Urban Informality and Narrative Form

1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-041-02834-5
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 282 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm

Urban Informality and Narrative Form brings together literary analysis and spatial planning theory in an interdisciplinary study of urban informality. It examines a diverse array of literary and cinematic fictions from across the globe--West and North Africa, West and South Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America--in dialogue with influential social scientific studies of urban informality.

Leading scholar Eric Prieto explores the formal and representational strategies authors have used to address the realities of life in the informal city. He demonstrates the ability of literary texts to provide significant insights into the kinds of real-world concerns that preoccupy planning and policy specialists but that have remained resistant to the more traditional methodologies of urban studies and planning. The book sheds new light on the forces that have led to the prevalence of urban informality in the Global South, while also debunking some common misconceptions about the phenomenon, highlighting the great diversity of subjective experiences hidden behind the euphemistic "informal settlement" (or the more pejorative "slum"), and identifying some of the most promising ways forward for the urban poor. At a time when over half of all city dwellers in the Global South live in an in informal settlement of some kind, the urgency of the topic could not be clearer.

With its global breadth and novel methodology (using urban theory as literary theory), this book will be of interest to scholars of urban literature, postcolonial and world literature, and to social scientists working in the spatial planning and policy fields.

Zielgruppe

Academic, Postgraduate, and Undergraduate Advanced

Autoren/Hrsg.

Prieto, Eric

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Internationale Beziehungen Kolonialismus, Imperialismus
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kolonialgeschichte, Geschichte des Imperialismus
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Stadt- und Regionalsoziologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Part I Theoretical and Historical Groundwork

Chapter 1 Introduction

Bibliography

Chapter 2 Informal Urbanism and/as Representational Crisis

Between the boosters and the hawks

Beyond Manichean politics

Representational crisis in urban studies

Literature and the discursive field of urban informality

Towards a transductive approach to Literary Urban Studies

Bibliography

Chapter 3 Changing Paradigms in Urban Studies

Informality and urban planning, a history

The modernists

The 1976 self-help consensus: Turner, Perlman, Karpat

The test of time: Revisiting Karpat, Perlman, and Turner's theories

Economic Crisis, Structural Adjustment, and Hernando de Soto

Bibliography

Chapter 4 A New Generation of Urban Informalists

Mike Davis and the Challenge of Slums

Justin McGuirk's Radical Cities: A hybridizing approach

Jennifer Robinson and ordinary cities

Ananya Roy and "policy epistemologies"

AbdouMaliq Simone, PAI and urban futures

Bibliography

Chapter 5 Literary Mappings of the Informal City

Some precursors

Urban informality in postcolonial literary history

Two rhetorical tendencies of shanty fiction: the hyperbolic and the normalizing Insider, outsider, guarantor, guide (on multifocalization)

Realism and representational innovation: A transductive itinerary

Bibliography

List of literary and cinematic works mentioned, alphabetical by author/director

Part II Interdisciplinary Cross-readings

Chapter 6 Hybrid Urbanization and Literary Space: Paulo Lins's City of God and Naïma Tagemouati's La Liste

Paulo Lins's City of God, spatial form, and the neighborhood effect

Naïma Lahbil Tagemouati's La Liste and the Great Paradox of urban planning

Endings, afterlives, conclusions

Bibliography

Chapter 7 Ordinary Cities I: Upward Mobility in Istanbul (Pamuk and Tekin)

Normalizing Informality in Orhan Pamuk's A Strangeness in My Mind

Hyperbolic informality in Latife Tekin's Berji Kristin

Representational politics in Tekin and Pamuk

Bibliography

Chapter 8 Memorializing People as Infrastructure in Abidjan and Dakar (Rouch, Sembène, Mambéty)

Jean Rouch's, Moi, un noir: PAI in colonial Treichville

Ousmane Sembène's Borom Sarret: PAI (and its risks) in independence-era Dakar

Djibril Diop Mambéty's La petite vendeuse de Soleil: PAI after structural adjustment

Conclusion

Bibliography

Chapter 9 Ordinary Cities II: Fables of Urban (Im)Mobility in Yaoundé and Lagos

Rumors of humanity in Patrice Nganang's Dog Days

Identitarian Flux and Urban Mobility in A. Igoni Barrett's Blackass

Next steps and last words (in media res)

Bibliography

Chapter 10 Climates of Uncertainty (Patterson, Chamoiseau, Saulter, and KSR)

Rastafarian Environmentalism in Orlando Patterson's Children of Sisyphus

Creole environmentalism in Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco

Techno-environmental futures in Stephanie Saulter's ®Evolution Trilogy

Kim Stanley Robinson's climate fictions and the end(s) of capitalism

Some tactical conclusions

Bibliography

Chapter 11 Executive Summary and Closing Remarks (Soft Eyes)

Looking back

Looking ahead

Bibliography

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Eric Prieto is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. He is the author of Literature, Geography, and the Postmodern Poetics of Place (2012) and co-editor of Urban Discourses of Crisis, Resilience, and Resistance (with Liam Lanigan and Anni Lappela; 2025).