01 ISSUE VII
SEPTEMBER 2025
SEPTEMBER 2025
The global City — A Modern Frankenstein
The slum is a symptom and resistance; informality, both a condition and a critique. Despite its fractures, the city remains essential for envisioning diverse and collective futures.
By Erin Gwydir
In the early twenty-first century, the city has become both the engine of global economic growth and the primary terrain where political, economic, and spatial rights are contested. Nowhere is this duality more palpable than in the cities of the so-called “Global South.” As populations urbanize at an unprecedented rate, what emerges is not a uniform or planned urban landscape, but one fragmented by class, race, capital flows, and informality. It is within this chaotic terrain that David Harvey’s idea of “the right to the city” emerges. This right to access urban life through dialectical legibility and thus the right to shape it is politically urgent. Through the lens of urban informality, this right becomes a battleground over the control of space, citizenship, and collective futures.
Image by Denys Argyriou, via Unsplash.
To understand the stakes, we must begin with Harvey’s framing of “the right to the city” as a deeply political and collective project. He writes, “This is a world in which the neoliberal ethic of intense possessive individualism, and its cognate of political withdrawal from collective forms of action, becomes the template for human socialization.” City skeletons are no longer grown by organic trade, migration, or employment, but are broken into place by global capital by modern-day Frankenstein engineers, Napoleons, and Robert Moseses, practicing inhuman urban logic. These cities become glass and concrete fiends, disconnected from the communities they enclose. “Where is our commune?” Harvey asks. It is a call to reclaim the city not as a site of isolation but as a project of shared living, dynamic and fractured in its identity.
Yet, in these cities, the “commune” often manifests not in top-down formal housing or planned development but in the dense networks of slums, settlements, and informal networks. Informality is frequently misunderstood as a lack (of infrastructure, legality, permanence) but, as Ananya Roy argues in SLUMDOG CITIES, it is a modality of urbanization, a state-sanctioned and market-driven production of illegality.
The informal is not outside the state; it is co-produced by it - illegible to those who have tried and failed to impose a top-down order, to those literate only in the written rather than oral language. Indeed, oral languages are older than written ones sharing roots with informal formations; their age defies narratives of indeterminable chaos. As Loïc Wacquant warns, conservative readings of the ghetto often obscure structural histories, reduce poverty to pathology, and exoticize communities as the economic and social “other.” The same governments that evict slum dwellers also rely on informal economies to function. Roy reframes “subaltern urbanism” not as deficient but as agency on the part of those who continue to build life amid dispossession.
Yet, that agency should not be romanticized. Mike Davis, in PLANET OF SLUMS, sees the slum not just as a site of resilience but as a containment strategy for the world’s “surplus humanity.” The slum, in this framing, is not merely a zone of resilience; it is a holding cell, an architecture of abandonment. Still, Davis’s work gestures toward revolutionary potential: “Aren’t the great slums, as a terrified Victorian bourgeoisie once imagined, volcanoes waiting to erupt?” Will these spaces be sites of revolt or of self-consuming fragmentation, where Darwinian struggle replaces collective solidarity?
AbdouMaliq Simone offers a nuanced counterpoint in his notion of “people as infrastructure.” In Johannesburg, South Africa’s largest city, the urban poor are active producers of urban life. Lacking formal services, people create their own infrastructures: of exchange, care, and survival. Informality here is not merely spatial but social: the right to the city enacted through relational, improvised practices responsive to fluctuating needs. These systems recall the market’s original conception and challenge the global capitalist order through localized, informal economies.
Still, adaptation must not be mistaken for liberation. Wacquant cautions against three pernicious premises in the study of marginalized urban space: overgeneralization, culturalist essentialism, and analytical blindness to the role of the state. Though focused on American ghettos, his critique resonates globally. Informality is neither pathology or romantic subaltern ingenuity; it is the grandmother and daughter of structural conditions such as global finance, racial capitalism, and state complicity. Informal urbanism is not a deviation; it is neoliberalism’s logic. As Harvey insists the right to the city is no longer a localized demand: “this has to be a global struggle, predominantly with finance capital, for that is the scale at which urbanization processes now work.”
But how does one revolt against immaterial wealth, against the algorithmic circulations of capital that buy and sell neighborhoods before residents can claim tenure? Neoliberal cities don’t merely exclude, they anesthetize. Like the Roman Empire turning slaves into Spartacus, resistance is absorbed and fragmented. The irony is collective space without communal organization; public life privatized into gated enclaves; cities built for investment portfolios rather than for people. In California, Harvey notes, homeowner associations become “bastions of political reaction, if not of fragmented neighborhood fascisms.” The same impulse animates the growth of luxury condos in Lagos, smart cities in India, and exclusionary zoning in São Paulo. The right to the city becomes the right to remain, to resist displacement.
Claiming this right through informality acknowledges that cities are not blank canvases for technocratic redesign, but rather living palimpsests of struggle, adaptation, and memory. The informal city is not outside the urban - it is its crucible. It reveals both the crisis and the potential of urban life. The right to the city is not about access; it is about transformation. It is about rejecting the myth of self-help urbanism and demanding instead a politics of solidarity and structural change. The slum is both a symptom and a site of resistance. Informality is both a condition and a critique. And the city, fractured as it is, remains the most vital terrain for imagining diverse collective futures.
Erin holds a bachelor’s degree in Global Studies and Screen Studies from Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School.