The contingent and contextual nexus of epistemology, method and politics offers abundant opportunities for new kinds of hybrids in radical, rigorous and relevant urban research. The linkages between epistemology, methodology and politics were unstable and contingent in positivism's heyday of the 1960s, and indeed at the birth of positivism itself. In this article, I suggest that this memory relies on a caricature of positivist urbanism that creates a dangerous illusion of a tidy past when the cause was clear and it was easy to distinguish allies from adversaries. Recent anxieties about the viability of critical and radical perspectives in urban research are part of our inheritance from the late 1960s and the backlash against a hegemony that connected positivist epistemology to quantitative methodologies and conservative, state-centric politics. Copyright Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2001. The main contribution of this paper will be in trying to make clear how some key metaphors in contemporary urban planning disempower the already disempowered and in fact contribute to conservative urban politics, even when they are not intended to. The uncritical use of concepts such as 'polarization', 'exclusion' or 'poverty' accords with the quest for urban purification by dominant groups in society, who seek to minimalize the urban experience of heterogeneity, otherness, diversity and urban unpredictability. Mainstream urban planning metaphors contribute to, instead of help to eliminate, sexist and racist urban politics. Mainstream conceptions of urban problems and policies are modernist, white, patriarchal, heterosexual, nuclear family-minded, middle-class and suburban. Drawing on evidence from the city of Brussels, it will be argued that much of today's urban governance discourses and practices contributes to anti-urban 'clichés of urban doom' and betrays middle-class, ethnocentric, sexist and racist prejudices about urban societies.
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