The Production of Space in the Global South: Robinson and Pieterse

The production of space in the Global South is the question of how the cities of Africa, Asia and Latin America are made, with which actors, rules and conflicts, and why urban theories developed in Chicago, Paris or Los Angeles are not enough to explain them. The expression comes from Henri Lefebvre, who in The Production of Space (1974) argued that space is not a container but a social product, and two authors have carried it South: the British geographer Jennifer Robinson, who in Ordinary Cities (2006) demanded that all cities be studied on an equal footing, and the South African Edgar Pieterse, who in City Futures (2008) analysed how the African city is produced between informality, poverty and fragmented governance.

Jennifer Robinson: against the hierarchy of global and Third World cities

Robinson starts from a critique of the hierarchy of cities. Twentieth-century urban theory divided the world into global cities, New York, London, Tokyo, which produced modernity and theory, and Third World cities, studied only as development problems. That division, she argues, is a colonial inheritance that impoverishes theory and harms cities: Lusaka or Johannesburg are as modern and as creative as London, and their residents produce space, culture and economy with the same inventiveness. Her proposal of ordinary cities calls for a cosmopolitan urban theory built by comparing any city with any other.

Edgar Pieterse: residents, capital and agencies producing the African city

Pieterse describes how that ordinary Southern city is produced. In Africa, urban growth happens with minimal municipal budgets, with most of the population in self-built settlements and with states that swing between absence and demolition. Space is produced at once by residents, who build incrementally; by real estate interests, which raise enclaves for elites and satellite city projects such as Eko Atlantic in Lagos; and by international agencies, which impose modernisation agendas. Pieterse argues that the result is a divided city where globalisation deepens spatial inequalities.

Informality as a permanent mode of producing space

Informality is the common key. Robinson and Pieterse agree that most housing, work and transport in Southern cities are informal, and that this condition is not a transitory failure of development but a permanent mode of producing space: self-built settlements house a billion people, informal markets feed cities and minibuses move them. Recognising that changes policy: instead of plans that ignore or demolish the informal, governance that integrates it, neighbourhood upgrading with secure tenure and universal basic services.

The South as a source of theory: comparative urbanism and resilience

Both see the South as a source of theory. The solutions its residents develop in the face of scarcity, from incremental construction to the savings networks of federations of settlement dwellers, hold lessons of resilience and sustainability the North needs. Robinson has since developed a method of comparative urbanism that puts cases from anywhere into dialogue, and Pieterse, from the African Centre for Cities, has promoted research made from African cities rather than about them. Ananya Roy and AbdouMaliq Simone have contributed to that same agenda.

The lesson for planning is that the production of space in the Global South requires its own categories and respect for its actors. Southern cities are not lagging behind on the way to the Northern model; they produce a different urbanity, more informal and more unequal, that will decide the planet's urban future. Understanding it on its own terms, as Robinson and Pieterse ask, is the condition for policies that reduce inequality instead of importing solutions that were not designed for them.