On 13th November 2019, it was my honour to speak at the concluding Plenary of the three-day UCL conference entitled, ‘At the frontiers of the urban: thinking concepts and practices globally.’ Chaired by Prof Jenny Robinson and also joined by Prof Vanessa Watson and Prof AbdouMaliq Simone, the plenary provided a set of concluding reflections on what the conference covered. My own intervention was on ‘De-centring, re-centring, obfuscating’, discussing the opportunities and constraints in the practices of ‘de-centring’ global urban studies.