Global South

From the Field

Power in the Periphery: Waste Conflict and Resistance in Periurban Kerala

Ashish Prabhakar - 6 September 2022
Ashish Prabhakar analyzes one Indian village’s fight against a city waste processing plant in 2011–2012, illustrating...
From the Field

Arrests of People Smugglers in Niger: A Criminalization of Mutual-Aid Practices in Migration Situations

Alizée Dauchy & translated by Oliver Waine - 8 July 2022
From the point of view of the Northern states, international migration from the South now has its designated...
Reviews

Disposability in the City: A Review of Waste Worlds

Lily Baum Pollans - 5 July 2022
Lily Pollans reviews Jacob Doherty’s Waste Worlds: Inhabiting Kampala’s Infrastructures of Disposability, which shows...
Essays

Fablabs in Africa: Digital Innovation for Sustainable Cities?

Armelle Choplin & Martin Lozivit & translated by Oliver Waine - 16 April 2021
In a context where “smart cities” are being promoted in urban projects in Africa, Armelle Choplin and Martin Lozivit...
Reviews

“Land Is the New Sugar”: A Review of Sai Balakrishnan’s Shareholder Cities

Thomas Crowley - 15 December 2020
Shareholder Cities argues that India’s urban corridors are driven by complex negotiations, transformations, and...
From the Field

Unlikely Inter-Class Cooperation in Urbanizing Rural Colombia

Sebastián F. Villamizar Santamaría - 25 February 2020
Sebastián F. Villamizar Santamaría examines a case of rural gentrification outside of Bogotá, Colombia, and shows how...
From the Field

Made in China, Sold in West Africa

Anne Bouhali & Nora Mareï & Mamadou Dimé & translated by Oliver Waine - 31 May 2019
From a small border post between Senegal and Mauritania, Anne Bouahli, Nora Mareï and Mamadou Dimé follow the journey...
Interviews

Global Climate Crisis and the City: An Interview with Ashley Dawson

Ashley Dawson & Maura McGee - 3 April 2019
An interview with Ashley Dawson, professor of English at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center,...
From the Field

Rio de Janeiro: An (Inequitably) Connected City?

Francesca Pilo’ & translated by Oliver Waine - 21 September 2018
The tangled webs of electrical wires, a symbol of the favelas, are also the sign of an electricity service that...
Debates

Can the Commons Pave the Way to Greater Land Security?

Irène Salenson & Claire Simonneau & translated by Oliver Waine - 22 June 2018
Experiences of collective forms of ownership, based on the concept of the commons, have flourished throughout the...
From the Field

Land Regularization on the Fringes of Mexico City: A Recipe for Reducing Inequalities?

Jean-François Valette & translated by Oliver Waine - 8 June 2018
Mexico City’s working-class neighbourhoods are the focus of numerous land-regularization operations. Jean-François...
From the Field

Land Insecurity in Khartoum: When Land Titles Fail to Protect Against Public Predation

Alice Franck & translated by Oliver Waine - 6 June 2018
The unstable economic and political context in Sudan has encouraged people to invest massively in land in urban...
Series

Land Rights in the Urban Global South

Armelle Choplin & Éric Denis & translated by Oliver Waine - 18 May 2018
In choosing to focus on the Global South, Metropolitics turns its attention to a key aspect of contemporary cities:...
From the Field

Urban Desires and Lust for Land

Éric Denis & translated by Oliver Waine - 20 April 2018
In the Global South, vast swathes of periurban and agricultural land are being sold off and converted into...
From the Field

Land Titling: A Tool, not a Panacea

Kareem Ibrahim & Deena Khalil - 20 December 2016
The government of Egypt has long relied on land titling to limit the growth of informal urban residential...
From the Field

Struggles over Rights and Representations in the Migrant Metropolis: Reverberations of the Trump Effect in the Global South

María V. Barbero - 7 December 2016
While Latin America figures in US debates about immigration as a source of immigrants, Trump-style anti-immigrant...
From the Field

Securing Land Tenure in Egypt: Who Needs Registered Titles?

David Sims - 14 June 2016
David Sims challenges popular wisdom on property-rights regimes in non-Western nations by questioning the relevance...
Debates

Social housing in Africa: a model to be (re)invented?

Alexandra Biehler & Armelle Choplin & Marie Morelle & translated by Oliver Waine - 16 October 2015
While the question of housing for working-class populations remains a recurrent issue in sub‑Saharan African cities,...
Reviews

Megacities and how to govern them: rethinking urban development in terms of infrastructure networks

Éric Verdeil & translated by Oliver Waine - 25 September 2015
Are colossal megalopolises like Shanghai or Mumbai uncontrollable? This collective work shows that nothing could be...
Essays

A Right to the City in the Global South?

Marianne Morange & Amandine Spire & translated by Oliver Waine - 17 April 2015
The idea of the right to the city has been the subject of strongly renewed interest in academic milieux, activist...
From the Field

Bypassing the city: divisions and divergences in Antananarivo

Catherine Fournet-Guérin & translated by Oliver Waine - 4 December 2014
In a context of global competition, major projects are the order of the day, including in the global South. The new...
Reviews

De-Westernising Urban Theory

Armelle Choplin & translated by Oliver Waine - 5 December 2012
Three recent publications share a common aim: to move beyond the dichotomies of Western vs Third-World cities,...

Series

Black Power and Black Self-Determination in a New Time and New Spaces
Urban Wastes, Present and Future
New York Dossier: The Food Industry Faces the Covid‑19 Pandemic
Cities in the Age of Financialization
Contemporary Housing Struggles: Crises, Activism, and Critical Research
New York Tech Dossier: The Dark Side of New York’s Tech Economy
Progressive Mayors and Urban Social Movements
Land Rights in the Urban Global South
Climate Change and Social Change

Featured

From the Field

Covid-19 Transformed New York’s Destination Food Markets

Ivana Mellers - 5 October 2021
Ivana Mellers analyzes how New York’s destination markets—key spaces of economic and social interactions—coped during...
From the Field

Moving Inside City Limits: The Urban Mobility of Undocumented Youth

Stephen P. Ruszczyk - 4 June 2019
The urban context and public transportation shape how undocumented youths move within cities. In a comparison of...
Reviews

Filming Ethnic Diversity in New York

Stéphane Tonnelat & translated by Christina Mitrakos - 21 October 2016
Frederick Wiseman’s fortieth documentary film, In Jackson Heights (2015), returns to an urban theme explored in...
From the Field

Looking Inward, Across the Border

Harel Shapira - 19 April 2016
In the constellation of anti-immigrant politics in the United States, groups like the Minutemen, civilians who...
Essays

The Political Aesthetics of Drag

Shaka McGlotten - 13 October 2015
Drag, or the diverse art form and culture of performance that typically plays with gender and sex, is an integral...
Debates

Disarm the Police

Gregory Smithsimon - 29 September 2015
In the current political debates about discriminatory policing, there has been a lack of serious discussion of...

Other resources online

Cycles of Violence: Analysing Media Discourse in the Newspaper...

Mobile Lives Forum
How are cyclist and pedestrian deaths depicted in newspaper reports, and how do these reports help shape...

Lahti: The First Carbon-Rationing Experiment Applied to Local...

Mobile Lives Forum
The city of Lahti in Finland was the first to experiment with a carbon-trading scheme among its inhabitants to...

Is Rationing Carbon for Travel a Fair, Efficient, and Realistic...

Mobile Lives Forum
In the wake of the pandemic, a carbon tax at Europe’s borders is now on the agenda, but a domestic version for...

Reducing Carbon-Emitting Travel: A Factor of Social Cohesion and...

Mobile Lives Forum
As part of France’s Mission on the Future of the Economic Model of Public Transportation, commissioned by the French...

Strasbourg, An Example of a Cycling City

Mobile Lives Forum
Strasbourg is the leading city for cycling in France and a constant source of inspiration for all French cities...

The Trinity of Walking, Cycling and Public Transportation Must Be...

Mobile Lives Forum
While emissions from the transportation sector remain at a very high level, all hopes are currently pinned on the...
Centre national de recherche scientifique (CNRS)
Journal supported by the Institut des Sciences Humaines et Sociales (Institute of Human and Social Sciences) of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS)

Partners