In all the debate on theorizing cities from and for the south, discussions of health remain relatively silent amid the rush to f ind adequate explanatory frameworks for a rapidly changing urban reality. This silence remains despite the fact that the broad canon of urban studies has actually been remarkably prolif ic in responding to Robinson’s (2006: x) assertion that urban theory has ‘excluded many cities and their citizens from their accounts of the excitement and potential of city life’ by corralling cities of the south into developmental frameworks, rather than theories of urban modernity. Indeed, while McFarlane (2008: 341) has argued that the south still exists as an ‘urban shadow’ on the ‘edges of urban theory’, there now seems to be an increasing movement towards making the shadows smaller (Myers 2011; Roy 2011; Roy 2009; Watson 2009b; Parnell and Robinson 2012). Inventive work is being undertaken in urban studies, but it remains the case, as Pieterse (2008: 1) contends, that contemporary studies of cities of the global south are bifurcated between those assuming an ‘apocalyptic view’ and those ‘who display an irrepressible optimism about the possibility of solving the myriad problems that beset such cities’. In turn, whether framed by apocalypse or optimism, ‘the categorisation of poorer cities through the lens of developmentalism has often meant that they are discursively constructed as a “problem”’ (McFarlane 2008: 345). Here, the difference between the two perspectives stems from the degree to which urbanists believe that cities and their residents hold the solutions or represent only their inevitable downfall. In matters of health, this tension points to a critical set of conceptual and policy debates.
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