Recasting Provisional Urban Worlds in the Global South: Shacks, Shanties and Micro-Stalls

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article contributes to ongoing calls that provoke a recasting of provisional urban worlds in the global South. I draw from informal and transient structures – shacks, shanties, micro-stalls – in Kibera, a high-density settlement in Nairobi, to offer an explication of provisional worlds that transcends teleological conceptions of what constitutes ‘the urban’. I argue that while often disregarded, sidelined, and marginalized in formal planning and city-making processes, informal and transient structures offer viable alternatives amidst the usually exclusionary nature of neoliberal and market-oriented interventions. As such, they instigate a mode of practice that speaks to different ways of being-in-the-world.