On handling urban informality in southern Africa

In this article I reconsider the handling of urban informality by urban planning and management systems in southern Africa. I argue that authorities have a fetish about formality and that this is fuelled by an obsession with urban modernity. I stress that the desired city, largely inspired by Western notions of modernity, has not been and cannot be realized. Using illustrative cases of top–down interventions, I highlight and interrogate three strategies that authorities have deployed to handle informality in an effort to create or defend the modern city. I suggest that the fetish is built upon a desire for an urban modernity based on a concept of formal order that the authorities believe cannot coexist with the “disorder” and spatial “unruliness” of informality. I question the authorities' conviction that informality is an abomination that needs to be “converted”, dislocated or annihilated. I conclude that the very configuration of urban governance and socio-economic systems in the region, like the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, renders informality inevitable and its eradication impossible

Geographies of development: without the poor.

Some contemporary narratives of development give privileged status to middle classes in the global South. In the face of intractable poverty, policy makers take heart from the success stories of ordinary people who have, over generations, realised and consolidated the gains of development and who embody society at its most functional. Their presumed virtues are their self‐sufficiency, their ability to articulate with the global economy, their buying power, and their good sense as responsible citizens. This, the first of three reports on geographies of development, reflects on recent research that interrogates the privileged status of middle classes in some narratives of development. As this burgeoning literature suggests, celebratory narratives elide the complex circumstances that make and unmake middle classes. Furthermore, middle class gains do not automatically translate into development for others. Indeed, efforts to centre the middle class threaten to displace, and justify the displacement of, economically marginalised groups seen as surplus to development

Urban regeneration and sustainable housing renewal trends

Urban planning, affordable houses and protection of the cultural natural heritage are important elements to be considered in the design of sustainable urban realities. Homes for One Pound, Granby Four Streets CLT, Homebaked CLT, Make Liverpool CIC and Engage Liverpool CIC are examples of successful initiatives oriented to foster urban regeneration by promoting environmental quality and social cohesion

Calculating without numbers: aesthetic governmentality in Delhi's slums

This article looks at the manner in which knowledge of slums in Delhi has been collected, assembled and circulated in two different moments of urban improvement to explore the relationship between calculation and governmentality. Based on an extended study of slum enumeration and the politics of slum demolitions in Delhi, I show that each of these two moments relied on an epistemologically different set of calculative practices - one statistical, the other aesthetic - to render the slum intelligible and secure rule. I specifically show how the statistically rigorous calculative practices of the first moment encountered various technical difficulties and political challenges in producing a governing intelligibility, thus leading to the unruliness of slum space. In response, a new set of governmental techniques operating through the dissemination of aesthetic norms and codes re-secured rule over slums. I describe this shift in governmental technique to demonstrate that the dissemination of aesthetic norms can be both more governmentally effective and practically implementable than the statistical deployment of governmental truths. This suggests the need to expand our understanding of the epistemology of government to include attention to a more diverse array of governmental technologies, some more aesthetic than strictly calculative