Narratives about cities have a tendency to endow them with a coherence that they in fact lack. This is the case with most urban theories, even those that describe cities as framed by deep social inequalities and spatial segregation – and which usually see in capitalism the unifying logic of these contradictory spaces. Cities are actually complex and mutating entities that always defy attempts to contain them within totalizing and comprehensive narratives and plans.  In the last two decades, several social scientists and urbanists have experimented with the possibility of conceiving and narrating cities anew to understand them in more complex ways. Many experiments originated in the Global South, where cities have never matched available urban theories. To think of the urban from the South means to start from de-centered positions; from positions that resist being centered. It does not necessarily mean focusing on cities in the Global South. Rather, it means to look for or to create alternative archives and perspectives instead of using established ones. It means defamiliarizing and suspending taken-for-granted views. It means rejecting the search for yet another coherent view and instead dwelling on the incoherencies and (unexpected) relationalities that these experiments reveal. It means to proceed transversally.