Faranak Miraftab

Born in Iran and trained in Tehran and Berkeley, Miraftab is professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her early work followed the women of settlements in Cape Town and Mexico who organised housing and services without waiting for the state, and from there came her most cited concept, formulated in 2009: insurgent planning, the practices by which excluded communities transgress the invited spaces of official participation and create invented spaces of their own.

Her study of the anti-eviction campaign in Cape Town and her critique of participation as a neoliberal technique of government, which includes the poor in order to neutralise them, have influenced planning theory in the Global South alongside Holston, Roy and Watson. She co-edited the Cities of the Global South Reader (2015), the field's reference anthology.

Global Heartland (2016) changed scale: it followed the Mexican, Togolese and African American workers of a meatpacking plant in Beardstown, a small town in Illinois, to show how globalisation also remakes the rural interior of the United States and how migrants build community where nobody expected them. Her contribution is to have given a theoretical name to what movements were already doing and to have joined the Global South with the American heartland.

Her studies of municipal services in post-apartheid Cape Town revealed another side of participation. Refuse collection in poor neighbourhoods was handed to community programmes presented as empowerment, but in practice they replaced stable public jobs with precarious, low-paid work, almost always done by women. Miraftab described it as a form of privatisation that uses the language of community to cheapen services for those who have least.