The concept of modernity forms a basis for much intellectual work on the cultural politics of cities today. Yet the concept itself carries the traces of its origins in western cities, and in western urban theory. This has had profound consequences for how cities in poorer countries are conceptualised, and has had the effect of diminishing the intellectual resources for imagining the creativity and dynamism of these places. The paper explores the locatedness of the concept of modernity through the work of Walter Benjamin, and suggests how the association of the western city with modernity left cities in other places in a troubled relationship to the modern. The work of urban anthropologies in the 1950s and 1960s presented an opportunity for revitalising urban theory, and reconsidering accounts of urbanism which carried the traces of western ethnocentrism. This was undermined by the emergence of developmentalism, and the consequent division with in urban studies between western urban theory and urban development studies which focussed on the third world city. The paper suggests, following Benjamin, that one possibility for transforming current parochial conceptualisations of modernity and urbanism, might exist in revisiting the dialectical clash which urban anthropology had begun to stage between the west's self-definition of urban modernity, and the diversity of urbanisms which characterise cities around the world.
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