Informal infrastructuring
The defining feature of 21st century urbanization
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11949005 |
|---|---|
| Authors | E Bandauko (0000-0002-1917-9640, University of Alberta, corresponding author), Brandon Marc Finn (0000-0001-7283-5478, University of Michigan) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Publication date | 2026-04-04 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Progress in Human Geography (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0309-1325 • E-ISSN: 1477-0288 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/03091325261438966 |
| OpenAlex | W7149543764 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
| References cited | 118 |
Urbanization drives global socio-spatial transformation. Informality is central to this transformation, but is treated as a peripheral process on the margins of cities and economies. Informality is often associated with specific locations, overlooking the fact that it constitutes a dynamic, global process operating across spatial and temporal scales. We develop the concept of informal infrastructuring to interrogate how, through informality, people , places , processes , and politics reconfigure and build urban life. We draw together planetary and postcolonial strands of urban theory to conceptualize informal infrastructuring as a global phenomenon. To imagine informality as peripheral is to mistake marginalization with marginality
Feature (linguistics · Global South · Human geography · Mistake · Process (computing · Urbanization · Urban and Rural Development Challenges · Urban Planning and Governance · Water Governance and Infrastructure
Splintering Urbanism
Dispossession, displacement and resistance
Urban land teleconnections and sustainability
The Global Infrastructure Turn and Urban Practice
Planet of Slums
Henri Lefebvre
Un-civil Society
Trapped or not trapped? An empirical investigation into the lived experiences of the urban poor in Harare’s selected informal settlements
Green Apartheid
Urban Informality as a Site of Critical Analysis
Prefigurative urbanization
Remaking the American Dream
Global review of human waste-picking and its contribution to poverty alleviation and a circular economy
Splintering Urbanism at 20 and the “Infrastructural Turn”
Who is the state? Infrastructural power and everyday water governance in Delhi
People as infrastructure politics in global north cities
The heterogeneous politics of infrastructure
Artisanal copper mining and conflict at the intersection of property rights and corporate strategies in the Democratic Republic of Congo
Moving sand
Transformative cohabitation
Decarbonization and social justice
The oddity of desiring informality
Informality at the heart of sustainable development
Asking ‘Third World questions’ of First World informality
Urban informality in the Global North
Urban way of life as survival
Rethinking urban metabolism
Towards a new epistemology of the urban
Sharing the struggle
The decarbonisation divide
Pathways to urban equality
Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI) - foundations to treetops
A focus on needs
Quasi-Formal Housing” in the United States
Toward supported self-provisioning
The hustle economy
Doing the work
The gendered production of infrastructure
Sand, Plantation Urbanism and the Extended Political Ecology of Infrastructures in India
Incompleteness of urban infrastructures in transition
Cities within cities
Ritornello
Mapping the field of urban infrastructuring — A scoping review
Infrastructural politics
Self-help housing and DIY home improvements
Doing it ‘ourselves’
The everyday counter-city
Dwindling funds and increased responsibilities
Precarious power’
Incremental housing extensions and formal-informal hybridity in London, United Kingdom. Questioning the formal housing imaginaries in the ‘North’
The Political Potential of Urban Informality in the Global North
Everyday contours and politics of infrastructure
Towards a modest imaginary? Sanitation in Kampala beyond the modern infrastructure ideal
Cities in an era of interfacing infrastructures
Electricity services always in the making
Urban metabolism redux
African urbanisation at the confluence of informality and climate change
The politics of drains
Infrastructure-led development and the peri-urban question
Thinking through heterogeneous infrastructure configurations
Knowing urban informalities
Urban infrastructure patching
Making heterogeneous infrastructure futures in and beyond the global south
Navigating the city
The work of waste
From problematisation to propositionality
Infrastructural citizenship
Moving in informal circles in the global North
Living with fragile infrastructure
Informal Urban Sanitation
Necrospatial containment and slow violence in Harare’s informal settlements
This country is free, but for the few
A tale of two Harare(s)
On Their Own Terms
Urban Informality
The structure of informality
Hydraulic City
The 21st-Century Metropolis
Incremental infrastructures
(Re)making hydrosocial territories
Residual urbanism
Prefigurative urbanization
The rise of 'infrastructural populism
The Monster 'Within
Speculative Urbanism and the Making of the Next World City
The Myth of Formality in the Global North
Political Infrastructures
The 'Urban Age' in Question
Planetary urbanization and totality
Entanglements of Periphery and Informality in Mexico City
Everyday Infrastructures of Urban Life
Peripheral urbanization
The City as Assemblage
Patchwork
Comparative Urbanism
Cities in a World of Cities
Urbanizing Urban Political Ecology
Articulation work
Informality as the Ur-Form of Urbanity
People as Infrastructure
| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 5 |
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |