ABSTRACT
In recent decades, the concept of self-organisation has attracted growing attention in the academic debates concerned with urban issues. All these urban variations of self-organisation can be included under the umbrella term of self-urbanism, which denotes practices and processes of making, shaping and living the urban space that are not prevalently and directly mediated or led by public institutions – that is, they are mostly endogenously produced. Self-urbanism is not a homogeneous phenomenon. The chapter analyses the birth of self-urbanism and identify its constitutive features. It argues that one of the main implications of self-urbanism is the rise of a new institutional fragmentation that overthrows the traditional boundaries drawn by public authorities and fuels spatialised forms of unequal urban citizenship.
