Decolonial informal urban futures

Abstract

Urban informality scholarship is concerned with injustice and anti-democratic practices. It addresses these issues by engaging with and critiquing urban displacement, inequality, and exclusionary governance. Decoloniality is present in this scholarship, but it has not been used as a theoretical and applied approach to intervene in urban informality. This paper addresses this gap by arguing that decoloniality should become central to how we understand and address urban development in the Global South. Colonial urban planning norms of the twentieth century continue to shape contemporary urbanization. This harms inclusive governance and renders informality undesirable and unworkable. We bring together existing debates on decoloniality to challenge this orthodoxy and introduce the concept of “decolonial informal urban futures” to do so. We advocate for novel theoretical approaches and applied methods that work with, rather than against, informality to develop heterodox explorations of decoloniality and urbanization.