Homeworking in the Philippines: Bad job? Good job?
This report focuses on two categories of homeworkers in the Philippines: industrial homeworkers, who assemble or fabricate goods for factories, retailers or their agents under subcontracting arrangements; and online workers, … Continue reading
From Visible Informality to Splintered Informalities
Increasingly, scholarly works challenge the formal/informal dichotomy, stressing the multiple political practices of producing informality which go beyond state incapacity. In contrast, this article addresses a lack of research concerning … Continue reading
“The street is ours”: Street trading, Covid-19 and new street geographies
This collaborative and comparative paper deals with the impact of Covid-19 on the use and governance of public space and street trade in particular in two major African cities. The … Continue reading
Urban-to-rural labour transitions from the factory to the informal economy
The COVID-19 pandemic has escalated processes of labour transition from industrial work to the informal economy, which have always characterized the life of the working poor. Exploring urban-to-rural labour transitions … Continue reading
On the conditions of ‘late urbanisation’
We are living through a global urban transition, but the timing of this transition has varied significantly across countries and regions. This geographic variation in timing matters, both theoretically and … Continue reading
Defending Space in a Changing Urban Landscape
The processes of privatizing and commodifying collective resources that accompany recent urbanization have evoked literature that focuses on the urban commons. In the case of India, scholars emphasize that the … Continue reading
The Pandemic City: Urban Issues in the Time of COVID-19
Pandemics have shaped the way cities are planned and configured. Throughout history, cities have evolved to solve problems of sanitation, hygiene, and health access while providing space and opportunities for … Continue reading
Informality in action: A relational look at informal work
We conceptualize informal work in relational terms, examining informality through the relations and interactions between and among a set of actors: capitalists, the state, organizations of informal workers, traditional trade … Continue reading
Sidewalk informality: Street vending regulation in China
Street vending represents a vital and growing aspect of the urban informal economy that is often the subject of municipal regulatory efforts that seek to control, confine or extinguish it. … Continue reading
Reading Development 