The Routledge Handbook of Southern Urbanism(s)

Cities are at the centre of a contemporary civilisational crisis, marked by displacement, climate breakdown, armed conflict, authoritarianism, and widening inequality. These conditions are not external shocks to urban life but constitutive forces through which cities are made, governed, inhabited, and contested. It is from these uneven, conflictual, and lived terrains that Southern urbanism(s) is being enacted today. This Handbook traces key debates shaping contemporary urbanisation through Southern urbanism(s) as an epistemic orientation, engaging critically with how urban theory and practice are being reworked in contexts where crises are most intensely lived and negotiated. Rather than offering models or solutions, the volume examines how urban knowledge is produced through situated practices, struggles, and experiments.

The book is organised into six interconnected sections that address the ethics and politics of urban inquiry; the entanglements of theory and practice; the governance of contested cities; the Southern infrastructural turn; struggles over situated urban justice; and pluriversal urban future imaginaries. The Handbook argues that centring situated reflections from and about Southern urbanism(s) enables scholars and practitioners to learn from the front lines where urban challenges are confronted, contested, and re-imagined. The “South” is treated not as a fixed geography but as a relational and epistemic position shaped by power, positionality, and lived urban conditions. Engaging questions that scholars and practitioners grapple with in their everyday work, the volume explores how theory emerges through practice, how global agendas are negotiated or resisted, and how alternative imaginaries of justice and urban futures are mobilised for the global majority.

The Handbook is an essential guide and reference not only for researchers engaged with southern (urban) theory and southern urbanism(s), but also for undergraduate and graduate teaching and for urban practitioners, policymakers, and activists.