While the proliferation of community food services (CFS) during the COVID-19 pandemic has been documented as a local survival strategy, its implications for metropolitan-scale theory remain underexplored. This paper moves beyond the analysis of individual food sites to examine CFS as a structural component of socio-spatial segregation in Latin American cities. Through a comparative study of 114 boroughs in Lima, Montevideo and Santiago, we analyse how different institutional environments and historical segregation patterns shape the density and reach of these networks. Our findings identify a ‘Southern perspective’ on urban infrastructure, where food networks function as bridges across fragmented metropolitan spaces. By contrasting these South American cases with established Northern-centric literature, this research proposes a conceptual adaptation of ‘people as infrastructure’ that accounts for the entrenched inequalities of the Americas. We conclude that recognising the infrastructural scale of CFS is essential for a global comparative urbanism that addresses the structural rather than merely incidental role of community solidarity.
This paper critiques the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework (SLF) by foregrounding its inadequate attention to political and physical risks in border environments, drawing on evidence from itinerant women traders in Nigeria’s informal economy along the Nigeria–Benin borderlands. Rather than simply documenting challenges that are already well established in the literature, the paper demonstrates how the SLF falls short in capturing the layered vulnerabilities that emerge from border insecurity, systemic marginalisation and state neglect. Despite their central role in sustaining cross-border commerce and household livelihoods, these traders operate in precarious contexts where institutional protections are minimal and political risks are acute. The analysis shows how women traders’ adaptive strategies such as informal networks, resource pooling and diversified trading practices both expose and complicate the SLF’s treatment of vulnerability and resilience. By engaging critically with the framework and anchoring it in the lived experiences of borderland traders, this paper extends existing critiques of the SLF and calls for its reconceptualisation to account for the political economies of risk in informal cross-border trade.
Increasingly, international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) have become dependent on major donors. Known as philanthrocapitalism, this was critiqued for a lack of democracy and downward accountability, leading to a concentration of power among a privileged few. Simultaneously, the call for localisation increased, which refers to more inclusion and empowerment of INGOs’ local partners. In this article, we interrogate how Dutch INGOs deal with attracting major donors on the one hand (i.e. philanthrocapitalism) and demands for increasing downward accountability (i.e. localisation) on the other. Based on interviews, work experience and report analysis, we explore these allegedly contradictory movements and analyse the power dynamics regarding its four attributes of knowledge, capacity, authority and accountability. We argue that, although power can be found at all levels in the ‘force field’ between philanthrocapitalism and localisation, funding relations create space for repression and therefore the concentration of power among major donors functions largely as an obstacle to localisation.
Special Economic Zones (SEZs) are often framed as tools for regional development, yet research has largely overlooked how national regulatory design shapes their trajectories. This paper examines Indonesia, a decentralised archipelago with significant regional disparities, to assess how its SEZ legal and regulatory framework produces either isolated enclaves or place-based embedded outcomes. It offers a content analysis of SEZ-specific and sectoral regulations across four dimensions: objectives, incentives, institutions and spatial aspects. Findings show a hybrid picture: incentives lean towards an enclave perspective, while spatial and institutional arrangements represent opportunities for embedded, place-based development. However, recentralisation trends in governance and spatial distribution risk re-enclaving SEZs. By clarifying how institutional capacity and spatial integration shape SEZ trajectories, this study informs debates on enclave-embeddedness models by emphasising their dynamic spectrum. It provides policy lessons for designing place-based SEZs in decentralised developing countries, where embeddedness must be actively sustained rather than assumed.
This study explores capacities of different community groups in Indonesia to successfully manage local domestic water resources, and the potential role of such groups in supporting equitable water access (SDG 6: clean water and sanitation). Using semi-structured interviews, mental mapping and observations, we zoom in on nine community groups located in Bandung City, Bandung Regency and West Bandung Regency. The findings indicate that community groups can possess diverse intellectual, social, political and environmental capacities, which collectively influence their success in providing reliable access to domestic water. Furthermore, they suggest that all capacities should be understood in relation to place, geography, access and resource availability. Concerns are raised about equity implications for future generations and long-term sustainability when predominantly relying on community-based water provision. Findings in this study collectively highlight that equity concerns regarding community-led water provision are valid. Community-based water management practices and groups are highly heterogeneous; thus, further research into balancing public and community-based delivery of essential resources and services is required.
Many residents in Southern cities work and live in an informal ‘grey space’ between recognition and unrecognition and are vulnerable to shifts towards violent ways of governing. This article delineates a necropolitics of informality as an analytical lens to unpack the processes at work when violence becomes a prominent mode of governing urban informality. This lens, it is argued, can extend familiar perspectives on the political dynamics of informality. Such an approach is then used to examine a major necropolitical turn in the management of street work in central Maputo, Mozambique. Attention is given to the spatial strategies of banishment, carceralisation and peripheralisation – and attendant socio-material processes – through which necropower reworked the politics and spatialities of street work. The article uncovers the processes of political dispossession and the calculated destruction of collective organisation, as well as the necropolitical respatialisation of street economies and the range of (necro)spaces that emerged. The ways in which the impacted groups experienced and acted upon necropolitical practices are examined. While the shift occurred during the COVID-19 crisis, such practices continued long beyond the pandemic, pointing to the relevance of the necropolitics of informality as a lens for understanding violent governance in both exceptional and ordinary times.
This paper investigates the informal economy in urban Ho Chi Minh City through field research conducted since 2022, focusing on three representative groups of workers: street vendors, motorbike taxi drivers (both traditional and app-based) and small-scale sidewalk businesses. Drawing on 32 semi-structured interviews and participant observation, the study reconstructs the adaptive yet precarious urban livelihood strategies of informal workers. Findings reveal that this sector not only provides essential income for a significant portion of the urban population, particularly migrant and low-skilled labourers, but also plays a vital role in sustaining everyday urban life and local social relations. Nevertheless, informal workers face increasing pressure from rigid urban redevelopment policies and misaligned administrative regulations. The paper argues for a re-conceptualisation of the informal economy as an integral component of the urban socio-economic structure, deserving of recognition and support through flexible, context-sensitive and human-centred approaches to policy issues, thereby fostering sustainable and inclusive urban development.
This study employs an assemblage thinking approach to reconceptualise ethnic rural places as dynamic, relational and continuously evolving, challenging static and bounded perspectives. Based on ethnographic observations and interviews in 11 villages across two She ethnic townships in Cangnan County, China, it examines rural revitalisation through territorialisation, deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. By situating these communities within broader socio-economic and cultural transformations, the study reveals the material and discursive forces shaping them. This work advances critical urban and regional scholarship by demonstrating assemblage theory’s utility in analysing ethnic rural revitalisation and offers policy recommendations for sustainable and inclusive rural transformation.
The ‘informality’ of a business may be in terms of location, licensing and product registration, which can result in a lack of access to strategies, programmes and incentives for local economic promotion by formal institutions. This study examines policies and strategies that led to creative kampongs’ development and improvement. By conducting policy analysis, the paper studies how and to what extent different policies related to creative industries recognise informality. We focus on programmes and policies implemented by the city to strengthen small creative businesses in the kampongs. The paper found that although creative industries policies in the city do not directly recognise the informal economy, targeting place-specific economies such as urban strategic zones has been perceived by targeted communities to be beneficial. Furthermore, our study also found that the government’s interest in strengthening and empowering informal economies is merely to achieve annual programme targets without elaborating on any long-term support programmes. The study highlights the importance of designing and implementing governance instruments to support coordination and cooperation between government agencies for effective implementation and sustainability of creative industries policies.
A growing proportion of urban residents live in informal rental housing, especially in the global South. While informally constructed rented accommodation offers multiple public policy benefits, the rapid and unplanned growth of rental units can have significant negative impacts on neighbourhoods and residents. This paper draws on neighbourhood level data from Cape Town, South Africa, to examine how informal rental housing markets drive the soft densification of a low-income settlement. It illustrates the enormous scale, density and diversity of informally constructed and commercially rented accommodation and unpacks how bottom-up building practices intersect with an inappropriate regulatory regime. Widespread informality limits government’s capacity to guide soft densification and mediate between its inherent tensions, trade-offs and conflicting public/private interests. We argue that recognising the economic logics of informal rental housing markets is crucial to understanding why, where and how informal soft densification occurs. We present a novel framework to assist policymakers in better engaging informal rental housing markets, outlining seven spheres of action, to promote the sustainable densification of urban neighbourhoods and cities. In offering concrete suggestions we contribute to wider debates about planning for informal urbanism.
Many residents in Southern cities work and live in an informal 'grey space' between recognition and unrecognition and are vulnerable to shifts towards violent ways of governing. This article delineates a necropolitics of informality as an analytical lens to unpack the processes at work when violence becomes a prominent mode of governing urban informality. This lens, it is argued, can extend familiar perspectives on the political dynamics of informality. Such an approach is then used to examine a major necropolitical turn in the management of street work in central Maputo, Mozambique. Attention is given to the spatial strategies of banishment, carceralisation and peripheralisation - and attendant socio-material processes - through which necropower reworked the politics and spatialities of street work. The article uncovers the processes of political dispossession and the calculated destruction of collective organisation, as well as the necropolitical respatialisation of street economies and the range of (necro)spaces that emerged. The ways in which the impacted groups experienced and acted upon necropolitical practices are examined. While the shift occurred during the COVID-19 crisis, such practices continued long beyond the pandemic, pointing to the relevance of the necropolitics of informality as a lens for understanding violent governance in both exceptional and ordinary times.
Amid the global impact of the March 2020 COVID-19 outbreak, governments instituted measures to manage the spread of the virus and needed to legitimise these responses to appear rational and appropriate in the eyes of citizens. We focus on Tanzania, which offers an example of a particular COVID-19 response of not having instituted lockdowns or other long-lasting movement restrictions. Drawing on an institutional logics approach, and by conducting a content analysis of 738 newspaper articles in 2020 to 2022, we explore the kinds of logics through which the state legitimised diverse responses during the pandemic and how these changed over time. Results show how the health and economic logics manifested the most, but also state authority, state welfare, religion, traditional and science logics were used. We further discuss the interplay between changes in the logics and in presidential regimes in the midst of the pandemic.
Small-scale traders often entertain spatially extensive connections of benefit to their businesses that are considered to be part of globalisation from below. This paper aims to understand the vulnerabilities of these processes by studying how the unsettling COVID-19 pandemic impacted on the geographies of small-scale businesses and contributed to the restructuring of these connections beyond the pandemic period. We employ assemblage thinking to unravel the continuous labour and temporalities implicated in the creation of connections across space. We studied these issues in Blantyre and Limbe, Malawi, where semi-structured interviews were conducted with street and market vendors. Results illustrate that the pandemic contributed to a restructuring of businesses of many vendors. They relied on less spatially extensive assemblages, i.e. local suppliers and clients. These changes lasted well into the post-pandemic period, and impacted on vendors' livelihoods. We discuss the implications of these findings for street and market vending businesses and globalisation from below.
Tanzania, a hybrid regime, was not immune to COVID-19. However, President Magufuli downplayed the virus's seriousness in the country, declaring Tanzania free of it in June 2020 and suppressing public discussion on the subject. No curfew was imposed, and citizens were ordered to continue their activities as normal. Despite this, global restrictions had considerable negative impact on the tourism sector, the second-largest gross domestic product (GDP) contributor in 2019. Using sensemaking theory and data from focus groups and interviews, this study investigates the influential information sources, sensemaking processes and alignment with the state narrative among tourism workers in Arusha, a city that has undergone complex, tourism-driven, urban transformation. The findings reveal how various information sources led to different forms of conformity and alignment with the state narrative. The study contributes a more nuanced understanding of citizens' sensemaking during COVID-19 in a hybrid political regime.
Economic hardships endured by street and market vendors during the COVID-19 pandemic impacted deeply on vendors' livelihoods in the post-pandemic period. This paper explores whether, and in what ways, they contributed to the reshaping of vendors' everyday movements across space and changes in their mobile phone use for the conduct of their small-scale businesses. Conceptually, the paper makes use of Cresswell's politics of mobility to theorise different aspects of vendors' everyday mobilities and to relate them to their mobile phone use. Empirically, the paper builds on interviews with vendors in Kitwe, an important trading hub on the Zambian Copperbelt. Results illuminated that most vendors limited their movements to commute and source and sell their goods in the post-pandemic period. A majority substituted their (restrained) spatial practices by relying more on their mobile phones. We discuss vendors' experiences and implications of these changes on their businesses and the urban informal economy.
The COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately affected informal workers in the global South, including market and street vendors, who faced severe income losses during the crisis. In some contexts, governments moved to support vulnerable populations, particularly those whose livelihoods were gravely affected by restrictions introduced to stop the virus. In Ghana, the government introduced support schemes that officially included informal vendors. However, based on qualitative research in Accra, this paper reveals a stark disconnect between policy intent and market and street vendors' lived experiences of accessing state support. Drawing on the concepts of infrastructural citizenship and grey space, we argue that informal vendors' exclusion from relief was rooted in long-standing state neglect, particularly the marginalisation of these groups from public infrastructure. Despite this neglect, most vendors complied with state-imposed restrictions, relying on self-made infrastructural solutions and social networks. We conceptualise these practices as forms of ordinary citizenship, rooted in everyday acts of survival and belonging, yet embedded within broader structures of social order. The pandemic, however, exposed the limitations of vendors' social collaboration under the weight of a widespread crisis. This underscores the importance of the state in redistributing resources and providing public goods to vulnerable groups, especially in times of emergency.
In this paper, we examine how Dar es Salaam's informal economy adapted to the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic under the guidance-based state policies. Using an ethnographic approach, we traced the trajectories of street vendors operating at Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) hubs from the initial shock of reduced mobility and customer loss to the gradual development of adaptive practices. Vendors diversified income streams, leveraged community networks and mobilised faith-based coping strategies to sustain livelihoods, revealing both creativity and precarity within informality. Findings highlight the paradox of symbolic state support under President Magufuli, where populist rhetoric fostered perceptions of protection despite limited material interventions. By bringing urban informality theory into dialogue with crisis urbanism and resilience scholarship, this paper contributes to debates on how pandemics unsettle density-driven planning paradigms and underscores the need for inclusive, context-specific policies in African cities.
This article examines how diverse and entangled governance configurations shaped local pandemic responses in marketplaces in Lagos, Nigeria, drawing upon conceptualisations of hybrid governance, twilight institutions and governmentality. Faced with many challenges, local governments delegated the implementation and monitoring of pandemic regulations to marketplace associations and traditional leaders, whose mandate and authority expanded in several markets. However, governance arrangements and relations varied greatly across urban space, reflecting the diversity of place-specific institutional landscapes in the markets and shaping diverse outcomes. The presence or absence of centralised structures (associational or traditional) in the markets contributed to varied experiences of compliance across the markets, although compliance was also shaped by state enforcement, self-regulation and economic necessity. Overall, the pandemic exposed the uneven governance capacities across different markets, revealing how historical relationships between the state, associations and traditional leaders continue to shape market regulation in times of crisis. The article is based on qualitative interviews with vendors, and association and traditional leaders in five markets as well as with government officials.
Education systems across the globe witnessed vast disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Uganda, the state categorised the education sector as 'non-essential' and schools closed for almost two years. Among other outcomes, the prolonged closure had ramifications for teachers in low-cost private schools whose main source of income was greatly disrupted. Building on the notions of economic and pandemic citizenship, we explore the redefined status, everyday practices, and feelings of teachers employed in low-cost private secondary schools located in Kampala's slum areas during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on a thematic analysis of qualitative interviews with teachers and head teachers, the article shows how their economic citizenship status changed when they were excluded from the 'essential' workforce which abrogated their right to work. Teachers' practices demonstrated their flexibility in entering the informal sector - stretching restrictions when their survival required it - and their feelings towards the teaching profession were altered. We conclude that to be categorised as 'non-essential' was not only a manifestation of pandemic citizenship but also a more fundamental change in the economic citizenship of the teachers in low-cost private schooling, and in the education sector at large.
