Governing the Informal (Ren, 2018)
This term describes settlements that are built outside formal planning and legal systems, yet are actively managed by the state in China, India, and Brazil (Ren, 2018).
What are informal settlements?
Kusno (2020) contrasts the megacity with this Indonesian term for dense, often informal, neighborhood settlements.
What is the kampung?
Watson argues that much urban planning theory is based on models developed in this part of the world.
What is the Global North?
What do people usually mean when they talk about “informal settlements”?
What are areas that are not officially planned or legally recognized, often associated with poverty or insecurity.
This is what urban planning is usually intended to do in cities.
What is organizing space, managing growth, and providing order and infrastructure?
Ren (2018) argues that informality is not simply a lack of governance, but a tool actively produced and regulated by this actor.
What is the state?
“Middling urbanism” (Kusno, 2020) refers to cities that are neither global command centers nor peripheral, but occupy this in-between positionality.
What is an in-between or “middle” urban condition?
“Seeing from the South” calls for urban theory grounded in the everyday realities of rapid urbanization, informality, and inequality in this region.
What is the Global South?
Informal settlements and informal economies grow rapidly when urban populations expand faster than formal housing and employment systems.
What is urban growth outpacing formal systems?
Planning rules often benefit this group more than others.
What are wealthier or more powerful social groups?
In China, urban villages are often redeveloped through demolition and large-scale redevelopment driven by this growth-oriented political logic (Ren, 2018).
What is entrepreneurial urbanism (or growth-driven urban governance)?
This concept explains why informal settlements are central to how megacities function.
What is middling urbanism?
Watson critiques the transfer of “best practices” in planning, arguing that policy mobility often ignores this crucial contextual factor.
What is local context?
There is tension between strict regulatory planning systems and residents who depend on informal housing and work to survive.
What is the clash between formal planning and everyday survival?
This happens when planning systems from the Global North are applied to cities in the Global South.
What is the exclusion of large populations whose lives depend on informality?
Ren (2018) shows that in India and Brazil, informal settlements are frequently incorporated into electoral politics through this practice of clientelism and vote-bank politics.
What is political patronage (or clientelist politics)?
Rather than viewing the kampung as backward, Kusno (2020) frames it as a site of negotiation, everyday life, and this kind of urban political agency.
What is grassroots urbanism (or everyday urban politics)?
Watson argues that planning education must shift from technocratic models toward this more socially embedded and politically aware approach.
What is context-sensitive (or socially just) planning?
These readings argue that informality is not temporary or marginal, but instead the dominant way many people access housing, work, and services.
What is informality as normal urban practice?
This explains why urban planning should be understood as connected to power rather than neutrality.
What is planning’s role in deciding who belongs in the city and who gets access to resources?
Ren (2018) challenges the binary between “formal” and “informal,” arguing instead that informality operates as a mode of this broader system of rule.
What is urban governance?
Kusno (2020) suggests that middling urbanism destabilizes dominant North–South hierarchies by challenging this universal model of urban development.
What is Western-centric urban theory (or global city theory)?
Watson suggests that dominant planning theory fails to engage with the “central urban issues” of poverty, informality, and inequality because it privileges this narrow epistemology.
What is Eurocentric (or Northern) planning knowledge?
Rather than viewing informal settlements as outside the system, these authors show they are deeply connected to markets, the state, and urban development.
What is the integration of informality into urban governance and capitalism?
This is the contradiction at the heart of urban planning highlighted by the readings.
What is planning’s claim to neutrality while exercising political power?