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 urbanism(s) is... 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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Part 1: Ethos of Urban Enquiry Section 1: Researching and Unknowing the Urban 1. Rububiyah, Knowledge, and Urban Breathing 2. Corpocartographies in Motion and Feminist Geo‑Pedagogies 3. Reparative Urban Design Praxis and Southern Architectures 4. De‑Centred Urban Theory and Black Geographies of Abya Yala 5. Indigenous Planning and Urban Yachay in Kitu‑Kara Section 2: Theorising and Practicing Southern Urbanism(s) 6. Planning Lessons from a City at War 7. Occupations, Resistance, and Anti‑Black Urban Foundations in Cape Town 8. Peripheral Urbanisation, Popular Economies, and Informality in Latin America 9. Plural Southern Urbanisms beyond the North–South Divide 10. Urban Humanitarianism, Displacement, Experimentation, and City‑Making Part 2: Governing Contested Cities Section 3: Ungovernable Urban Disruptions 11. Domicide and Civilian Resistance in Gaza and Aleppo 12. Protest, Dignity, and Urban Space in Cali’s 2021 National Strike 13. Neo‑Illiberal Urban Trajectories and Spatial Inequality in Millennial India 14. Migrant‑Friendly Urbanism in Smaller Cities Section 4: Reframing the Infrastructural Turn 15. Incompleteness as an Infrastructure Paradigm 16. Inclusive Socio‑Electric Pathways in South Africa’s Informal Communities 17. Blue and Green Infrastructure Governance in Bengaluru 18. Global China and the Infrastructural Fix in Urban Africa 19. Urban Energy Transitions and Indian Cities Part 3: Shaping Urban Futures Section 5: The Search for Situated Urban Justice 20. Urban Governance Models and Climate Justice in India 21. Digital Connection and Enabling Spatial Justice 22. Mobility Justice and Intersectional Care Trajectories 23. Feminist Municipalism, the Right to the City, and Caring Territories 24. Reparative Urbanism and Countering Urbicide in Occupied Palestine Section 6: Pluriversal Urban Future Imaginaries 25. Algorithmic Urban Imaginaries and New Cities in Southeast Asia 26. Youth, Climate Action, and Urban Futures in the Global South 27. Inclusive Climate Proofing in African Cities 28. Epistemic Determinants of Syndemic Urbanism 29. Art, Pluriversal Imaginaries, and Urban Futures

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 editor of Regional Studies, Regional Science, and 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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