Richard Walker has written a sharply dismissive response to our article, “Towards a new epistemology of the urban?” Although he opens by stating that his intervention is intended in the spirit of “friendly combat,” the bulk of Walkerʼs text is composed of a series of castigations suggesting that our work is misguided, confused, unoriginal, ahistorical, hypertheoretical, idealist, metaphysical and undialectical. Particularly because we have found Walkerʼs writings on urbanization and territorial development so essential for our own developing theorization of extended urbanization, we were surprised to learn that he views our ideas as an unhelpful detour from what he considers to be the “hard work” of urban research. Are our recent writings really in such dramatic tension with those of an author whose theories, categories and methods have so powerfully shaped our own, and which continue to inform our thinking about urban questions? Perhaps there are other issues at stake here, related less to substantive disagreements than to different ways of responding, on an epistemological level, to the rapidly shifting terrain of urban theory and research under contemporary conditions.