Urban Politics in the Global South

It’s workshop month! Today I am at the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University for their Urban Research Conference. It’s an honor to share my research with dozens of scholars from across the world on the politics of urban infrastructure in Africa. I look forward to learning from all of them. In this extra post, I review last week’s online workshop “Urban Politics in the Global South.” I plan to do the same for the workshops I participate in over the course of the next month. Let’s get to it!

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Comparative urban politics – the political processes, institutions, and power relations across different urban contexts – is one of the most exciting subfields of political science today. Much of the scholarly innovation is happening in Global South cities.

I have played a small part of developing this growing subfield through organizing workshops before the American Political Science Annual Meetings and working to incorporate the study of African cities and their neighborhoods into the larger study of urban politics.

Last week, we featured some of this exciting new research in our annual “Urban Politics in the Global South Virtual Conference Series.” One of the goals of this workshop is to break out of our silos and engage with policymakers, politicians, and of course, scholars from other disciplines. To extend this endeavor, here are a few insights from the conference:

1. For development innovations, look to “slums” and informal settlements.

Creative experimentation happens in the world’s poorest neighborhoods. The African Cities Research Consortium is working on these exciting interventions. This group of scholars, including Smith Ouma, have demonstrated how the shifting political landscape across the continent impacts housing and land use policy, especially with respect to slum-upgrading. The fast and changing pace of politics and policy requires innovative partnerships, which is why Diana Mitlin and Ezana Weldeghebrael propose urban reform coalitions that bring together scholars, policymakers, and activists to discuss, co-create, and implement urban policy.

Informal settlements take many different shapes and sizes and are not only the dense containers of poverty and violence in the middle of cities that are portrayed in the popular public. For example, Fizzah Sajjad and Umair Javed demonstrate the political process of land acquisition in Lahore, Pakistan, which involves tapping into family networks to incorporate villages into the city. In peri-urban Bangalore, Raksha Balakrishna shows how residents solve collective action