Urbanization in the Global South: Simone, Pieterse and Roy Explained

Urbanization in the Global South is the process by which Africa, Asia and Latin America now concentrate almost all of the world's urban growth, some 2.5 billion new urban residents expected by 2050 according to the United Nations, in cities that grow without the industrialisation, formal employment or state capacity that accompanied European and North American urbanization. Three authors have built the framework for understanding it: AbdouMaliq Simone, who in For the City Yet to Come (2004) showed how informal networks make African cities work; Edgar Pieterse, who in City Futures (2008) analysed the governance crisis of those cities; and Ananya Roy, who in 2005 defined urban informality as a mode of producing the city rather than its anomaly.

AbdouMaliq Simone: people as infrastructure

Simone worked in Douala, Djibouti, Dakar and Johannesburg and found cities that, without sufficient infrastructure or formal employment, function thanks to what he calls people as infrastructure: networks of exchange, favours, street trade, informal transport and associations that connect residents and allow them to survive and prosper. Those practices are inventive and flexible, but also precarious, and Simone warns against romanticising them: the city yet to come of his title is the one those networks anticipate and that public policy has not yet learned to recognise or support.

Edgar Pieterse: the governance crisis and radical urban politics

Pieterse, director of the African Centre for Cities in Cape Town, addresses governance. Southern cities grow faster than their governments can plan, with minimal budgets, powers fragmented among levels of government and a majority of the population outside formal registers. His critique targets both the developmentalism that promises infrastructure that never arrives and the global city and smart city agendas that copy Northern models. He proposes instead a radical urban politics that starts from informality as a fact, invests in universal basic services and builds institutions with the organisations of the neighbourhoods themselves.

Ananya Roy: informality as a mode of producing the city

Roy supplies the critique of planning. In her article Urban Informality: Toward an Epistemology of Planning, she showed that informality is not the absence of the state but a mode of urbanization the state itself produces by deciding which occupations it tolerates, which it regularises and which it demolishes: the settlements of the poor are illegal while elite developments outside the rules are legalised. Her work on Kolkata and on Southern cities as sites of theory, with Aihwa Ong in Worlding Cities (2011), demands that urbanism be thought from Mumbai, Lagos or Rio and not only from Chicago and Paris.

Opportunities: upgrading, tenure and services without displacement

All three agree on the opportunities. Southern cities are young, dense and creative, and the solutions their residents have developed, from informal collective transport to markets and incremental self-building, hold lessons for global urban sustainability. Neighbourhood upgrading that recognises tenure and extends services without displacement, as in Medellín or as promoted by Slum Dwellers International, shows that policy can build on informality rather than fight it. The condition is a state that accompanies instead of demolishing.

The lesson of Simone, Pieterse and Roy is that the urban future is decided in the South and that the categories of inherited planning, plan, zoning, formality, are not enough to govern it. Understanding informality as a way of producing the city, investing in the basics for all and building governance with communities are the three principles of an urbanization that, instead of reproducing inequality on an unprecedented scale, can turn the largest urban growth in history into the largest opportunity for justice.