Theorizing and Practicing Planning from the South: Informality in the Discourse

Abstract

Emerging scholarships within urban planning have questioned the universalized notion of planning theories and their ability to respond to urban issues in the South. The southern planning perspective has espoused theorizing planning ideas based on situated experiences of southern cities—including their urbanism and social conflicts. I argue that the southern planning perspectives take their foundational epistemological turn from the conflict of urban planning and informality. Focusing on African cities, this review paper contributes to planning theory by exploring the centrality of informality in southern perspectives and further discusses informality toward a critical “theory about planning.”

Introduction: Stage Setting

Urban planning in many parts of the world reflects an increasing gap between current approaches and growing problems of poverty, inequality, informality, rapid urbanization, and spatial fragmentation, particularly (but not only) in cities of the global South. Given past dominance of the global North in shaping planning theory and practice, … perspective from the global South can be useful in unsettling taken-for-granted assumptions about how planning addresses these issues. (Vanessa Watson 2009a, 2260)

Majority of the urban population in the Global South, particularly in Africa, relies on informal economic activities and housing for survival. Informality has emerged as a critical concern in urban planning, policymaking, and the overall functioning of cities in Africa (Cobbinah 2017; Cobbinah 2023; Finn and Cobbinah 2022). While informality unfolds new complex urban issues across the Global South, urban planning has surprisingly ignored, marginalized, or failed to manage informality. This is because the field of urban planning originated from the Global North is implicitly formality biased. Many planning theories and practices rely on planning systems and ideals confined to contextual issues in the Global North. These theories often do not resonate with or pay attention to the recipient countries’ prevailing social, economic, cultural, and political conditions (Baffoe and Roy 2022; Healey 2012; Yiftachel 2016). To echo the voice of Gautam Bhan (2019), urbanism or cities in the Global South are often read, described, understood, and acted on in terms of theories built elsewhere. As such, urban planning in many parts of the Global South, particularly in Africa, is often regarded as a failed venture in the light of parochial planning theories and practices. To an extent, many urban and spatial issues in southern cities stem from reliance on colonial or Euro-American planning models, which fail to address the local realities and informality present in these areas (Baffoe and Roy 2022; Cobbinah 2023; Watson 2009a, 2014a). The issue lies not in the inappropriateness of planning theories (Roy 2005) but in their assumed universalized notion that disconnects them from context-dependent practices (Bhan 2019), underlying local circumstances, and lived experiences of people in other cultures. The excerpt from Vanessa Watson points to the contextual reality of African cities and planning practices and the urgency to rethink of discursive phenomenon of informality and planning.

Past and ongoing phenomena and conditions in the Global North currently shape many planning theories and are “unfit,” perhaps not applicable in the southern context (Mukhopadhyay, Hammami and Watson 2021). For decades now, urban planning theory has been heavily critiqued, with discourses shifting paths to bring the unfamiliar terrains of informality into planning theory. These critiques stem from two major rationales: first, the tendency to claim a universal logic rather than a specific generalization in planning theory (Healey 2012; Mukhopadhyay, Hammami and Watson 2021). Second, the marginalization of southern perspectives and practices in planning theory (Roy 2009a; Winkler 2018). As Ananya Roy (2009a, 7) thoughtfully asked, “What do the worlds of informality and insurgence, when placed in conjunction, contribute to planning theory?” This intriguing question sparks critiques of the universalized claims in planning theory and the call for theorizing from the South. Roy calls for “new geographies of theory” and epistemologies to de-center from the Euro-American canons to make room for theorizing from and across the Global South. Similarly, Oren Yiftachel (2006, 2009, 2016) draws the attention of planning theorists to the Global “South-East” cities where urban issues differ substantively from the northern context (i.e., the presumed laboratory of planning theory). Yiftachel (2006, 2016) uses the South-Eastern approach and experiences to re-engage planning theory. Subsequently, Vanessa Watson introduced the idea of “seeing from the south” or “learning from the south” (Watson 2009a, 2014a, 2014b, 2016) to express the urgent need for context-specific or context-rooted theorization to understand and respond to planning issues pertaining to the Global South. She argued that there is an urgent need to develop a more appropriate body of planning theory that focuses on different socioeconomic, political, and material conditions encapsulated in parochial planning theory (Watson 2013, 2014b). The southern turn in planning theory has instigated renewed scholarly attention to southern cities and the unfamiliar terrains of informality that lie at the fringes of planning theory. Such a bold move can be seen as a critical evolving paradigm shift, attempting to unsettle, recenter, and situate planning theories to reflect the context-specific lived experience of southern cities (see Roy 2005, 2009a; Watson 2009a, 2016).

While this discussion is not new in planning literature, my position in this paper places informality at the center of these evolving perspectives. I argue that these diverse perspectives emanated from planning confrontations with the stubborn realities of informality in most southern cities. My argument in this piece does not suggest a unified thinking or epistemological close-mindedness with informality among southern planning theorists but the effort to bring the situations of informality in southern cities to planning discourses. While it is far to suggest a coherent southern position among theorists—either from the South-Eastern (Yiftachel 2006, 2016), Asian (Roy 2009a, 2009b, 2011a), or African context (Cobbinah 2023, 2024; Watson 2009a, 2013, 2014a) from which these perspectives emerged in planning theory—the point of convergence lies in the conflictual relationship between planning theory and the urban culture of informality, which is often ignored or marginalized.

This article makes three significant contributions to planning literature. First, it contributes to the ongoing discussion on southern planning theory and the importance of context-specific theorization for effective planning practice. It adds to the rich literature critiquing the universalized claims of planning theory and its pitiful failures in many parts of the Global South. Second, it contributes to what we can learn about planning theory and informality from the African perspective by exploring the conflict between planning and informality and how the two can be integrated. The paper's theoretical contribution outlines ways to incorporate informality into planning theory and practice. Lastly, I approach the topic of theorizing and practicing planning from the South to confront planning in the face of informality and how planning can be meaningful in the Global South. The discussion brings into the fold of planning theory the discursive issues of informality. Focusing on the African context, the paper reflects on the incongruity of parochial planning theories and the reality of informality and urban issues confronting cities in the Global South. I argue that the southern planning theory takes its foundational epistemological turn through the conflictual rationality of planning theory and the encounter with informality. My arguments here point to the critical role of informality in the southern turn in planning theory and how it is central to theorizing and practicing planning in the Global North. The paper offers an essential and novel insight into the need for theorizing and practicing planning from the South—where the stubborn reality of informality confronts dominant planning theories and practices. It is important to state here that I attempt to present this paper as a starting point toward theorizing informality as a “theory about planning.”

The Concept of Informality and Its Role in the Southern Planning Theories

Conceptualizing Informality in Southern Cities

Informality is a multi-faceted concept that embodies diverse connotations (Finn and Cobbinah 2022; Roy 2009b; Yiftachel 2009). Over the past few decades, the global discourse on informality has rapidly expanded to capture wide and dominant practices (Azunre 2024). Yet, it is undertheorized for planning, particularly in the Global South. Informality emerged to describe various forms of unregulated economic activities by low-income groups (Hart 1973). Informality today has increasingly been used to describe various activities relating to housing or settlement development (Banks, Lombard and Mitlin 2020; Duminy et al. 2014; Roy 2005, 2012), service provision, territorial logic of deregulation (Roy 2009a; 2015), as well as a mode of governance, politics, and the production of space or paralegal governance structures (e.g., insurgent planning) (Miraftab 2009; Roy 2005, 2009b, 2012; Yiftachel 2006). As organizing logic, urban informality is a mode of urbanization in contemporary human settlement—a system of norms regulating urban transformation (Roy 2005).

Informality originated in the field of urban planning studies related to issues in the Global South (Meijer and Ernste 2022). Informality covers a wide range of situations within and across territories. How informality is viewed may differ substantively “depending on who is doing the looking” and the part of the world one is looking at informality (Finn and Cobbinah 2022, 5; Roy 2009b). In its naturalistic conception, informality connotes the practices of low-income individuals to survive in cities of developing countries, ¹ where people engage in small economic activities, like street vending, as a source of livelihood and slums for shelter (Cobbinah 2023; Porter 2011; Watson 2009a). In other words, informality is “people creating their own rules by adapting to, or resisting, the prescribed systems of ordering urban space” (Asan and Ozsoy 2018, 60). It emerged due to “finding a way” to survive, mostly in cities by the urban poor. This description often equates informality with poverty (Roy 2005). In African cities, for instance, informality is about livelihood and housing strategies. Most of the urban poor in this context employ dynamic “make-do” socioeconomic practices to provide for themselves in the absence of formal means (Addi and Ayambire 2022; Cobbinah 2023; Finn and Cobbinah 2022).

These evolving practices do not usually conform to formal planning rules and regulations (Marx and Kelling 2019; McFarlane 2012); far from that, informality is often understood as the organic and spontaneous formation of these societies. In the words of Patrick B. Cobbinah (2024, 2), informality is an expression of African urban culture, which defines, shapes, and frames urban fabrics. It is integral to the survival, growth, and economic development of African cities (Cobbinah 2023, 2024; Finn and Cobbinah 2022; Kamete 2017; Watson 2009a, 2014c). It is crucial to note that informality, in part, is a product of formal regulations (Polese 2021; Polese, Kovács and Jancsics 2018; Roy 2018).

Recent scholarship has examined the role of the state in the production of informality—it ought to be understood as a product of the state (i.e., a product of formal regulations) rather than something beyond the state (Azunre 2024; Polese 2021; Polese, Kovács and Jancsics 2018; Roy 2015; 2018). The state's role in the production of informality emanates from its inability to meet the huge demands for urban services as well as through its regulatory frameworks. The hegemony of state power and planning plays a crucial role in delineating the sphere of informality and its functionality and how these practices are or can be recognized and integrated into formal planning domains. Informality “in spite of” and “beyond” the state in Abel Polese (Polese 2021; Polese, Kovács and Jancsics 2018) conceptions see how the state and citizens produce informality through deliberate ignoring of planning practices. State planning remains hostile to informality (and vis-à-vis), creating a continuum of conflict between planning and informality (Cobbinah 2023; Kamete 2017). It is, therefore, important to recognize that informality is also a product of formal rules and regulations. This recognition is crucial to framing urban informality in southern cities, given how planning rules and regulations systematically marginalize the survival agencies of the urban poor while promoting the informality of the state and the elites (Banks, Lombard and Mitlin 2020).

A careful exploration of the political economy of urban informality tends to reveal a wide spectrum of powerful actors involved in these practices within urban possessory politics—viewing informality beyond the practice of the urban poor to elites, state, and private businesses (Azunre 2024; Banks, Lombard and Mitlin 2020; Yiftachel 2016). In urban governance, informality concerns how the urban poor and marginalized people act in the face of power (i.e., state planning and urban governance). Also, the state often operates informally in its relationship with citizens or planning interventions (Banks, Lombard and Mitlin 2020; Bhan 2019; Roy 2009b; Watson 2013; Yiftachel 2006). Given the changing framing of informality and its agencies, Banks, Lombard and Mitlin (2020) suggest that informality should be seen as a critical site of analysis, with the potential for new theoretical insight to understand emerging urban situations, power dynamics, and relationships in the Global South.

In the rapidly urbanizing African regions, governments and public institutions, like municipal planning institutions, are severely overwhelmed by increasing demand for urban services, infrastructure, housing, and livelihood opportunities (Cobbinah 2017, 2023; Watson 2014a). Such huge demands against the backdrop of economic growth and resources limit the capacity of urban public institutions to steer spatial development, provide services, and create opportunities for urban residents (Cobbinah 2017, 2023). Consequently, informality continues to evolve as a coping or adaptive survival strategy for most poor urban residents (Cobbinah 2023; Finn and Cobbinah 2022). “Informality is thriving” (Polese 2021, 1). These survival strategies of the urban poor are largely manifested in their economics and housing practices, their struggles for inclusion, and their appropriation of spaces (Asante 2020; Kamete 2017; McFarlane 2012).

The framing of informality also needs to pay attention to the uniqueness of places. While there are notable similarities in how informality is unfolding in southern cities, it is important to recognize the distinct variations in different contexts. For instance, in the South-East context, such as Israel, informality is associated with dynamics of state power, politics, and territorial control (Roy 2009b; Yiftachel 2006, 2016). For example, Yiftachel (2009) uses the term “gray space” from the southeast context—as spaces defined by state sanctions, constituting “groups,” housing, land, economies, and discourses outside the planned city. In Latin America, informality echoes the likes of African cities as survival strategies but adds a critical dimension of citizen participation (Miraftab 2009; Roy 2009b)—the idea of invited and invented space of participation in governance processes. While informality is largely visible in southern cities, it is not exclusively limited to cities in the Global South. Informality is equally taking place in the cities of the Global North but may take different forms, including squatting or camping on public properties or street vending (Meijer and Ernste 2022; Roy 2011b; Yiftachel 2006, 2016). However, these practices are often overlooked, perhaps due to their low prevalence. Such recognition and distinctive conception of informality have the potential to shape planning theories and practices differently. Yet, in this analytical and theoretical lens from which scholars describe southern cities, informality is still highly marginal in the theater of planning theory. Much is required to situate planning practice within the daily rhymes of informality. I see this discourse as an epistemic problem, questioning the purpose of planning theory.

Informality and Urban Planning in Africa

In many parts of the Global South, urban planning continues to be in deep conflict with the stubborn realities of informality (Watson 2009a, 2013). Despite the centrality of informality in urban Africa, governments and their institutions, particularly the institutions of urban planning, are mostly stuck with colonial planning systems (Baffoe and Roy 2022; Cobbinah 2023; Watson 2009a) and ideologies of a modern city where the practice of informality does not appear significant (Cobbinah 2023, 4; 2024). Much has been said about the African urban planning system and its limited capacity to understand and respond to complex urban challenges (Cobbinah 2023; Duminy et al. 2014; Watson 2009a). The planning systems, even today, are embedded in and framed around the inherited planning regimes of colonial laws and regulations, blueprint planning models based on Western ideals and ideological agendas (Baffoe and Roy 2023; Cobbinah and Gaisie 2023; Watson 2009a, 2009b), as well as policy instruments that are often disconnected from contextual realities. The thrust of Africa's urban planning systems and management agendas (i.e., the idea of ordering and beautifying urban spaces) across the continent exhibit an insatiable desire for Western modernity (Cobbinah 2024; Watson 2003, 2014c). Such ambitious modernization logic that shapes government actions and, of course, urban planning in Africa often starkly contrasts with the intrinsic nature of informality. Africa's urban planning and governance take the form of modern capitalist practices through neoliberal strategies (Olajide 2023). For instance, in Kumasi, Ghana, the modernization project to replace one of the largest traditional markets in West Africa (i.e., Kumasi Central/Kejetia market) with a multi-complex ultra-modern structure is to raid off informalities in the city (Addi et al. 2024; Okoye 2020). As such, Africa's urban planning and informality seem to run on parallel scales—a conflict amplified by modern capitalist practices.

The pursuit of modernity has been enkindled by neoliberal urban policies and the development interventions within municipal governance (Parnell and Robinson 2012), which has worsened the condition of informality. Urban planning has been instrumental in municipal governance in Africa. What is notable in contemporary urban Africa is that neoliberal policies have shaped the direction of urban planning and intensified its conflictual relationship with informality through dispossessory politics. The notion of illegality ascribed to informality remains instrumental in the neoliberal-led production of urban spaces and the eviction of informal economic operators and settlements in the cities (Azunre 2024; Olajide 2023). Nonetheless, the pervasiveness of informality alongside poor economic development challenges Africa's urban planning capacity to materialize its neoliberal and modernization objectives. Informality contrasts the imposed top-down exclusionary planning regimes, which seek to expel informal practices from the urban landscape (Amoako, Adjei-Poku and Dankyi 2022; Roy 2012; Watson 2009a). Neoliberal policies have made things worse in terms of how informality is viewed and treated within urban planning and policy discourses. Urban planning efforts to disguise informality often fail and, in most cases, become counterproductive—exacerbating the existing urban problems. It implies that Africa's urban planning appears to demonstrate a practical error in its axiological approach.

The challenge of Africa's urban planning and the conflicting rationalities of informality stem from four key factors. First, the continuous importation of “Western conceptions and approaches,” which are “devoid of adaptation to local circumstances” (Cobbinah 2023, 4) yet are perceived as the ideal models for planning. Like many contexts in the Global South, planning practices are continuously “borrowed and replicated” across borders without or with few qualms (Healey 2012; Roy 2005, 147). Second, governments and city authorities deliberately neglect and exclude informality in policy planning. Third, subjecting informalities (i.e., informal spaces and economic activities) to continuous repression and brutal planning regiments such as eviction and demolition (Finn and Cobbinah 2022). Lastly, the institutional capacity to deal with informality. Within contemporary urban planning across the continent, informality is seen as a nuisance to be removed or corrected by planning (Amoako, Adjei-Poku and Dankyi 2022; Banks, Lombard and Mitlin 2020; Cobbinah 2023). Despite African urbanization being characterized by informality, commonly driven by poverty and unplanned development, scholars (Cobbinah 2023; Finn and Cobbinah 2022; Kamete 2017) acknowledged that there is limited recognition of informality by the state, city authorities, and planners, as well as a critical theorization of informality in contemporary African cities.

Informality has historically been marginalized from the colonial era to contemporary neoliberal urban governance and entrepreneurial-driven planning and policies (Olajide 2023; Porter 2011). Across the African continent, the response to urban informality spans from brutal repressions and sustained eviction to inclusive and supportive policies (Rogerson, 2016). Local governments continue to employ evictions, relocations, demolitions, and confiscations as “revanchist urban management mechanisms to dispossess street vendors” (Okoye 2020, 2). More recently, city authorities have adopted neoliberal approaches to urban infrastructural planning and the production of space (Amoako, Adjei-Poku and Dankyi 2022; Asante and Mills 2020). These ongoing urban infrastructural development strategies and dispossessory politics in Ghana's urban transformation agenda and other African countries is an attempt not only to modernize the cities but to marginalize, dispossess, expropriate, and eliminate informalities and the urban poor from their livelihoods, spaces, and shelters (Addi, Cobbinah, Ayambire and Takyi, 20202024; Frimpong, Clifford and Kuffuor 2020; Watson 2009a, 2014c). The worst-case scenario is subjecting these informalities (and their actors) to strict regulations and state control (Frimpong, Clifford and Kuffuor 2020; Kamete 2017; Watson 2014c). Street vending, the most visible component of informality in African cities, is not only seen as unfit in the modern utopian visions of Western cities but is often perceived to thwart such ambitious visions (Watson 2014c). However, these repressive regulations often face resistance from informal economic actors and slum dwellers and eventually fail (Cobbinah 2023; Okoye 2020; Watson 2003).

For instance, the plan to replace one of the largest traditional markets in West Africa (Central/Kejetia market at the center of Kumasi, Ghana) with an ultra-modern urban market structure illustrates the burning desire of city authorities to clean up informalities and modernize their urban centers (Asante and Mills 2020; Okoye 2020). Such planning and urban development practices are common across the African continent (Watson 2009a, 2014a; 2014c) and can be understood within the broader discourse of the heavy dependence of the Global South on colonial or Western planning regimes of modernity (Baffoe and Roy 2022; Cobbinah 2023; Roy 2015; Watson 2009a, 2014c; Winkler 2018). The above discussion raises critical concerns about the effectiveness of Africa's urban planning. Despite the transformative potential of urban planning, Cobbinah and Gaisie (2023, 6) asked, “Why is urban planning not working for African cities?” Planning positions itself as a formal practice. However, its practices are implicated in the production of informality and contribute to the complex urban problems in southern cities, perhaps complicating issues of informality (Addi, Amoako, Takyi, Azurne and Amponsah 2024). ²

The challenge of dealing with informality in African cities can be attributed to the institutional capacity (Cobbinah 2017). However, the major problem is closely associated with the continuous importation of planning theories and practices (Watson 2009a, 2014a, 2014c). As Cobbinah and Gaisie (2023, 5) indicated, there is a wide gap between the form of urban planning practice and the everyday lived experiences, especially in complex societies and living in the improvised conditions of informality. Communicative planning hinges on severe critique in a society of differences, power imbalance, and irresponsible governments. Communicative/collaborative planning remains one of the robust tools for theorizing and practicing effective planning from the South and integrating informality. However, the assumption of seamless dialogue and equal opportunities for all participating groups is often unattainable in complex societies (Watson 2016). We can recast our minds to the exclusionary practices and how power dynamics shaped the planning and implementation of Kumasi Central/Kejetia modern market.

In discussing planning theory and its encounter with southern cities, it is important to ask this question; “what do the worlds of informality bring to planning theory?” Why should planning be concerned about informality? Has not a lot been said about informality? Why is it still a problem in planning? Is informality not outside the confines of “planning”? These reflective questions are purposed to rethink the longevity of informality in scholarly discussion yet remain at the fringes of planning theory and practices. In the next section, I discussed planning theory and the diversity of practices. My aim is to establish the link between planning theory and practice and to usher readers into seeing informality in the Global South as a “Theory about planning,” critiquing planning and requiring new theories for southern planning practices. I also intend to establish the purpose of planning theory and why diversity in planning practice and local experiences is critical to theorizing planning ideas.

Planning Theory and Diversity of Practice: Purpose, Perspective, and Universality

Inquisitively, I asked these questions in an “Advance Planning Theory” ³ class: “Why do we have planning journals publishing on ‘Planning Theory’,' ''Planning Theory & Practice' ‘Planning Theory for Practitioners' and so on?’” Why such a banal distinction? Which theories are for planning practitioners, and which are mainly for scholarly debates? Such benign distinctions awaken my curiosity to explore the rationale of planning theory and practices. Reading a volume of planning literature convinced me of the relationship between planning theory and practice. However, the boundaries are still blurred. Through these questions, I have become keenly interested in the discussion of planning theory, its purpose, and concerns about the southern planning perspectives and why this reinvigorated and shifting paradigm is relevant to effective planning in Africa and other contexts of the Global South.

Urban planning emanates from and is characterized by theories, conceptions, models, and approaches in cities of the Global North that purport to address urban problems in these regions (Lawhon and Truelove 2020; Watson 2009a, 2014a; Yiftachel 2006). Today, planning theory has increasingly become a global concern, with many ideas being transferred and translated into other languages to diffuse knowledge and replicate practices across the globe (Friedmann 2008; Healey 2012). They have spread fashionably across the Global South via transfer mechanisms of colonialism and ideological globalization (Cobbinah 2023; Connell 2014; Healey 2012; Mukhopadhyay, Hammami and Watson 2021; Parnell and Robinson 2012; Roy 2011b; Watson 2009a, 2016). The “transnational flow of planning ideas” (Healey 2012, 188) allows planning to be shaped by dominant thoughts, with the southern worlds often marginalized in the theater of planning theory and merely turn recipients. In most cases and under the dominant North-to-South flows, most planning theories are often presented and legitimize themselves, capable of explaining situations and addressing issues elsewhere (Healey 2012; Roy 2015). They do so without reference to the socioeconomic and political contexts from which they originated (Watson 2016) or attempting to reconfigure practices in other contexts (Healey 2012). Such a blind translation and subordinated flows of planning theory into practices in the South proved irrelevant and inefficient. This raises questions about the purpose and relevance of planning theory. As Lawhon and Truelove (2020) critiqued, Euro-American hegemony works to displace the diversity of intellectual traditions.

What, then, is planning theory? What purpose does planning theory serve? How is it relevant for planning practice? The question of “What is planning theory” is difficult to define (Fainstein and DeFilippis 2016, 1), but “Why we do planning theory” (Friedmann 2003) indicates the intrinsic connection between theory and practice. Although the relationship between planning theory and practice is sometimes problematic (Fainstein and DeFilippis 2016), the crucial role of planning theories is to advance planning knowledge and practices (Alexander 2022; Bhan 2019; Fainstein and DeFilippis 2016; Friedmann 1993, 2003; Olesen 2018). In essence, planning theory provides a “lens for thinking about planning” and the complex problem to be addressed by planning (Olesen 2018, 305).

As John Friedmann (1993, 482) stated, “Planning is that professional practice that specifically seeks to connect forms of knowledge with forms of action in the public domain.” In another sense, planning is an “iterative and dynamic process between knowledge and action” (Vasudevan and Novoa 2022, 78). These definitions explicitly position planning as a profession in which practices are informed by knowledge produced about situations or places. The question then is, “What knowledge is relevant, and whose action are we [planners] concerned?” (Friedmann 1993, 482). The “uncodified knowledge” forms situated in context and lived experiences that can better inform planning practice are often taken for granted. As such, planning theory today still faces the challenge of balancing the recognition of context-specific diversity with the desire to develop normative theoretical stances that can be generalized in practice (Watson 2003).

Another strand linking planning to practice defines “planning” as “what planers do” (Fainstein and DeFilippis 2016). This definition describes planning with an axiological sense rather than a more epistemological focus (Friedmann 1993). If planning is what planners do in practice, how does planning theory inform it? In this discussion, Alexander (2022) argued that planning theory shapes practice when applied in a “particular practice” (i.e., context, regime, and planning systems). The idea of a particular practice identified planning with diverse ways of doing planning, commonly in different contexts. As Friedmann (2003, 8) rightly puts it, “There is no planning practice without a theory about how it ought to be practiced.” In this sense, planning theory is produced not only to “continue the intellectual development of planning” as an independent profession or put forward a theoretical debate (Olesen 2018, 305; Watson 2014a) but, more critically, to inform appropriate practices. Practitioners then need planning theory to guide their reading of situations and acting upon them in the more diverse “worlds.”

The essay by Ernest Alexander (2022) categorized three kinds of planning practices: (1) Generic “planning"—what people do when they are planning; (2) knowledge-centered planning practice—a substantive practice in planning; and (3) real practice in a specific context, for instance, informality in southern planning. These distinctive practices can be related to Andreas Faludi's partitioning of planning theory into “Theory of planning” and “Theory in planning” (Faludi 1973). The theory of planning relates to the organization of planning and the procedures for doing it (Friedmann 2008). Generally, it represents a generic perspective of planning. On the other hand, theory in planning is a substantive theory related to a specific field within planning, like transportation planning or land use planning (Faludi 1973). A third distinction is the “Theory about planning,” which critiques planning and elucidates practical pathways or raises compelling arguments for reforms. Critical theory about planning does require a new planning theory for practice (Friedmann 2008). Recasting our minds to history, theories about planning possibly emerged during the 1960s and 1970s, criticizing how planning was conceived and practiced within the rational comprehensive model (Friedmann 1993; Watson 2003), which eventually led to a paradigm shift in planning. Within these discourses, southern planning perspectives can be seen as a critical theory that reacts to and attempts to unsettle the one-size-fits-all approach embodying planning theory. My interest in this theoretical distinction is to navigate my way around “Theory about Planning” to discuss informality and the encounter with planning practice in African cities.

The discussion here highlighted the intrinsic relationship between planning theory and practice and pointed to the diversity of planning practice. Although planning has become a global practice, there is recognizable diversity across various parts of the world, far beyond the differences in geographical, Global North and Global South, to a more seated difference between countries, their governance, and planning systems. In addition, Alexander's (2016) work concluded that planning is a multi-scalar set of diverse practices linked to underlying or mainstream planning theories. This diversity has implications for developing planning theory. By acknowledging diversity in planning practice, local knowledge forms and practices are crucial to theorizing for effective planning practices. The normative question is, how relevant is the universal logic of theorizing planning in the diversified world of practice?

Scholars like Pasty Healey (2012) viewed planning as a contingent concept evolving through experiences, debates, and critiques, as well as innovation around practices of managing complex urban situations over time. In this regard, Friedmann proposed an epistemology (planning theory) based on social learning, one that seeks a theoretical understanding of local diverse practices, lived experiences, and culture. These situated diverse practices—for instance, in the African context—are associated with urban informality. The point line is that theorizing planning needs to understand the “contingent universals” of situations (Healey 2012). That is, “understanding what is specific to a place and what can be shared learning across different localities and contexts” (Watson 2016, 38). Shifting from “contingent universals” to “contingent situations,” we may again be reading from John Friedmann (2003) on the need for planning to align with the “changing world,” with different situations. The underlying socioeconomic conditions largely shape these contingent situations and are central to what makes certain planning theories work in some contexts and struggle to make sense in other places. For instance, adopting neoliberal policies and modernist planning as the benchmark for spatial ordering and urban development in relatively poor, weakly governed, rapidly urbanizing, and underdeveloped African cities has faced implementation challenges. In many of these cities, formal mechanisms to access decent living conditions and services are largely absent, and most urban citizens live in informal settlements and depend largely on informal economic opportunities to make a living (Cobbinah 2023; Watson 2014a).

Most planning thoughts or ideas are inevitably produced under pretexts based on the nature of society, economy, environment, political, and institutional structures (Healey 2012; Watson 2014a). Time and place are also necessary regarding the circumstances under which a particular approach is developed or adopted to shape planning discourses (Friedmann 1993; Watson 2014a). These underlying factors vary significantly and must assume importance in the knowledge that reflects context-specific problems and practices (Bhan 2019; Fainstein and DeFilippis 2016; Watson 2014a). The disregard for these factors in adopting planning theory continues to awaken the long-standing debate in planning scholarship, arguing that “planning theories are divorced of practice” (Alexander 2022, 181). Gautam Bhan's (2019) “Notes on a southern urban practice” also reflects the “disconnects” between theory and practice in planning in the case of southern cities.

If planning practice in today's complex world is characterized by societal and political differences (Friedmann 2008), it should be informed by appropriate values, situated experiences, and knowledge forms (Watson 2003). The contingent situation of informality, more situated in southern cities, indicates a need to rethink planning theory and practice and how we must conceive and re-imagine planning to respond to the complexity of informality. Let us now gaze at the dominance of the Global North in shaping planning theory and practice and unquestionable universality.

The Southern Planning Theory: Key Debates

This section highlights the most critical theoretical debates about southern perspectives in planning theory and how they relate to informality. The universalized notion of (urban) planning theory has historically forced and imposed—permitted cities worldwide to be read, described, understood, and mainly treated under theories built to respond to situations elsewhere (Bhan 2019; Parnell and Robinson 2012; Roy 2015), despite the vast historical and situated differences. With this methodological error, southern planning scholarship critiques the universality and parochialism of planning theory, which often overlooks the context-specific differences (Myers 2014; Watson 2014a).

Over the past four decades, four broad counter-scholarships have emerged within urban planning against the northern hegemony of planning theory. They include the southern planning theory, postcolonial theory, decolonial theory, and pluriversal planning scholarship. All these scholarships have emerged from different perspectives but suggest a set of assumptions to inform theorizing and practicing planning beyond the Global North (Beebeejaun 2022; Watson 2013). For instance, postcolonial theory emphatically critiqued the naturalized Euro-American epistemologies of the urban and suggested new geographical locusts of thinking about the urban and planning (Roy 2009b, 2015). As Lawhon and Truelove (2020) argued, the southern perspectives in urban and planning scholarships acrimoniously critiqued the “northness” of urban theory as problematic for explaining global diversity and the particular of cities in the Global South. I will start this discussion with a benign challenge by Ananya Roy on urban and planning theories:

As the parochial experience of Euro-American cities has been found to be a useful theoretical model for all cities, so perhaps the distinctive experiences of the cities of the global South can generate productive and provocative theoretical frameworks for all cities. (Roy 2009b, 820)

The excerpt from Roy has a strong potency to substantiate the southern planning perspectives in planning theory. If Roy's thought-provoking statement makes sense to how planning theory is read and applied within the universalized praxis, then what may be generated in many parts of the Global South will, if nothing at all, be far from making sense in cities of the Global North. Although employing comparative case studies in developing theories may, to an extent, make sense of the dynamic global urbanism (Myers 2014). This is because issues of informality and its functionality in southern urbanism and urbanization processes do not exhibit the same order, patterns, or practices in other parts of the world, even within cities of the Global South. With informality equally taking different forms in cities of the Global North (Yiftachel 2006, 2016), the question is whether southern theorization on informality can make a meaningful contribution to planning practice in these settings.

The first and most critical point is that the southern turn in planning theory emphasizes the temporal and spatial specificity of urban phenomena. This recognition of the situatedness of planning issues and contextual differences challenges the universalized assertion of planning theory. Southern perspectives stress the relevance of context and place rather than creating universalized theories (Roy 2009a; Vasudevan and Novoa 2022; Watson 2009a, 2016; Winkler 2018; Yiftachel 2006). This approach emerged from the proposition that the South is empirically different: socially, culturally, politically, materially, and historically different from the North (Lawhon and Truelove 2020, 7–8). The contextual differences between and within the Global North and Global South (Watson 2014) provide enough evidence to think of southern-based theories in planning. However, planning theory often overlooks such differences without prior research to contextualize them for practices (Roy 2015; Watson 2016). In this vein, Roy sees “Eurocentrism is ‘an epistemological problem’” (Roy 2015, 205) and calls for new geographies of “imagination and epistemologies” (Roy 2009a) to capture the ground reality of southern cities, their composition, and functionality. As Roy (2009a) earlier mentioned, there is a need to bring unfamiliar issues into the fold of planning theory—the issues specific to urban planning in southern cities.

Informality in southern cities and the encounter with parochial planning practices continue to spur the heated scholarly debate, advancing the idea of theorizing and practicing planning from the South. Recognizing cities’ differences renders universalized theorization and application of models or concepts less relevant and invalid to planning practice (Mukhopadhyay, Hammami and Watson 2021; Watson 2016). The context-specific driven approach to planning theory invites planning theorists to critically reflect and engage with the context and theorize from situated experience and practices (Cobbinah 2023; Healey 2012). In this case, it requires a reflexive engagement with informality.

Second, the southern perspective in planning theory counteracts the geopolitical dominance of planning knowledge production—the authoritative or hegemonic of the Global North in planning knowledge production (Connell 2014; Roy 2009b; Winkler 2018; Yiftachel 2009, 2016). The collective task of the southern scholarships, pluriversal planning scholarship, or decolonial planning theory tends to reject the universal language and unsettle dominant planning theory (Beebeejaun 2022; Vasudevan and Novoa 2022; Winkler 2018; Yiftachel 2006) by “arguing in favour of value-laden and situated knowledge.” More critically, the hegemony of planning knowledge and imposition of northern planning ideas on the Global South expresses power and control and reinforces colonialism in postcolonial worlds (Connell 2014; Parnell and Robinson 2012; Roy 2009b; Yiftachel 2009). For instance, Parnell and Robinson (2012) see the imposition of neoliberal urban policies as putting forward and reinforcing hegemonic global agendas or selling dominant visions of Western cities to southern governments in the hope of creating more competitive cities for economic growth (Watson 2014c). In essence, neoliberalism and modernity are designed to support economic exploitation.

Southern theorists tend to see northern hegemony or the political economy of planning knowledge production as the vehicle to maintain coloniality or coloniality of thoughts (Beebeejaun 2022; Connell 2014; Watson 2014b) and marginalization of southern perspectives in planning theory. The southern planning scholarship and decolonial theories seek to unsettle historical colonialism and imperialism (Beebeejaun 2022; Winkler 2018). Decolonizing planning theory seems to be an epistemic pathway to de-linking from the North (Mukhopadhyay, Hammami and Watson 2021; Winkler 2018). It thus implies developing alternative knowledge systems (e.g., an “African knowledge system”) to retort the coloniality and imperialism of Western cultures and influences (Connell 2014; Winkler 2018). Theorizing from the South, as Yiftachel (2006, 212) mentioned, “would avoid the pitfalls of false and domineering universalism” and emancipate planning from the locus of power and Western domination (Roy 2009b). This point is further expressed in Tanja Winkler's (2018) essay on decolonizing planning.

The third argument is based on the complexity of urban governance. Urban governance in the Global South straddles multiple systems, from political ideologies to social welfare and economic development and asymmetric power relations (Watson 2009a). As a result, implementing certain planning theories or models faced difficulties or sociopolitical power resistance (Cobbinah 2017; Watson 2002, 2014a). In an argument for a southern planning perspective, Watson (2003) used the term “conflicting rationality” to unpack how planning addresses urban challenges in varied contexts in the face of complex systems and power dynamics. These complexities characterizing urban planning and governance in the global south call for re-imagining diverse ways to deal with urban issues across scales. For instance, the hegemony of neoliberal governance or state power in planning southern cities often faces counter-reactions from citizens, particularly residents of informal settlements, against the state's oppressions and exploitations (Watson 2009a; Yiftachel 2009). Miraftab (2009) uses “insurgent planning” as a radical planning practice (i.e., counter-hegemonic) in response to neoliberal specifics of dominance and its contradictory inclusive governance and marginalization of low-income groups, surviving under conditions of informality. The “invited” and “invented” spaces of participation illustrate how power relations operate in southern planning and urban governance. Southern theorists emphasize the criticality of multiple power relations and ethnic politics interfering with and shaping state planning (Miraftab 2009; Mukhopadhyay, Hammami and Watson 2021; Watson 2013; Yiftachel 2016). We can see this governance system or practices as informal in southern cities.

After examining the key arguments of southern planning scholarship, it is essential to revisit informality and its centrality in planning theory and practice in the South. The three arguments outlined above highlighted the dominance of the Global North in the production of planning knowledge and the marginalization of southern perspectives. It evinced how theorizing and practicing planning in the South would place informality at the locus to craft pragmatic solutions to these cities and their contextual experiences. In the following section, I delve into this topic more fully, exploring what planning theory can learn from informality and how to integrate it more effectively.

Theorizing and Practicing Planning from the South: Informality in the Discourse

Informality offers an important insight into rethinking the idea of planning theory and practice and how planning can be instrumental to managing cities of the Global South. At present, planning theory and practice rarely venture into the terrains of informality despite its centrality in southern cities (Roy 2009b). Hence, the lack of critical theorization about informality makes planning ineffective in responding to the urban issues in the Global South (Finn and Cobbinah 2022). As seen in the case of Africa's cities, the challenges of urban planning, particularly in managing informality, call us to rethink planning and informality in southern cities. That is to theorize and practice planning with informality. Informality can then be seen as a theory about planning, ⁴ critiquing the seemingly stabilized universality omen of traditional planning theory and its relevance to practice in different settings. A critical engagement with informality will produce pragmatic management frameworks for southern planning practices.

Through contextual and situated experiences, planning theorists are called to reflect on the urban poor's practices, resistance, and strategic actions as a “response to modes of planning that have failed them” (Vasudevan and Novoa 2022, 84). Informality should not be seen as a challenge to urban planning but rather a reaction to planning, which fails to recognize and integrate these situations through a theoretical lens for effective practices, thus avoiding the pitiful failure in the Global South.

Theorizing and practicing planning from the South takes the form of developing planning theory from the experience of southern cities and devising working strategies to planning with informality. It requires a new body of thoughts and methodologies to theorize from the discursive practices of informality (Bhan 2019; Vasudevan and Novoa 2022). It brings planning to bear with the criticality of informality as a point of reference for building southern theories and modes of practice that see informality as the organic formation and culture of southern cities (Cobbinah 2024). Theorizing from the South is based on the situated knowledge of southern cities, which have been historically marginalized. It requires the recognition of local knowledge and social practices, as well as the adoption of social learning and collaborative processes. The project of theorizing and practicing from the South embraces epistemologies developed from the lived experience of southern cities via co-produced knowledge mechanisms to understand the complexity of informality and how planning practice can be well-informed by local knowledge. It calls on theorists to reflect on the uniqueness, challenges, and opportunities, particularly with the practice of informality in the Global South (Cobbinah 2023). To reiterate the urgency of “seeing from the south,” planning theory is “indebted” to cities in the Global South, and practicing planners need robust theoretical framing of informality to solve their context-specific problems. Planning in southern cities can be better served if theorists and practitioners engage in a project, both theory and practice, to engage with informalities in formal planning.

Amid the increasing complexity of African cities and the discursive phenomenon of informality, planning theory can contribute substantively to building more resilient and inclusive cities by developing models and frameworks tailored to the local context and embracing the practice of informality. To this end, urban planning in the South must adopt a pro-poor and inclusive approach that places and integrates the livelihood of the urban poor at the center of planning efforts. Integrating informality makes planning theories and practices more inclusive and effective (Meijer and Ernste 2022), particularly in the southern context, where informality is the norm for getting things done by private individuals, organizations, and sometimes governments (Bhan 2019).

The challenge now is to construct an alternative body of planning knowledge—generated from southern experiences, perhaps African cities (Parnell and Robinson 2012)—legitimate theories that are deeply engaged with issues of informality. As Bhan (2019, 9) thoughtfully asked, “How can a new body of thought give us ways of moving and modes of practice?” Tanja Winkler (2018) offered a pathway by alluding scholars and practitioners to draw inspiration from endogenous knowledge systems (i.e., the social learning process). Scholars like Yiftachel (2016, 155) and Vasudevan and Novoa (2022) espouse adopting a “pluriversal approach” to examine urban situations—de-linking from Western ways of knowing, being, and acting on cities or planning problems. Pluriversal planning and decolonial methodologies of ethnography and extended or comparative case studies are critical to providing useful insight into theorizing from southern cities. This approach to theorizing from the South draws on a “range of ideas on societal conflict, informality, identity, and ethnicity” (Watson 2016, 32) and seeks to integrate these factors into planning. Theorizing from the South embraces “ideas of engaged scholarship…and deep respect for local knowledge” and practices (Winkler 2018, 590).

This is the case of insurgence planning, as put forward by Faranak Miraftab (2009)—a “planning practices respond to neoliberal specifics dominance” in the Global South. What I called practicing planning from the South allows planners to embrace informality, engage with marginalized groups, and create spaces to accommodate the struggles of the urban poor, who are often excluded by imposed planning modalities. Currently, planning institutions in African cities, for instance, are grappling with informality and modernity (Cobbinah 2023; Watson 2014b, 2014c), thus placing the urgent call to theorize about informality for planning. In the next section, I briefly highlighted crucial points from existing scholarships within the umbrella of southern planning perspectives to integrate informality in planning theory and practice.

Informality in Planning Theory and Practice: Critical Southern Perspectives

First, the decoloniality of planning knowledge and practices is a critical pathway to seeing from the informality of the southern cities (Winkler 2018). By embracing “value-laden and situated knowledge,” planning theory can effectively integrate informality and endogenous practices into its framework. Decolonial planning theorizing methodologies more radically accept all knowledge forms and practices as valid (Winkler 2018, 592) as they are situated within the lived experiences from which they emerged. In doing so, planning theories can learn from the endogenous knowledge forms and the culture of informality and how various forms of informal practices can be neatly meshed and articulated into nuanced theories for practicing planning.

The second approach in which planning theory can learn from informality from the Global South is adopting pluriversal planning theorizing. In line with decolonial methodologies, pluriversal planning recentered and extended the “traditional conceptualization of planning theory and practice” via contextual and situated description of the ways “marginalized groups have theorized about their own lives as inspiration for planning thought” (Vasudevan and Novoa 2022, 84). Unlike the decolonial approach (Winkler 2018) to theorizing from the South, pluriversal methodologies rhyme with postcolonial methods of critical ethnography and comparative case studies (see Myers 2014; Roy 2015; Watson 2014b). Employing ethnography and case studies in theorizing within the Global South, like Africa or comparatively with the Global North, is useful to situated theoretical inquiries about informality that foreground the particular and retain a certain level of generalization, presently missing in planning theory (Healey 2012). With informality equally occurring in the Global North, planning theory may learn from what is particular about informality and what can be situated between two worlds. This does not necessarily mean we have to theorize about each city, region, or country to make planning practices highly efficient, as suggested by one of the reviewers. As highlighted in the section “Conceptualizing Informality in Southern Cities,” informality takes related but diverging forms even within the Global South.

The third thesis adds to the postcolonial perspective of informality using empirically grounded cases for theoretical interventions. Planning theory can benefit greatly and integrate informality by prioritizing situated and participatory knowledge production. Similar to insurgent planning, which was built from the lived experiences of people, planning theory stands to learn better and theorize with informality for practice. By seeing planning as an interactive activity by multiple actors (Miraftab 2009) and diverse practice (Healey 2012), appropriate theorization to capture informality into planning theory may be to learn from the everyday practices in southern cities.

The outlined mechanisms for theorizing with informality seem more radical in their approach to emancipating planning from dominant thoughts; they are helpful to understanding what could be the “contingent universals” in the contemporary flow of ideas and “contingent experiences” (of informality) in other contexts (Healey 2012).

Final Remarks and Implications for Further Research

This research sought to understand how informality is critical in the southern turn in planning theory. The study contributes more generally to the critiques against the universalization of planning theory, often generated under conditions mainly situated in the Global North and tends to assume global applicability. As a global practice, planning ideas have traveled across spaces and time through a complex combination of specificity and generalization (Roy 2009b), and dominant planning thoughts and practices have gained global validity through colonialism and neoliberal globalization. The universalized praxis underlying planning theory and the dominance of the Global North has marginalized southern cities, practices, and perspectives from planning theory. Most planning theories often undermine the criticality of contextual specificities and complexities of governance processes, albeit the stubborn realities of informality.

Consequently, southern cities are mainly seen as recipients of planning theories and practices rather than a locus for developing planning theory despite the grounded differences (i.e., informalities, socioeconomic conditions, politics, and institutional structures) central to formulating theories and their application. Recognizing the diversity in planning practice, planners need a robust theorization of informality and its dynamic processes to effectively act upon them in a meaningful way (Fainstein and DeFilippis 2016). Such societal practices vary from place to place, clearly between and within the Global North and Global South—questioning the universalized rationality.

Conversely, planning in the Global South, particularly in Africa, is deeply buried in and based on inherited colonial planning regimes and imported models. Such “pitiful” practices leave planning under constant confrontation with informality, political resistance, and limited capacity to address the core issues facing the cities. Thus, planning is seen as a failed enterprise whose interventions create exclusions and marginalization rather than better outcomes. This issue is furthered by the deliberate refusal to recognize, learn from, and accommodate informality. Africa's urban planning is consumed with formalizing the “informal” or suppressing informalities to reflect the understanding of a modern city (Cobbinah 2023; Watson 2009a, 2014c). To echo Yiftachel (2006), such planning modalities do “not ‘sit’ well” with the complexity of informality in the southern cities. As mentioned earlier, planning theory is indebted to southern cities for epistemic “bullying,” “intellectual colonization” or “neglect” (Watson 2014b, 25). This does not imply that existing theories have not made relevant contributions to shaping and managing cities in the South or informality in southern cities (Cobbinah 2024). However, the lack of theoretical development (i.e., theorizing from the South) to genuinely engage with the stubborn reality of informality weakens planning capacity and its purpose in dealing with issues in the South. By reconstituting the scope and geographies of planning theory, theorists can painstakingly embed in the “deep-seated informality,” which is empirically grounded in southern cities. Embracing local knowledge forms is not just a sign of resistance to the unspeakable universalized planning theory but also brings planning to bear with situations of informality. I argued that informality should be seen as a critical “Theory about planning” that counteracts stabilized planning theory and practice and calls to rethink the idea of planning. Theorizing from the South is prudent and may allow for social learning processes to mobilize local knowledge and understand the urban struggles and natural formation process of southern cities. Theorizing and practicing planning from the South can be a powerful mechanism to imbue informality in planning theory, without which planning may be far from making a meaningful impact in southern cities.

Southern planning perspectives bring southern cities’ situations to the discourse of planning theory and challenge the assumed universality of planning thoughts. It seeks to develop perspectives and approaches for understanding southern cities, their social and spatial composition, politics, power relations, and how planning practice can effectively confront its realities in these contexts. The findings show that discourses of the S2016outhern planning scholarships express three key debates. First, to understand southern cities, their contextual lived experience, and different knowledge practices to generate theories from the South. It rejects universalized knowledge claims and embraces local knowledge systems and practices. Second, southern perspectives in planning theory, from insurgent planning to pluriversal planning to decolonial and postcolonial scholarships, collectively seek to unsettle dominant theories and decolonize or de-link from the authoritative knowledge production (Vasudevan and Novoa 2022). Third, it brings the complexity of urban governance, planning practice, and power relations in the Global South to bear in planning theory. Despite speaking from highly diverse geographical contexts and perspectives from the South, the Southern planning theory has offered the possibility of re-imagining planning theory beyond the authoritative knowledge production center of the Global North, which confined itself to history, experience, and philosophy. It also drew the attention of planning theory to the discursive issue of informality, which is often taken for granted and marginalized.

Africa, perhaps the Global South, needs more robust and grounded planning theories to respond to its contextual urban issues. Without a robust theorization of informality, the current planning approaches to Africa's urban problems are bound to recurring failures and face a paternalistic conflict with informality. Theorizing and practicing planning from the experiences of southern cities is a way to appropriately guide planning in the Global South. This urgent call has been expressed in various scholarly works, purposely undertaken, particularly the southern planning theories included in this paper, to draw the attention of planning theory to southern cities.

In summary, informality as a central feature of southern cities plays a critical role in the southern turn in planning theory, drawn from the perspectives from Southeast, South Asia, Latin America, and Africa (Roy 2009b; Watson 2009b, 2016; Yiftachel 2006, 2016). The lack of attention given to informality within planning theory and practice has continued to render planning less capable of managing and transforming southern cities. It is imperative that planners begin to recognize the importance of informality and work toward its integration into planning practice. The task is to bridge the gap between planning theory and practice by bringing theories to bear with informalities. This research recommends theorizing and practice planning from below. A further area of research is understanding how formal and informal planning practices can mesh to make planning more effective in southern cities. There is an urgent need for new normative planning theories from the South to directly manage these cities and their informalities. This study recommends going beyond the debate of southern planning theory to productively engage in concrete theorization from the Global South.