- Convenors:
-
Graeme Young
(University of Glasgow)
Alice Sverdlik (University of Manchester)
Martina Manara (University College London UCL)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Paper panel
- Stream:
- Economics of development: Finance, trade and livelihoods
Short Abstract
This panel explores how informality can constrain and/or allow for forms of grassroots agency that contribute to inclusive urban futures.
Description
Informality is a defining feature of urban life across the Global South. Given its central role in housing, employment, and service provision, informality may substantially shape equitable urban development pathways. But this potential often depends on whether and how grassroots agency can support alternative visions and foster economic, social, and political progress in cities.
We welcome papers exploring urban informality, grassroots agency and inclusive futures in the Global South on topics that include (but are not limited to):
1. Organization and collective action surrounding informal housing, economic activity and/or service provision, including political mobilization relating to informality (in either democratic or authoritarian political systems, particularly tied to electoral and/or clientelistic politics).
2. Evolving relationships and negotiations between state actors, grassroots, and civil society groups seeking to promote alternative approaches to urban informality.
3. Equitable political or policy-related processes, structures, and initiatives, such as co-production and other collaborative measures to include individuals and groups involved in informality.
4. Forms of state and/or private power that pervade informal housing, economic activity, and/or service provision and any opportunities to contest, evade, or take advantage of these.
5. The extent to which grassroots and civil society groups have engaged with multiple axes of exclusion (such as marginalization related to race, gender, disability, and/or migration status) alongside efforts to promote alternative strategies towards informality.
Contributions from a wide range of geographical locations and theoretical and disciplinary backgrounds are welcome. We also encourage contributions by practitioners and efforts to meld theory and practice on urban informality.
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
Based on ethnographic fieldwork on urban floods in Bengaluru, this paper argues that informality within the municipal government shapes access to relief for slum residents; and that they strategically navigate this informality to claim services, protection, and relocation amid environmental crisis.
Paper long abstract
This paper uses urban floods in the Indian city of Bengaluru as a lens to examine the co-constitutive relations between urban informality, environmental crisis, and claims to urban services for residents of informal settlements. With urban floods becoming more frequent and destructive across Global South cities, they affect the provision and maintenance of multiple urban services including drainage, infrastructure, housing, and welfare. Floods, worsened by climate change, thus reconfigure ‘urban informality’ when poor populations encounter the state for relief; sometimes intensifying its effects of precarity and other times bringing forth its political possibilities.
The paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between July - September 2025, including in-depth interviews with ~forty residents across three flood-affected informal settlements in East Bengaluru. It puts forth two arguments. First, it extends Ananya Roy’s (2005) concept to argue that ‘urban informality’ is indeed embedded within Bengaluru’s municipal governance architecture, structuring how slum residents access flood relief. Historically shaped by technocratic restructuring and democratic insulation, this state informality manifests in overlapping jurisdictions over service provision; legalistic evasions; and agency-to-agency blame shifting, with costs most borne by marginalised populations. Secondly, this paper argues that these flood-affected communities are not just victims of state informality but tactically navigate and even exploit such bureaucratic ambiguity, often with the help of civil society networks, to secure relief or relocation.
Thus, this paper ultimately sees urban flooding as an analytic through which informality within the state and grassroots agency intersect, opening constrained but meaningful possibilities for contesting exclusionary urban governance.
Paper short abstract
I propose the concept “Informal Public Goods” (IPGs), community-driven solutions to limited public services. I compare cases in Belo Horizonte favelas and Cape Town townships to explain why communities facing similar structural challenges display varying levels of agency and sustain different IPGs.
Paper long abstract
Urban development debates increasingly recognise alternative sources of public goods provision when the state fails. This paper introduces the concept of “Informal Public Goods” (IPGs): community-driven solutions to the lack or limited availability of public goods. I examine how communities create and sustain IPGs amid inequality and uneven service delivery with case studies comparing favelas and occupations in Belo Horizonte (Brazil) and townships in Cape Town (South Africa).
At the centre of the paper is the relationship between Structure - the government and its policies - and Agency - the ability of individuals and groups to act. The interplay between structure and agency influences the genesis of IPGs; however, structural components do not determine precise levels of agency. Agency can vary within the same context (for example, IPGs may occur in one township but not in another in the same city). This leads to the core puzzle: why do some communities, despite confronting comparable structural challenges, exhibit varying levels of agency?
I use qualitative research (semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and local documentary sources) to trace how residents improvise and innovate to meet needs, with cases ranging from food provision to sanitation, through informal networks. I also analyse glocalisation dynamics, showing how global ideas and practices are adapted to local realities to produce hybrid solutions.
By centring a bottom-up approach to public goods provision - where communities are the protagonists - this paper contributes to debates on urban informality, grassroots agency, and alternative visions of progress beyond state-centric frameworks.
Paper short abstract
This study examines how informality shapes citizenship practice in Lagos, Nigeria
Paper long abstract
Residents routinely make demands on the government for public services, but they often rely on local intermediaries to gain access to the state. Yet we still know little about who is most likely to make claims, why they turn to certain intermediaries over others, and what motivates them to act in the first place. This paper examines these questions using an original household survey of local governance processes in Lagos, Nigeria. The survey covers 20 diverse neighborhoods across the city—varying by income level and core–periphery location—and includes 800 respondents. It captures variation in claims-making across multiple public services, including water, sanitation, security, employment, and housing, and incorporates governance arenas beyond the state, such as traditional authorities, religious leaders, and non-state service providers. The analysis emphasizes how scale shapes citizenship pathways; settlement history structures patterns of authority and intermediation, and; place attachments motivate claims-making and collective action. By leveraging fine-grained neighborhood variation, the paper advances the panel’s broader comparative agenda on how informality shapes political access in the Global South.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how “unplanned” urbanism silences marginal voices in Delhi’s JJ Colony Bawana and Kashmir’s informal settlements. Ethnographic fieldwork reveals how planning discourses justify evictions, service cuts, and policing via legality and hazard rhetoric.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how discourses of “unplanned” urbanisation enable the silencing of marginal voices in two ostensibly distinct sites: JJ Colony Bawana on Delhi’s periphery and informal settlements in urban Kashmir. In both cases, large-scale resettlement and redevelopment are framed as necessary correctives to chaos, encroachment, and environmental risk, even as they deepen precarity for already marginalised communities. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Bawana and Srinagar, interviews, walk along conversations, and visual documentation, combined with analysis of planning documents, court orders, and media narratives, the paper traces how legality, hazard, and beautification are mobilised to justify the withdrawal of services, policing of everyday life, and threats of eviction. It argues that the “unplanned city” is not an analytical description but a governing idiom that disqualifies slum residents, migrant workers, and informal vendors from the category of legitimate urban citizens (Mohan 2025; Saqib 2025). Yet residents of Bawana and Kashmiri informal settlements actively contest this marginalisation through petitions, rights based language, tactical engagements with local politicians, and alliances with civil society groups, crafting fragile but significant spaces of claim making (Mohan 2025; Baviskar 2011). By reading Bawana and Kashmir together, the paper illuminates how displacement, securitisation, and developmentalist rhetoric intersect to produce differentiated regimes of vulnerability and voice in contemporary Indian urbanism, while foregrounding subaltern practices of urban citizenship from the margins.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how diverse state, customary, and grassroots actors negotiate peri-urban land transformation in Bushbuckridge, South Africa, showing how informal practices and contested authority drive changes on South Africa’s urban frontiers.
Paper long abstract
Debates on peri-urban land in Africa often depict customary tenure systems as being ‘overrun’ by urbanisation, market expansion, and state formalisation. This paper challenges such linear accounts through an analysis of Bushbuckridge, a rapidly urbanising region in South Africa where informality functions not as a residual condition but as a dynamic space in which authority, access, and land values are negotiated. Drawing on four arenas of interaction, namely state-led land regularisation, commercial investment, a booming informal house-building economy, and NGO advocacy, this paper traces how land commodification and formalisation unfold through the intersecting actions of state agencies, traditional authorities, residents, and intermediaries. These processes do not follow a single trajectory. They produce new uncertainties and conflicts while also generating opportunities for residents and customary authorities to assert claims, protect interests, or advance particular development visions. Taken together, the arenas reveal a shifting and sometimes contradictory landscape in which no actor fully controls land transformation. Instead, peri-urban change in Bushbuckridge emerges from ongoing negotiations that recalibrate authority and reshape the meaning and value of land. The paper argues that these dynamics constitute a complex, contingent form of land governance that cannot be captured by narratives of either erosion or persistence of customary systems.
Paper short abstract
This paper shows how urban land informality, once negotiated through mobilisation and patronage, now generates heightened insecurity. It argues that structural and institutional changes have reconfigured how informality is tolerated, reproduced, and governed.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how changing configurations of urban informality reshape the possibilities for grassroots agency through a comparative study of informal settlements in Lucknow, India. It analyses two moments: a successful land-rights mobilisation in the Haider canal settlement in the late 2000s, and the recent demolition of Akbar Nagar. Informal settlements in Lucknow survived through a combination of grassroots mobilisation, civil society support, and political patronage, which together rendered informality and ‘illegality’ negotiable and eviction politically costly. In the Haider Canal case, a land-rights movement supported by a local grassroots organisation generated collective solidarity (ekta), enabling residents to negotiate access to land and sustain a degree of political protection.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the paper argues that while political brokerage persists, the structural conditions that once allowed them to translate into security have eroded. The demolition of Akbar Nagar marks a critical shift in the governance of informality: patronage no longer reliably offers protection, civil society interventions have become fragmented and increasingly legalistic, and avenues for collective mobilisation have narrowed. As a result, political visibility seems to no longer guarantee security from eviction.
Focusing on Haider Canal in the present, the paper shows how fear and uncertainty now permeate everyday life even in settlements that have not been demolished. New actors claim to defend it, yet such claims are experienced as fragile and contingent. The paper shows how contemporary urban inequality is produced through unstable forms of political mediation, in which protection becomes contingent, uneven, and increasingly unreliable.
Paper short abstract
Many people confound the assumption that South Africa’s townships are an impossible environment for running a business. We report on 140 narrative accounts of experiences and hopes to throw light on issues of trust, identities, networks, finance, governance and formality/informality.
Paper long abstract
We report on in-depth interviews with small business operators working in Khayelitsha Township in Western Cape and Mdantsane Township in Eastern Cape – seventy from each. The interviews were conducted using an adapted version of the QuIP (Qualitative Impact Protocol) structured to identify respondents’ perception of (a) recent change in selected business domains (b) the causal pathways leading to those changes. The data was first inductively coded and analysed and then used to test hypotheses about the influence on business dynamics of (a) personal and social identity, including residence status (b) social networks and trust, (c) access to and use of financial and digital services, (d) local governance. Primary findings are also compared with a systematic meta-aggregation review of relevant secondary literature. This enables us to deconstruct the simple conceptual dualism between formal and informal business operation and governance by recognising the diversity of institutions that enable and impede business operators. We also throw light on how business activities are sustained by imaginaries of the future, as a foundation for discussion within the townships of scope for improving the business environment. The research is funded by South African, UK and US research councils under the “Transatlantic Research Program.”
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how urban residents mobilise grassroots agency when formal participatory mechanisms fail. Drawing on zoning disputes in an Indian city, it shows how communities shifted from invited participation to claimed legal action to contest illegal construction and pursue spatial justice.
Paper long abstract
Urban governance in many cities of the global South is formally structured around participation, planning permissions, and regulatory oversight. Yet, in practice, residents often encounter governance as fragmented, opaque, and unevenly enforced. This paper examines how grassroots agency emerges when “invited spaces” of participation fail to address everyday violations of spatial justice. Drawing on the author’s direct involvement in two urban zoning and building-regulation disputes in an Indian metropolis, the paper reflects on how ordinary residents confronted unauthorised construction enabled by institutional neglect.
In both cases, municipal authorities have violated zonal and planing norms. Despite repeated petitions and engagement within officially sanctioned consultative mechanisms, residents found that administrative processes were ineffective in halting these violations. This impasse prompted a strategic shift from invited participation to “claimed spaces” of action, most notably through collective legal mobilisation. Judicial intervention ultimately halted construction, revealing courts as critical—if uneven—arenas of urban governance.
Using a spatial justice lens, the paper argues that grassroots agency is not merely reactive resistance but an adaptive political practice that navigates multiple scales of governance. The analysis highlights how legality, informality, and power intersect in the everyday production of urban space, and how residents transform institutional failure into collective action. Methodologically, the paper offers a reflexive, practice-based account that bridges activism and scholarship, foregrounding positionality and ethical responsibility.
By situating community legal struggles within debates on urban informality and alternative visions of progress, the paper challenges technocratic notions of participation and re-centres agency as relational, contested, and spatially ground
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how the Kenyan government exerts its dominance in the conversation on affordable housing in informal settlements and the possibility of utilising existing spaces to contest its influence.
Paper long abstract
Rapid urbanisation in African cities has lasting impact on their planning, management and functioning . As the capital city of Kenya, Nairobi grapples with the need for affordable, decent housing for its citizens. In this case, the rapid urbanisation of the city and challenges in providing affordable housing and settlements exacerbated the challenge of informality. The current administration has initiated and implemented various affordable housing projects all over the city. There is continued demolition of new sites in the east and south of the city in areas such as Makongeni and the Marigoini informal settlement. Even with the local communities moving to court and gaining an injunction, the government went ahead and cleared the site. This is an example of the exertion of state power and leads us to question whether there is room for engagement that is constructive and beneficial for such communities. Using qualitative methodology, this paper examines the possibility of leveraging existing spaces to contest and influence the state and gain concessions for communities that have called these areas home for decades.