Un/Making Endpoints

In the age of proclaimed post-industrialism, relations between cities and (their) industries are being reconfigured in the face of global warming, demographic decline, infrastructural decay and other crises of capitalism. Such reconfigurations are changing citizens' daily lives, professional urban planning practices and envisioned urban futures. They materialize, for instance, in the abandonment of both: no longer effective strategies of urban governance that are based on expectations of industrial growth, and previous urban lifestyles determined by industrial production rhythms. We refer to the ongoing reconsiderations of established ways of knowing, urban governing and planning the relations between cities and industries as "endpoints" and understand them as moments of fundamental reorientation. These endpoints are accompanied by sentiments of change and a diversity of intended and unintended social and urban effects. This special issue assembles a variety of ethnographic examples that shed light on these contemporary processes of urban governance, allowing for global comparisons that extrapolate different practices of contesting and changing dominant modes and systems of power. It also aims to reveal the epistemic prevailing notions of linear progress inherent in terms such as "urban development" and the "postindustrial."