Urban Popular Economies

Abstract

What is a life worth living and how is it concretely actualized by an urban majority making often unanticipated, unformatted uses of the urban to engender livelihoods in a dynamic and open-ended process? This is the key question undertaken in this collectively written piece. This means thinking about work, paid and unpaid, in ways that highlight the everyday practices of urban inhabitants as they put together territories in which to operate, which sustain their imaginations of well-being as part of a process of being with others—in households, neighborhoods, communities, and institutions. What is it that different kinds of workers have in common; what links them; where does the household begin and end; what is the difference between productive and reproductive work?

Plug-in urbanism: City building and the parodic guise of new infrastructure in Africa

“…We posit that urban planning and development processes ought to transcend linear, dominant and monolithic understandings of infrastructure and acknowledge the heterogeneity, incompleteness and open-endedness of infrastructure ‘not solely [driven] by neoliberal interventions’ (Guma, 2022; 60; see also Guma, 2020; Lawhon et al, 2018; Simone, 2004). As Simone (2019: 618) encourages us, we need to appreciate the role of ‘popular economies’ including ‘the variegated, promiscuous forms of organizing of things […] as well as the provision of social reproduction services that simultaneously fall inside and outside the ambit of formal capitalist production’ (see also, The Urban Popular Economy Collective et al, 2022). Consequently, our argument of plug-in urbanism offers a proposition for a vision of city building that takes into account multiple and diverse urban populations, formations and trajectories.…”

“…And thirdly, and as a consequence of the above, engagement with plug-in urbanism offers a recourse beyond the reflex prioritisation of plug-in and parodic spatial plans and blueprints, towards more inclusive and holistic city building processes that are responsive to diverse, popular and heterogeneous articulations of cities. In other words, city building processes must strike a balance that incorporates socio-material experimentations and popular economies in city building processes (Simone, 2019; The Urban Popular Economy Collective et al, 2022). Rather than blindly pushing a premeditated set of top down and centralised technological ideas and infrastructures, policy makers, city planners and practitioners must also recognise that infrastructure in reality encompasses vast interventions including small, open and in-situ incremental articulations and resident engineered socio-material and techno-popular modes and experiments in city building processes (Guma, 2022; Lawhon et al, 2018; Simone, 2004).…”

Provincialising Alappad’s Nationalistic Gaze: A Spatial Complexity Siting the ‘South’ Beyond the Metro

“…This shift in effect poses the complex logics and genealogies as deviant (Benjamin, 2017). Finally, the inability to think of the complexity of agency and power realms where empowerment and resistance are subtle works in indeterminate ways and where ambiguity to survey and sight is essential to move along (Benjamin et al, 2022; Simone & Benjamin, 2022). Perhaps such dystopian framing across ideological positions is not just premised on very thin fieldwork but deeply entangled in the politics of international research projects that pre-set agendas and narratives with fieldwork charted out for third-world or Southern research collaborators.…”