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

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 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

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.

Paper short abstract

Children in low-income Lagos settlements face frequent displacement from evictions, demolitions and floods. Using child-centred methods, this study shows how they interpret disrupted spaces, adapt play and assert spatial agency often overlooked in mainstream research.

Paper long abstract

Children living in low-income urban settlements in Lagos experience recurrent, localised forms of displacement arising from evictions, demolitions, flooding and fires. While rarely recognised within dominant humanitarian or crisis frameworks, these disruptions reshape the spatial, social and material conditions of children’s everyday lives. This paper examines how children interpret and respond to such changes, and how participatory, child-centred research methods reveal forms of spatial knowledge and grassroots agency overlooked in mainstream urban research and development practice.

Drawing on qualitative methods including group interviews, child-led photo walks, play diaries, life mapping and play mapping, the study explores how children document, navigate and rework their neighbourhood environments. Attention is paid to constructed play spaces, such as playgrounds or school grounds, and found or informal play spaces embedded within everyday urban infrastructures, including alleys, roads, vacant plots and domestic thresholds. Through these methods, children represented shared access spaces, improvised play materials and fluid boundaries between public and domestic domains, highlighting how play is negotiated across formal and informal spatial conditions.

Analysis of the visual, narrative and spatial data shows how children make sense of disrupted urban environments by adapting play practices, restoring familiarity and reasserting spatial claims. Children’s play emerges as relational, mobile and contingent on place-based knowledge developed through everyday movement and social ties. By foregrounding children’s engagements with informal play spaces, this paper contributes to alternative visions of progress that recognise children’s situated knowledge and agency within contexts of urban informality and incremental change.