‘These are journeys enabled by trust with the ever-present possibility of distrust and epistemic violence; journeys of hope that must continuously recognize hopelessness and fears; and journeys that insist on crossing borders even as each person on the journey learns of borders that they cannot cross – either because it is impossible to cross them, or because it does not make sense to invest in dreams and sweat in these border crossings.’ (Nagar 2014, 5-6 quoted in Ramakrishnan, this issue).

In our journeys through the city undertaken in hope of better understanding it, perhaps even of changing it, how do we grapple with the complexities of its spaces, its formations overlaid by our experience of it in the every day? How do we recognise the centres and the margins, sound out our own limits? City 21.2 is full of how we know what we know about the city, how we investigate it, what knowledge we overlay on top of the embodied experience of living in it, walking through it, being forced out of it, being imprisoned in it. How the colour of our skin and the content of our character stand among a host of things determining where and how we can safely traverse the urban, where that journey might begin, what paths are permitted us. Beginnings themselves are often denied. Our positionalities shape the lessons that we take away from these experiences, the ways in which we speak, and the people who are listening.

This issue was put together in the late hours in the midst of my own fieldwork around homelessness in a city that felt bereft of hope, embodying the despair of deindustrialisation and austerity. My own journey—that seemed one of futility and heartbreak both—had an odd resonance with the special feature at the centre of this issue, The city and its margins: Ethnographic challenges across makeshift urbanism. It raised many questions as I worked through the articles collected here.

The special feature highlights practices of reflexivity in undertaking urban ethnography, and how a focus on methodological questions reveals the ongoing discomfort with issues of voice and power that remain in tension, never resolved. This is particularly true of any study of the ‘margins’, places and peoples pushed to the fringes of economic, social and political power. Editors Michele Lancione, Elisabetta Rosa and Tatiana Thieme strive in their introduction to balance the need for unpicking the specific, the complex, the splintered, without losing sight the structural forces at play. It is a question forever unresolved within any number of disciplines, much less in combination or conversation among several of them. Some of the authors they call upon as representative—Amin and Thrift (2002) and Graham and Marvin (2001) on the one hand, Wacquant (2008) on the other—are familiar voices in the pages of City. So too is the multifaceted question of how to read and how to write the city, perhaps discussed most memorably in City 10 (2) on the subject of London. Bob Catterall wrote in the editorial ‘Such hope as there is will in part depend on how we write about cities’ (2006, 122). Is there hope to be found here over a decade on?

The articles collected here question representation, reflexivity and subjectivity through journeys across space—whether across the globe or down the street—but also in time. A powerful process of learning is involved in the temporality of being present elsewhere, and this is a learning that cannot be hastened. They are complemented and challenged by Matthew Thompson’s ‘LIFE in a ZOO: Henri Lefebvre and the (social) production of (abstract) space in Liverpool’, which grapples with these same questions in a very different way. He uses Lefebvre to unpick how lived ‘social’ space has articulated with abstract space over several decades, represented by residents on the one side, and developers and planners on the other. The two book reviews—of Rashad Shabazz’s Spatializing Blackness: Architectures of Confinement and Black Masculinity in Chicago, and Walking in Cities: Quotidian Mobility as Urban Theory, Method, and Practice edited by Evrick Brown and Timothy Shortell—engage more deeply in an exploration of embodied positionality. They show both its centrality to understanding geographies of mobility and exploration, as well as geographies of entrapment and incarceration. Several challenging questions can be engaged with through all of them: what happens in the space of encounter, how we tell these stories, and where, in the end, are the ‘margins’ and the ‘centre’ actually to be found?