The politics of increments in collective urban action 1

In the so-called majority urban world of today, the trajectories of change sometimes seem univocal, in others, all over the place. Memories of national imaginaries—of slights and wounds, power grabs, and nagging liberations—both harden and fade away. Speeds of transformation are deceptive in their manifestations. The seeming hegemonies behind the logics of mega-development appear to chew up everything in their path. But in their production of more of the same, they leave little to constitute the basis of dynamic interactions between them, and such interactions otherwise constitute the speed, the registration of history (Curran 2007; Goldman 2011; Hodson and Marvin 2009; Kirkpatrick and Smith 2011; Monstadt 2009; Shatkin 2008).