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Ananya Roy
Thinkers

Ananya Roy

1970

Indian-American urbanist who studies informality not as a failure but as a mode of governing.

Roy argues that informal housing is not what happens where the state does not reach, but a decision of the state: tolerated here, demolished there, legalised when convenient. Informality is not the absence of rules but rules applied unevenly, and that unevenness is the instrument.

Hence her critique of «subaltern urbanism», which romanticises the endurance of poor neighbourhoods, and her insistence that urban theories written from New York or London do not describe Kolkata or Jakarta well — where most of the planet's urban population lives.

Born in Calcutta and trained at Berkeley, Roy is professor of urban planning and social welfare at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she directs the Institute on Inequality and Democracy. City Requiem, Calcutta (2003) studied how poverty and gender intersect in the settlements of her home city, and her 2005 article on urban informality as an epistemology of planning argued that informality is not the absence of a plan but a mode of governing: the state decides which illegality it tolerates and which it demolishes.

Her 2009 article on new geographies of theory and Worlding Cities (2011, with Aihwa Ong) placed Asian and Southern cities as sources of theory, and Poverty Capital (2010) dismantled microcredit as a solution to poverty. From Los Angeles she researches housing, evictions and what she calls the racial banishment of the poor from American cities, and has carried that research into the housing struggle in the city itself.

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