Urban Informality and Narrative Form brings together literary analysis and spatial planning theory in an interdisciplinary study of urban informality. It examines a diverse array of literary and cinematic fictions from across the globe—West and North Africa, West and South Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America—in dialogue with influential social scientific studies of urban informality.
Leading scholar Eric Prieto explores the formal and representational strategies authors have used to address the realities of life in the informal city. He demonstrates the ability of literary texts to provide significant insights into the kinds of real-world concerns that preoccupy planning and policy specialists but that have remained resistant to the more traditional methodologies of urban studies and planning. The book sheds new light on the forces that have led to the prevalence of urban informality in the Global South, while also debunking some common misconceptions about the phenomenon, highlighting the great diversity of subjective experiences hidden behind the euphemistic “informal settlement” (or the more pejorative “slum”), and identifying some of the most promising ways forward for the urban poor. At a time when over half of all city dwellers in the Global South live in an informal settlement of some kind, the urgency of the topic could not be clearer.
With its global breadth and novel methodology (using urban theory as literary theory), this book will be of interest to scholars of urban literature, postcolonial and world literature, and to social scientists working in the spatial planning and policy fields.
Table of Contents:
Part I: Theoretical and Historical Groundwork
Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 Informal Urbanism and/as Representational Crisis
Chapter 3 Changing Paradigms in Urban Studies
Chapter 4 A New Generation of Urban Informalists
Chapter 5 Literary Mappings of the Informal City
Part II: Interdisciplinary Cross-readings
Chapter 6 Hybrid Urbanization and Literary Space: Paulo Lins's City of God and Naïma Tagemouati's La Liste
Chapter 7 Ordinary Cities I: Upward Mobility in Istanbul (Pamuk and Tekin)
Chapter 8 Memorializing People as Infrastructure in Abidjan and Dakar (Rouch, Sembène, Mambéty)
Chapter 9 Ordinary Cities II: Fables of Urban (Im)Mobility in Yaoundé and Lagos
Chapter 10 Climates of Uncertainty (Patterson, Chamoiseau, Saulter, and KSR)
Chapter 11 Summary and Closing Remarks (Soft Eyes)
About the Author :
Eric Prieto is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. He is the author of Literature, Geography, and the Postmodern Poetics of Place (2012) and co-editor of Urban Discourses of Crisis, Resilience, and Resistance (with Liam Lanigan and Anni Lappela; 2025).
