Handbook on informal urbanisation
The new handbook, edited by Roberto Rocco and Jan van Ballegooijen, explores 25 cases in 24 cities around the world. In each case, informal urbanisation has played a pivotal role in how people have struggled for their right to the city and for their ‘right to rights’ as citizens.
The explorations seek to answer the questions: how does informal urbanisation in the Global South help citizens achieve their right to the city? How do planning systems around the world respond to informal urbanization and to the struggle of citizens to be included into structures of citizenship?
This book has a special significance at this time, because it explores democracy and citizenship as actively being built as the result of struggles and the hard work of grassroots. Our cities are the spaces where this struggle is most intense. Following the words of the British social scientist Doreen Massey, they are the spaces of radical simultaneity, where we must learn to live together. Informal urbanisation is often the key to enter this political realm, but it is also the expression of exclusion and spatial injustice.
This book shows how this struggle is being carried out in cities all around the world by people with very little means, against all odds. These are the cities studied in this volume:
- Ahmedabad
- Ankara
- (the) Balkans
- Beirut
- Belo Horizonte
- Cairo
- Fortaleza
- Guangzhou
- Guayaquil
- Hanoi
- Harare
- Jerusalem
- Johannesburg
- Khartoum
- Lima
- Mashhad
- Medellin
- Mumbai
- Nairobi
- Port au Prince
- Rio de Janeiro
- São Paulo (cortiços)
- São Paulo (occupations)
- Seoul
- Yogyakarta