The travelling adventures of urban theory. A view from outside the core

The paper summarizes arguments, developed in two forthcoming publications, about the importance of context in making sense of urban social processes like segregation and gentrification. It focuses especially on tensions arising from the fact that concepts and theories used in most empirical research around the world are generated in different contexts and are bundled with their own contextual attachments, in ways that are usually implicit, allowing for their –often unwarranted– claim to universal validity. It also stresses the non-randomness in the geographical pattering of concept and theory generation, which follows and reproduces the hierarchies in the academic division of labour. The main part of the paper is a rather autobiographic illustration of working with borrowed concepts and theories and of the ways their contradictory input (at the same time enabling and mystifying the understanding of local processes) can be handled in a productive way.