Urbanisms In the Global South

All the stories about the slums immerse us in muddy, damp streets, where architecture is essential, the houses are built with waste materials. Food is scarce, but diseases are numerous. The slums are synonymous with extreme poverty, a reflection of these peasants, worn out by their fruitless lands, who have come to break their last strength against the impenetrable gates of the city.

For several years, however, these assumptions have tended to disappear. Faced with the human and social emergency that may have reigned in marginal urban areas, solutions had to be found.
For urban planners and architects, slums have become urban opportunities, laboratories for the city of tomorrow. In these chaotic areas of high urban density, we experiment, we look for urban models, with the only constraint, simplicity.
In these urban margins we have nothing more to lose, so we can build everything.
If our urban planners and architects seek and explore innovative solutions to respond to these extremely precarious situations, “are we now ready to see our slums as an opportunity and an opportunity for an urban laboratory at home?”

If the image of slums is associated with negative feelings, this relationship now tends to evolve. We talk more and more about these urban fringes as urban laboratories. Faced with the urgency of certain situations, solutions have been found, inventing new forms of urban organisation. While many observers in the city have already explored the issue, a new study reminds us of the potential wealth of these slums.
The planetary dynamic of urbanization passes through the expansion of shanty-towns in developing countries. Today, 930,000 people, or one eighth of humanity, live in these marginal spaces. Tomorrow, in 2030, they will represent 2 billion people. While some see these spaces as a threat, others see them as a potential, even a wealth from which we should be inspired.

For various reasons, the urban model developed in the heart of the slums would be an example of a sustainable city. Indeed, the inhabitants move on foot, due to the lack of infrastructure large enough to accommodate the motor vehicles’ passage. Children play in the streets. In these overcrowded spaces, the challenges of urban density have long been in the process of being resolved. Like small houses, buildings are optimised and living spaces are adaptable and multifunctional. Public spaces are genuinely public and for everyone. In the slums of Marrakech people get married on the street, with their neighbours. For lack of public services, they clean in front of their houses. The intensity of this city is linked to the porosity between public and private spaces. When something breaks, they repair it (there is a strong logic of recycling). Mutual aid systems are developed. Local economies are being created, so that today these slums generate money. Therefore these spaces are therefore increasingly perceived as a sustainable city, at the same time pedestrian, ecological, participatory and recyclable.

We understand that specific social or ethical rules prevent us from allowing these camps to settle culturally and legally, and choosing not to accept that this precariousness is a city model. A praiseworthy and understandable approach. In general, the slum has always been equated with the instability of developing countries. However, the influx of migrant populations causes a displacement of these forms of settlement. While these forms have long been transit structures, today they tend to become perennial forms of organisation. So we choose to destroy, for various reasons, which poses a problem of ownership.

We understand that certain social or ethical rules prevent us culturally and legally from allowing these camps to settle. However, if you think about it, the slum model, if it gives us the keys to the development of sustainable cities, seems like a model we know in another form. Like the ephemeral city, the slum could become an opportunity. An opportunity to redefine together the codes of the city of tomorrow. An opportunity, in the crisis, to create together and humanly a revolution. An opportunity to highlight urban and social potential for collective innovation and better living, in the creation of an urban planning of simplicity. In the same way as ephemeral urbanism, this new form of urbanism could become a laboratory of the city from below, of the city made by and for the inhabitants.

Contemporary processes of urbanisation present major challenges for urban research and theory as urban areas expand and interweave. In this process, urban forms are constantly changing and new urban configurations are frequently evolving. An adequate understanding of urbanisation

Currently Latin American cities are seeing simultaneous processes of reinvestment and redevelopment in their historic central areas. These are not just mega scale interventions like Porto Maravilha in Rio or Puerto Madero in Buenos Aires or the luxury renovations seen in Santa Fé or Nueva Polanco in Mexico City, they include state-led, piecemeal, high-rise interventions in Santiago, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Panamá, and Bogotá, all of which are causing the displacement of original populations and thus are forms of gentrification. Until very recently, these processes have been under conceptualized and little critiqued in Latin America, but they deserve careful scrutiny, along with new forms of neighbourhood organisation, activism and resistance. In this introduction, we begin that task, drawing on the work begun in an Urban Studies Foundation-funded workshop on Global Gentrification held in Santiago, Chile in 2012. Our aim is not just to understand these urban changes and conflicts as gentrification, but to empirically test the applicability of a generic understanding of gentrification beyond the usual narratives of/from the global north. From this investigation we hope to nurture new critical narratives, be sensitive enough to engage with indigenous theoretical narratives, and understand the dialectical interplay between state policies, financial markets, local politics and people. The papers in this special issue deal with the core issues of state power, urban policies (exerted at metropolitan and neighbourhood levels), an enormous influx of financial investment in derelict neighbourhoods, which produces exclusion and segregation, significant loss of urban heritage from rapidly 'renewing' neighbourhoods, and even some institutional arrangements that make possible anti-displacement activism and self-managed social housing production.

The emerging literature on the globalization of real estate has addressed how internationally circulating capital has increasingly found its ways into housing markets of the "Global South". With relatively underdeveloped financial and real estate markets, these countries have discursively and materially been rebranded as emerging markets, that is, they have been shaped into frontiers in the global urbanization of capital. In this paper we scrutinize the trans-national real estate networks that shape and reshape the Cuban housing market. First, we reconstruct how, following the 2011 legalization of housing prices set between buyers and sellers, Cuban migrants and a few foreign investors, in cooperation with Cubans residing in Cuba, are buying properties in Cuba's cities, beach resorts and other towns. Second, we explore the economic and extra-economic motives behind such transnational property transactions, highlighting how residential properties are bought and converted into private restaurants or hotels. Central to our analysis is that the present development is not simply shaped by local or national demand and processes but also by international investment. We contend that a pattern of economic globalization unfolds where transnational remittances, rather than institutional investments or mortgage finance, steer Cuba's emerging property market, along with local investments among Cuban citizens.

This first-of-its kind volume spans the breadth of disability research and practice specifically focusing on the global South. Established and emerging scholars alongside advocates adopt a critical and interdisciplinary stance to probe, challenge and shift common held social understandings of disability in established discourses, epistemologies and practices, including those in prominent areas such as global health, disability studies and international development. Motivated by decolonizing approaches, contributors carefully weave the lived and embodied experiences of disabled people, families and communities through contextual, cultural, spatial, racial, economic, identity and geopolitical complexities and heterogeneities.

Dispatches from Ghana, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Venezuela among many others spotlight the complex uncertainties of modern geopolitics of coloniality; emergent forms of governance including neoliberal globalization, war and conflicts; the interstices of gender, race, ethnicity, space and religion; structural barriers to redistribution and realization of rights; and processes of disability representation. This handbook examines in rigorous depth, established practices and discourses in disability including those on development, rights, policies and practices, opening a space for critical debate on hegemonic and often unquestioned terrains.

Highlights of the coverage include:

•        Critical issues in conceptualizing disability across cultures, time, and space

•        The challenges of disability models, metrics, and statistics

•        Disability, poverty and livelihoods in urban and rural contexts

•        Disability interstices with migration, race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality

•        Disability, religion and customary societies and practices

•        The UNCRPD, disability rights orientations and instrumentalities
•        Redistributive systems including budgeting, cash transfer systems and programming

•        Global South–North partnerships: intercultural methodologies in disability research.


This much awaited handbook provides students, academics, practitioners and policymakers with an authoritative framework for critical thinking and debate about disability, while pushing theoretical and practical frontiers in unprecedented ways.

Cases of local autonomy in the production of space are analyzed from Marx's critique of commodity-form to show contemporary contradictions and incompleteness of Tatic Urbanism, in order to elaborate a new research agenda from the periphery.

Available at: https://www.vitruvius.com.br/revistas/read/arquitextos/21.244/7881

On the basis of a concrete analysis of an urban resettlement
policy implemented in the city of Córdoba, Argentina officially called Mi Casa, Mi Vida (“My House, My Life” – hereafter MHMLP), the purpose of this chapter is to provide an account of how a resettlement policy configures specific types of subjectivities and influences the formation of new urban identities across urban space. This chapter shows that a hybrid “homeowner-consumer” identity comes to dominate the urban space as the new primary urban identity forced on specific urban populations. The logic of the selection of urban population groups
is briefly discussed, showing that the marginalised “poor” are the target of new identity formation outcomes through influencing subjectivities by means of planned resettlement policies.

HERNÁNDEZ, J.; DE LA VEGA, C. y CIUFFOLINI, M.A., (2021). “Transforming political subjectivities through resettlement in Córdoba, Argentina: from poor citizens to poor consumers”. En Raffael BEIER; Amandine SPIRE y Marie BRIDONNEAU (comp.), Urban Resettlements in the Global South. Lived Experiences of Housing and Infrastructure between Displacement and Relocation, pp. 66-83. Abingdon: Routledge. ISBN 9780367644437. DOI: 10.4324/9781003124559-5.