving our goals. Building knowledge is about improving the reliability of the expectations that guide inquiry and action. Explanations that do not improve those expectations are not necessarily refuted or rejected. They simply lose their value as guides to judgment.

Under certain circumstances, Ramsey's version of “accumulation through reconstruction” provides a potentially powerful way for urban studies to think about knowledge accumulation. His philosophy recognizes that theories can remain useful, even when meaningful criticisms have been made about them. The question is not whether a theory belongs to an old or new paradigm, but whether it remains capable of organizing plausible expectations about urban processes under specified conditions. Its value lies in whether its consequences for inquiry and action can be comparatively assessed (Ramsey, 1991; Lake, 2025).

There might therefore be something valuable in pursuing further how Ramsey's philosophy makes theoretical accumulation analytically productive. Translated into the terms of urban research, a Ramsey-inspired approach would ask four questions: What phenomenon is being explained? What mechanisms does the explanation privilege? Under what conditions does the explanation apply? and; How is this different to other accounts? These questions move theoretical reconstruction from an act of intellectual recovery to an evaluative practice. Theories are inherited, critiqued and reformulated, but less frequently are they lined up against alternative explanations so that analytical gains and losses can be assessed.

What prevents accumulation in urban research?

At first glance, Ramsey's deflationary epistemology is simple, and most of us probably see evidence of it already being operative across urban studies. The part of Ramsey's framework that is less evident is his evaluative practices. We have openness to theoretical accumulation without the insistence on comparison and evaluation. This is understandable since our field is interdisciplinary and global, lending itself to theoretical generation, critique, and situated application. But, at the same time, these qualities make it difficult to sustain shared practices of evaluation.

In urban studies, it is certainly easier to launch a theoretical innovation than an organized evaluative practice. Urban scholars have become adept at generating new concepts and vocabularies to interpret emergent urban forms and processes (see Storper and Scott, 2016); think planetary urbanization, splintering urbanism, assemblage urbanism, resilience, platform urbanism, polycrisis, permacrisis, smart urbanism and so on. All do important work helping us interpret changes in the organization of urban life. But the utility generated by theoretical churn makes evaluation more difficult. We have a situation whereby novelty becomes intellectual authority. But analytical gains are not the same as interpretive insight. Interpretation is used to understand a process or phenomena, whereas explanations organize our expectations about the world. Interpretive frameworks may illuminate meanings, experiences or structures of power, but explanatory theories additionally specify what consequences should follow under particular conditions. In Ramsey's (1931: np) terms, explanatory belief functions as “a map of neighbouring space by which we steer.”

Explanation is a test of efficacy. So, when we lack a concern with explanation, theories can easily accumulate. Many scholarly theories are perceptive and interesting, but whether these can guide expectations is another story. Theoretical debates can revolve around successive waves of interpretation, each adding to the field's interpretative vocabulary. One reason why this situation persists is the inherent dynamism of urbanization. Rarely, if ever, do we find ourselves in situations akin to a laboratory: urban research is constantly trying to catch up with its subject. This has made us extraordinarily good at producing richly contextual studies and broad interpretive frameworks. It has also made sustained comparison difficult.

An absence of evaluation amongst theoretical innovations makes it harder to distinguish between interpretative and explanatory claims. On occasion, a single theory might serve as a diagnostic, political critique, description, and explanation. When a theory is doing this much work, it can be illustrative and illuminating of a particular urban process, as well as being hard to evaluate as an explanation. For example, a political critique may convincingly identify how power relations produce unjust outcomes, but do little to specify what, where, and when the explanatory account would be valid. It may disclose a relation of domination, but it does not yet specify the conditions under which that relation should guide our expectations about other cases, contexts, or outcomes.

There are many different scholarly approaches used across urban studies, and each prioritizes certain virtues: empirical rigor, political purchase, conceptual innovation, methodological sophistication, normativity, explanatory power, and so on. These are not differences to be problematized or erased. Rather, the task is how to supplement this interdisciplinary richness with tools that enable us to develop evaluative standards that make differences theoretically productive. If our standards are implicit or we remain simply incommensurable, there is no opportunity for theoretical richness to be more than a sum of its parts: parallel discourses stymie cumulative clarification. Theories are often dismissed as being insufficiently attentive to x, y or z. Others are rejected for being too abstract or lacking explanatory utility. Such critiques can be valid within their own evaluative frameworks. The problem is that, without even weak shared comparative practices, we lack a basis for deciding what competing explanations clarify, what they obscure, and where one account improves upon another.

To clarify, the problem I’m writing about here is not intellectual fragmentation. Urban studies remains interconnected through shared references, concepts and debates (van Heur, 2024). Our explanatory issue is more challenging precisely because it is subtle. Our theories coexist, mutate and proliferate without always generating clearer understandings of how explanations differ, where they overlap, and under what conditions they remain persuasive. The challenge for cumulative urban research is therefore not to eliminate plurality, but to develop stronger practices for making theoretical disagreement analytically informative.

Toward a more cumulative urban research

Theoretical unification or homogenization is not the answer to the cumulative issue. Cities are historically dynamic, geographically differentiated, inherently political, and conjuncturally defined (Davidson and Ward, 2024). Theoretical innovation and diversity is therefore central to urban studies. Neither should the development of cumulative standards suppress interpretive, critical or normative traditions in favor of narrowly positivist standards. Urban research excels when it moves between abstraction and context, explanation and interpretation, structural analysis and situated experience. The challenge we face is how to collectively organize the field's plurality.

One place to start is making disagreement more analytically productive. This likely involves placing theories like the Chicago School's frameworks or Smith's revanchist city into clearer comparative and reconstructive relation with one another. This requires us to make distinctions between the types of theories we produce, and what work various theories and concepts are doing. This would shift us away from asking whether theories are wholly accepted or rejected, thus moving us to consider what explanatory work a theory, or part of it, might do for us.

Here our Chicago School and revanchism forums share an important and instructive quality: a minimal comparative ethic. In neither forum do you find an imposition of methodological uniformity or philosophical agreement. Instead, there is a willingness to engage, critique, differentiate and reconstruct. This type of approach provides the basis necessary to start thinking about theories as competing explanations. If we specify this minimal comparative ethic more directly, it could mean a set of shared questions for urban studies:

What urban phenomenon is being explained?

On first look, these questions may appear modest and too simplistic. They are not aimed at predictive goals or achieving/imposing some kind of disciplinary consensus. Their purpose is to make theoretical objectives and claims more explicit and comparable, thereby providing grounds for dialogue about evaluation.

The work these questions, or some version of them, perform is to place theories into dialogue. They can also serve to clarify just what part of the urban process a theory is explaining, and how. But dialogue does not mean collapsing everything into the same framework. Plurality is productive precisely because it avoids this. This Ramsey-inspired emphasis on comparative confidence does not require final theoretical adjudication; it requires a practice of placing explanations into relation. When Imre Lakatos (1976) tried to thread the needle between Popper and Kuhn's views of knowledge building, he argued that epistemological progress occurs when disagreements force us to compare. As he put it, “sophisticated falsificationism” shifts attention from “how to appraise theories” to “how to appraise series of theories.” The point is not that a single failed prediction should eliminate a theory, nor that paradigms simply persist until crisis. Rather, theories become assessable when placed in relation to rival research programs and judged by whether they generate more or less productive explanations.

Conclusions

Since the Chicago School used their observations to tell us about “the city”, urban research has been a source of theoretical productivity. Driven by our research object, the interdisciplinary field has continuously reinterpreted inherited traditions, generated new concepts, and rethought the urban through changing political, economic, and spatial conditions. Theoretical pluralism is one of the field's great strengths. But recent dialogues in this journal suggest we struggle to convert this theoretical strength into an epistemological project that accumulates explanatory gains.

Urban theory debates often advance through reinterpretation and reconstruction rather than simple succession. The journal's Chicago School forum demonstrates how inherited traditions can be critically reconstructed rather than defended wholesale or discarded entirely. Similarly, contemporary debates on revanchism show how concepts acquire renewed analytical force when re-embedded within changing conjunctures of authoritarianism, surveillance, and urban inequality. These collections therefore offer useful epistemological guidance, containing clues about how urban research might become cumulative in a more disciplined sense: not through the indiscriminate accumulation of theoretical vocabularies, but through the coordinated reconstruction, comparison, and refinement of explanations.

This kind of theoretical reflection gets close to mobilizing a comparative ethic, where we are clarifying what different theories explain, under what conditions they apply, what mechanisms they privilege and where their analytical limits lie. In a world where theoretical novelty tends to win attention, this kind of work requires an elevated place in our practices. When we engage with theories in ways that allows for comparison, we give the field an opportunity for structured dialogues that make disagreement analytically informative. Urban research becomes cumulative when critique not only identifies omissions or blind spots, but also clarifies how revised explanations improve upon, modify or delimit prior accounts. In Ramsey's terms, this means treating inherited theories as guides to expectation rather than as paradigms to be defended or abandoned. The task is to revise our confidence in explanations as they move across cases, encounter rival accounts, and confront changing urban conditions.

The future of urban studies therefore depends less on resolving theoretical disagreement than on making disagreement more analytically productive. Theories will continue to coexist, mutate and overlap. Concepts will continue to travel across contexts and conjunctures. But urban research becomes cumulative when inherited ideas are reconstructed in ways that generate clearer explanatory distinctions, sharper comparative expectations, and more explicit evaluative dialogue across traditions. The danger is not that urban studies have too many theories. The danger is that it has too few ways of deciding what those theories explain, where they fail, and how they should change.