Parnell and Robinson challenge the dominance of neoliberalism as a ready-made explanatory framework for cities of the global South. Their argument is not that neoliberalisation is irrelevant, but that its theoretical centrality can obscure urban poverty, developmental states, rights, governance arrangements and practical forms of urban intervention that emerge from different historical and institutional conditions. The paper’s iconic move is to provincialise a hegemonic critical vocabulary so that cities previously treated as empirical deviations can become sources of conceptual production. Its theoretical contribution is therefore geopolitical as well as epistemological: the geography of urbanisation requires a corresponding redistribution in the geography of theory. Methodologically, the authors juxtapose established critiques with practice-generated literatures on poverty, the right to the city and subnational state formation. The work bridges postcolonial urban studies, development theory and critical geography, while providing a durable model for constructing urban theory through plural starting points rather than a single metropolitan canon.