This intervention is by a collective of scholars working on various facets of urbanisation in Asia. Focusing on the notion of arrangements/re-arrangements, it seeks to extend the consideration of urban politics as a matter of surges, a provisional consolidation of intensities, inhabitants and their practices, affiliations and orientations that give rise to continuously mutating forms of sense, care, and collective action. Whereas the work and effects of institutions, with their genealogies, remits, and competencies, are to a large extent specifiable according to their operating norms and the various regulatory frameworks that govern their operations, the dispositions of arrangements -what they do, what they actually bring about -are not readily definable or clear, enacting a form of performative ambiguity. Involving workarounds, collaborations, exchanges, and agreements that exceed the familiar protocols of interaction among households, local authorities, markets, civil institutions, brokers, and service providers, arrangements entail the enactment of caring, provisioning, regulating, mapping, and steering as the purview of more provisional, incessantly mutating forms that fold in bits and pieces of discernible institutions. In this heuristic intervention we seek to further the 'urbanisation' of urban geography itself, in the sense of complexifying both the terrain and the methodological practices brought to bear. It attempts to open a way of speaking about urbanisation processes that exceed binary formulations, countervailing scales, or structural absences to encompass a broader range of processes at work in shaping dispositions that are materialised or simply potentiated. It proceeds from a process of collective composition whose objective is to diversify the working tools of urban analysis rather than simply offering new conceptual formulations.

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Urban vocabulary has been influenced by global patterns of modernity, capitalism and anglophone academia. These lexicons are increasingly standardised and shape dominant conceptual approaches in city debates. However, contemporary urban theories indicate a shift toward understanding the ‘urban’ and ‘cities’ from multiple perspectives. An emerging urban vocabulary is being built to capture the significance of place, complex power dynamics and changing geographical landscapes. This special issue presents diverse perspectives on how urban lexicons can be decentred from anglophone thought, operate as organising urban logics, serve larger political projects, and shape and are reshaped by grounded urban practice. Articles from the Middle East and South Asia discuss the margins of vocabulary and how vocabularies located in the global South enable us to think through dilemmas of knowledge production. We contribute to debates on decolonising power and authority in urban thought by expanding on how to theorise from the South.

This article considers how urban peripheries are made and unmade by forms of “shifting”. We examine these shifts from the perspective of rickshaw garages and mess dormitories in Dhaka, Bangladesh, which both offer makeshift working and living arrangements to rural–urban migrants. By explicitly situating these spaces as part of the movements and crisscrossing trajectories that animate urban peripheries, we challenge the tendency in urban scholarship to analyze peripheral and marginalized spaces primarily through the lens of habitation. Breaking with residentialist and sedentarist approaches to urban space, we present rickshaw garages and mess dormitories as spaces that are enabling and undergoing various forms of shifting, as their occupants move and alternate between different places, neighborhoods, and spatial arrangements to establish a continuity of work and income. We argue that these forms of manoeuvring are made possible by a degree of spatial malleability that reflects the territorial impermanence of the periphery itself, which is continuously pushed sideways through tandem processes of precariousness and improvement. By directing attention to the “shifting” in “makeshift”, we contribute to a less static understanding of how labor migrants try to hold their place in the city amidst wider processes of exclusion, expansion, and densification.

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