ABSTRACT
In the uncertainty that still surrounds notions of what, if anything, a ‘city of the global South’ is or could be, one empirical reality holds up to a fair amount of scrutiny. If we take planning to mean deliberate attempts by the state to shape the built environment using law, plans and policy, then many cities of the South have been built in some tension with this notion of planning. Put quite simply: for many reasons, large parts of these cities simply neither look like their plans nor do they fit into neat categories of law, especially in the latter’s understanding of ownership and property. Here, the ‘large’ is significant. Variations from planning are not a Southern phenomenon and certainly evidence of variation is to be found in all cities. The claim that there could be something Southern about a mode of urbanisation is then partly about the extent of the disjuncture and how fundamental or not it is to understand urbanisation itself.
