The notion of “urban governance” is nowadays widely used to refer to the practices, principles, and institutional arrangements that coordinate and regulate the planning, management, and development of urban spaces. Its rise is often associated with the weakening of centralized and state-led urban planning, and its replacement by a neoliberal state which governs cities through complex arrangements involving private and civil society actors. Current approaches to urban governance, often originated in northern contexts, tend to focus on institutionalized actors and formal processes. In contrast, this workshop aims to explore governance in and from the peripheries, in line with recent calls to decenter urban studies and to acknowledge the growing relevance of processes of extended, suburban and peripheral urbanization, especially in the Global South and East. It seeks to understand how and by whom the urban is governed when the state and other formal actors are not fully present nor assume their designated roles. Thinking beyond traditional institutional arrangements opens up a space to take into account usually overlooked actors and logics that operate in such contexts, and to understand how they interact or enter into conflict with more visible and formalized governance arrangements. By exploring cases from Brazil, Mexico, and Turkey, this workshop aims to create a space for comparing common and divergent features of governance in the peripheries and the peripheries of governance across different contexts.
Organizers:
- João Tonucci (Federal University of Minas Gerais)
- Ebru Kurt Özman (University of Amsterdam)
- Tania Guerrero (Province of Noord Holland)