Full Description
Cities are at the centre of a contemporary civilisational crisis, marked by displacement, climate breakdown, armed conflict, authoritarianism, and widening inequality. These conditions are not external shocks to urban life but constitutive forces through which cities are made, governed, inhabited, and contested. It is from these uneven, conflictual, and lived terrains that Southern urbanism(s) is being enacted today. This Handbook traces key debates shaping contemporary urbanisation through Southern urbanism(s) as an epistemic orientation, engaging critically with how urban theory and practice are being reworked in contexts where crises are most intensely lived and negotiated. Rather than offering models or solutions, the volume examines how urban knowledge is produced through situated practices, struggles, and experiments.
The book is organised into six interconnected sections that address the ethics and politics of urban inquiry; the entanglements of theory and practice; the governance of contested cities; the Southern infrastructural turn; struggles over situated urban justice; and pluriversal urban future imaginaries. The Handbook argues that centring situated reflections from and about Southern urbanism(s) enables scholars and practitioners to learn from the front lines where urban challenges are confronted, contested, and re-imagined. The "South" is treated not as a fixed geography but as a relational and epistemic position shaped by power, positionality, and lived urban conditions. Engaging questions that scholars and practitioners grapple with in their everyday work, the volume explores how theory emerges through practice, how global agendas are negotiated or resisted, and how alternative imaginaries of justice and urban futures are mobilised for the global majority.
The Handbook is an essential guide and reference not only for researchers engaged with southern (urban) theory and southern urbanism(s), but also for undergraduate and graduate teaching and for urban practitioners, policymakers and activists.
Contents
Part 1: Ethos of Urban Enquiry 1. Rububiyah Knowledges and Urban Praxis 2. Feminist Geopedagogies and Corpocartographic Expression 3. Reparative Urban Design and Southern Architectures 4. Black Geographies and Decentring Urban Theory in Abya Yala 5. Indigenous Planning Revitalisation in Kitu-Kara and Kichwa Cities Part 2: Theorising and Practicing Southern Urbanism(s) 6. Planning Lessons from a City at War 7. Resistant Occupations and Anti-Colonial Urban Texts in Cape Town 8. Peripheral Urbanisation and Popular Economies in Latin America 9. Southern Urbanisms beyond the North-South Dichotomy 10. Geopolitics of Circulating Urban Humanitarian Knowledge Part 3: Governing Contested Cities 11. Domicide and Civilian Resistance in Gaza and Aleppo 12. Urban Space Reconfiguration during Cali's 2021 National Strike 13. Neoliberal Trajectories and Spatial Inequality in Millennial India 14. Migrant-Friendly Approaches in Smaller Cities Part 4: Reframing the Infrastructural Turn 15. Incompleteness as an Infrastructure Paradigm 16. Inclusive Socio-Electric Pathways in Informal South African Communities 17. Managing Blue and Green Infrastructure in Bengaluru 18. Global China and the Infrastructural Fix in Urban Africa 19. Urban Political Economy of India's Energy Transition Part 5: Shaping Urban Futures: Situated Urban Justice 20. Climate Justice and India's Urban Governance Model 21. Digital Justice and Data Practices in Southern Smart Cities 22. Mobility Justice and Intersectional Care Trajectories 23. Feminist Municipalism and the Right to Caring Cities 24. Reparative Urbanism and Spatial Justice in Occupied Palestine Part 6: Pluriversal Urban Future Imaginaries 25. Algorithmic Urban Imaginaries and New Southeast Asian Cities 26. Youth Climate Action and Pluriversal Urban Futures in the Global South 27. Climate-Proofing Approaches in African Cities 28. Epistemic Determinants of Syndemic Urbanism 29. Pluriversal Urban Imaginaries through Artistic Practice
