ABSTRACT
Drawing on feminist and post-colonial perspectives on geography and urban sociology and scholars operating on the ground, this chapter proposes a conceptual framework built around the proposition that knowledge of undertheorized mobilities spaces in the Global South can deepen attempts to conceptualize and operationalize urban articulations and inform urban policies. By urban articulations we mean the ways urban residents organize to facilitate networks and flows of people, resources, spaces, discourses, and representations; seizing transitory opportunities and activating gaps in time and space as productive hubs within questionable economic and political infrastructures. By undertheorized mobilities spaces we mean heterogeneous configurations and dynamic, yet transitory, situations of socio-economic productivity and political creativity that are relatively invisible to current urban frameworks because they do not fit within existing analytical models. Binary theory models and policy frameworks, grounded in the experiences of cities in the West and North, ignore the diversity of geographies, practices, and possibilities ‘in-between’ dichotomous perceptions. The chapter argues that understanding these ‘in-between’ spaces is crucial to developing interventions that are appropriate to the transnational, differentiated, often syncretic character of our contemporary urban societies. The chapter draws on key propositions in emergent urban scholarship seeking to overcome the limitations of analytical categories and frameworks developed in the Global North, in an attempt to conceptualize, operationalize, and productively mobilize new and emerging urban articulations from the Global South. We argue that institutions must be capable of engaging with the complexities of the everyday practices of their constituents, developing innovative ways to conceptualize and materialize such engagements in order to reframe ways of working, and to formulate and implement innovative policies of socio-spatial inclusion which maximize the resourcefulness and optimize the mobilities of urban citizens and residents.
