Monika Streule

This article introduces the concept of popular urbanization to describe a specific urbanization process based on collective initiatives, self-organization and the activities of inhabitants. We understand popular urbanization as an urban strategy through which an urban territory is produced, transformed and appropriated by the people. This concept results from a theoretically guided and empirically grounded comparison of Mexico City, Istanbul and Lagos. Based on postcolonial critiques of urban theory and on the epistemologies of planetary urbanization, we bring urbanization processes in these urban regions into conversation with each other through a multidimensional theoretical framework inspired by Henri Lefebvre focusing on material interaction, territorial regulation, and everyday experience.

In this way, popular urbanization emerged as a distinct urbanization process, which we identified in all three contexts. While this process is often subsumed under the broader concept of ‘urban informality’, we suggest that it may be helpful to distinguish popular urbanization as primarily led by the people, while commodification and state agencies play minor roles. As popular urbanization unfolds in diverse ways dependent upon the wider urban context, specific political constellations and actions, it results in a variety of spatial outcomes and temporal trajectories. This is therefore a revisable and open concept. In proposing the concept of popular urbanization for further examination, we seek to contribute to the collective development of a decentered vocabulary of urbanization.

The article wins the IG Award 2020 awarded by the Swiss Network for International Studies for being an outstanding publication, accessible to a wider audience and particularly relevant for International Organisations.

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Streule, Monika, Karaman, Ozan, Sawyer, Lindsay, Schmid, Christian (2020) Popular Urbanization. Conceptualizing urbanization processes beyond informality. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 44.4, 652–672. DOI:10.1111/1468-2427.12872

This paper serves as an introduction to the »Contested urban territories: decolonized perspectives« special issue. The idea for this issue emerged during our reflections on a socioterritorial perspective, preeminent in the current Latin American analysis of contemporary urban struggles (Schwarz and Streule, 2016). It aims to contribute to these ongoing debates about a specific understanding of urban territories from a postcolonial and decolonized perspective by combining contributions from two paper sessions we organized at the 2017 meeting of the American Association of Geographers in Boston with additional papers by scholars who could not participate in the conference.

All seven contributions tackle the question of what a relational and dynamic conceptualization of territory may contribute to current debates in the urban studies field. Put more precisely, to which extent are socioterritorial approaches of value for a further decentering and pluralizing of urban theory? What is their significance to research on urban social movements? And, finally, how does such a socioterritorial perspective nurture and complement an analysis of the social production of space? The present special issue invites the reader to get familiar with new concepts and engage in a critical reflection on the conditions of knowledge production in urban geography and beyond.

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Overview special issue (all contributions)

Schwarz, Anke and Monika Streule (2020) Introduction to the special issue »Contested urban territories: decolonized perspectives«. Geographica Helvetica, 75, 11–18. https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-75-11-2020