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Topos, a term with resonance in both geography and literature, refers to a familiar motif, idea, or pattern. Literally meaning location or place, a topos, or topic, was in ancient Greek rhetoric a place where arguments could be found or invented. Topoi are “established schemes of thought, extended metaphors, standardized passages of description … that recur in the literature of Western Europe from Homer to the modern age.” Like the locus communis, or commonplace (the Latin translation of topos), the topos is a shared cultural form that has become so conventionalized that it has little intrinsic meaning, and so can be mobilized for any side of an argument for which its meanings are appropriate. Our usage of topos stresses its formal iterability but also its spatiality. It reminds us that political discourse and journalism are replete with powerful metaphors and imagery so familiar they often go unnoticed. And it reminds us that a geospatial location is always also an imagined topic of shared and contested meaning. This project studies six topoi where urban corruption is typically imagined, plotted and narrated: slum, multistory building, ‘world-class’ zone, swampland, periphery, and infrastructure. These topoi are not simply inert and static backdrops to the corruption plot; rather, they shape the corruption plot in significant ways. They locate familiar spaces where urban corruption has typically been imagined and narrated in the global south. Although each in a different space and with a different emphasis, these urban topoi all plot corruption in ways that bring to the fore ethical imaginaries that identify and situate myriad hegemonic and oppositional publics.

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