Cities of the Global South

This article considers the conundrums entailed in maintaining the notions of “city” and “Global South” in an era where urbanization is no longer epitomized by the city form and where the Global South as a distinctive geopolitical entity has largely been fractured into a multiplicity of domains and histories. Nevertheless, the compositions of contemporary urbanization processes engineer an urban world that is largely deterritorialized in terms of geographical and socio-technical specificity but simultaneously necessitates heterogeneous articulations across territories that open up spaces for the reiteration of many Souths. These potentially continue a long trajectory of solidarities and singularities among postcolonial urbanities. The article details the ways contemporary urbanization processes are composed via a heterogeneity of flows and corridors, while they are simultaneously reterritorialized through the elaboration of popular economies that express a partial disjuncture with capital-central logics of urbanization and the concretization of urbanization potentials embodied by long histories of struggle.