The Routledge Handbook of Southern Urbanism(s)

Description

Cities are at the centre of a contemporary civilisational crisis, marked by displacement, climate breakdown, armed conflict, authoritarianism, and widening inequality. These conditions are not external shocks to urban life but constitutive forces through which cities are made, governed, inhabited, and contested. It is from these uneven, conflictual, and lived terrains that Southern... Read more

Cities are at the centre of a contemporary civilisational crisis, marked by displacement, climate breakdown, armed conflict, authoritarianism, and widening inequality. These conditions are not external shocks to urban life but constitutive forces through which cities are made, governed, inhabited, and contested. It is from these uneven, conflictual, and lived terrains that Southern urbanism(s) is being enacted today. This Handbook traces key debates shaping contemporary urbanisation through Southern urbanism(s) as an epistemic orientation, engaging critically with how urban theory and practice are being reworked in contexts where crises are most intensely lived and negotiated. Rather than offering models or solutions, the volume examines how urban knowledge is produced through situated practices, struggles, and experiments.

The book is organised into six interconnected sections that address the ethics and politics of urban inquiry; the entanglements of theory and practice; the governance of contested cities; the Southern infrastructural turn; struggles over situated urban justice; and pluriversal urban future imaginaries. The Handbook argues that centring situated reflections from and about Southern urbanism(s) enables scholars and practitioners to learn from the front lines where urban challenges are confronted, contested, and re-imagined. The “South” is treated not as a fixed geography but as a relational and epistemic position shaped by power, positionality, and lived urban conditions. Engaging questions that scholars and practitioners grapple with in their everyday work, the volume explores how theory emerges through practice, how global agendas are negotiated or resisted, and how alternative imaginaries of justice and urban futures are mobilised for the global majority.

The Handbook is an essential guide and reference not only for researchers engaged with southern (urban) theory and southern urbanism(s), but also for undergraduate and graduate teaching and for urban practitioners, policymakers, and activists.

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Southern Urbanism(s): Trajectories and New Prospects Part I: Ethos of Urban Enquiry Section I: Researching and Unknowing the Urban 1. The Knowledges that Rububiyah Breathes 2. Corpocartographies in Motion: Artistic Expressions from Feminist Geopedagogies 3. Working with Southern Architectures: Locating a Reparative Urban Design Praxis 4. Decentering Urban Theories from the Black Geographies of Abya Yala 5. Rebuilding the Abya Yala Indigenous Planning: Kitu-Kara and Kichwa Urban Yachay Section II: Theorising and Practicing Southern Urbanism(s) 6. Five Points for Planners from a City at War 7. Occupations as Resistant Texts: Challenging the Colonial and Anti-Black Foundations of Cape Town 8. Peripheral Urbanization and Popular Economies: Reframing Housing and Labor Informality from Latin America 9. Southern Urbanisms, Plural, beyond the North/South Dichotomy: A View from the Semi-Periphery 10. Urban Humanitarianism: Displacement, Experimentation and City‑Making Commentary: The Practice of Evidence-Based Decision-Making and Actionable Knowledge Part II: Governing Contested Cities Section III: Ungovernable Urban Disruptions 11. The Home Front: Domicide and Civilian Resistance in Gaza and Aleppo 12. “Digna Rabia”: Reconfiguring Cali’s Urban Space during the 2021 National Strike 13. Elite Cities: Neo(il)liberal Trajectories and Spatial Disparities in Millennial India 14. How to Become Migrant-Friendly: Stories from “smaller” Cities Section IV: Reframing the Infrastructural Turn 15. Incompleteness as an Paradigm Toward Reframing Infrastructure 16. Inclusive Socio‑Electric Pathways in South Africa’s Informal Communities 17. The Blue and Green Infrastructure Management for Bengaluru 18. Global China and the Infrastructural Fix in Urban Africa 19. Urban Energy Transition in India: Reimagining Cities as Catalysts for 21st Century Energy Transition Commentary: The Geopolitics of Infrastructural Investments and
the Implementation of Global Agendas Part III: Shaping Urban Futures Section V: The Search for Situated Urban Justice 20. Assessing India’s Urban Governance Model for Climate Justice 21. Stories that Unite Us: Harnessing the Power of Digital Connection in Forging Inclusive Places 22. Mobility Justice: Intersectional Approaches to Care Trajectories 23. Right to the City, Feminist Municipalism, and Intersectional Social Justice: Collective Action Towards Caring Cities and Territories 24. Reparative Urbanism and Community Resilience: Countering Urbicide in Palestine Section VI: Pluriversal Urban Future Imaginaries 25. Automated Utopia, Forgotten People: Algorithmic Urban Imaginaries and New Cities of Southeast Asia 26. Youth, Climate Action, and Urban Futures in the Global South: Pluriverse of Periphery? 27. Inclusive Climate Proofing in African Cities 28. Epistemic Determinants of Syndemic Urbanism 29. Exploring Pluriversal Urban Imaginaries through Art Commentary: Shaping Urban Futures Conclusion: For Southern Urbanisms Yet to Come

Editor(s)

Biography

Catalina Ortiz is a Colombian urbanist, Professor of Critical Urban Pedagogy and Director of Urban Lab at the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment, University College London, United Kingdom, and an editor of Urban Studies, working on spatial justice, decolonial urban theory, and creative methodologies.

Chandrima Mukhopadhyay is an Independent Consultant, working on southern theory, climate action, and mobility. She has taught Urban Politics and Governance. She was MIT-UTM Malaysia Sustainable Cities Program fellow. She is the editor of Regional Studies, Regional Science, and a Regional Studies Association Fellow.

Critics' Reviews

"Rare collections are able to both insist on the importance of a conceptual field while listening deeply to its critiques and debates in a way that moves us collectively forward. This is one such collection. Sharp, necessary, and contemporary, it holds on to the ethic of southern inquiry and begins the next generation of its articulation and expansion."

Gautam Bhan, India Institute of Human Settlements

“This Handbook marks out the dramatic shift in the compass of urban scholarship. The volume offers new ideas, fresh challenges and most importantly a chorus of confident southern voices to explore and interpret cities anew at this time of critical global transition.”

Susan Parnell, University of Bristol

“A must read for critical urban educators and a must be assigned for classrooms that wish to teach plurality and openness of a contested field that seeks to understand urban experience(s) and theorize possibility of just future(s) for majority world.”

Faranak Miraftab, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

“In this handbook, South is not a cardinal point in the Earth's urban geography but rather an epistemic orientation towards the rupture of a hegemonic paradigm of urbanization which has colonized territories and imaginaries. The different chapters, urban contexts and experiences presented in the book challenge it, bringing fresh air to dystopic times.”

Raquel Rolnik, Universidade de São Paulo

The Routledge Handbook of Southern Urbanism(s)

Description

Table of Contents

Editor(s)

Biography

Critics' Reviews

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