Scholarship on urban informality has grown significantly over the last two decades, often postulating new ways of looking at the production of informal economies (Roy and Alsayyad 2004), regimes of cultural relationalities (De Boeck 2012), and their sustaining social infrastructures (Simone 2004). Within such scholarship, researchers have emphasised the need to re-conceptualise informality as practice, enacted by various stakeholders in the urban milieu. On the other hand, the theoretical filter of “informality” remains widely employed across both academic and non-academic realms, often failing to grasp the different modes of production, subjectivities, and the complex aesthetic and political configurations, that take place outside of institutional regimes of planning and scholarly totalising categories, and that give shape to the majority of urban economies and spaces in dense urban environments around the world.

We seek contributions which engage with a range of theorisations that include, but are not limited to: critiques to the “illusion of transparency” and of “state-imposed normality” (Lefebvre 1991); decolonial and anti-colonial epistemologies (Cusicanqui 2012; Mignolo 2006; Santos 2014); feminist, black, and queer geographies (hooks 1990; Knopp 2007; Price 2010); hybrid infrastructures and heterogenous configurations (Jaglin, 2016; Larkin 2013; Lawhon et al. 2018). Topics can include themes such as: regimes of simultaneity and non-binary contestation in spatial negotiations; socio-spatial infrastructures beyond formal-informal dualities; modes of discipline; social engineering and modes of control in the city; et al.
Some sub-themes we invite contributions to reflect on are:

• How do urban realities transform linear planning regimes?
• Which is the fundamental ontological gap between top-down approaches by the state and international organisations, and grassroots interventions? And how do we situate these state-society relationships in research on “urban informality”?
• What types of productive negotiation and mediation take place among state, communities, and non-state actors, in the production or reconfiguration of urban infrastructures?
• How are political and social subjectivities formed and negotiated through claim-making practices by urban residents? Which is the relation between (i) the making and un-making of citizenship and identity, and (ii) the cyclic production of space and infrastructure?