Urban Informality and Resilience in Global South Cities

Urban informality in cities of the Global South encompasses a spectrum of unplanned housing, livelihood strategies and social networks that emerge in the absence or failure of formal regulatory frameworks. These informal systems often thrive at the margins of metropolitan economies, providing shelter and services to millions while operating beyond official land and housing markets. Far from being solely sites of deprivation, informal settlements frequently exhibit forms of everyday resilience: community‐driven adaptations to environmental hazards, flexible social support mechanisms and incremental infrastructure upgrades. At the same time, residents face acute risks from climate change, subsidence, flooding and gentrification as municipal authorities pursue modernisation agendas. The interplay between informal practice and urban resilience unfolds through multiscalar processes: local self-organisation, regional planning interventions and global discourses of sustainability. Contemporary research seeks to understand how informal communities negotiate tenure security, access to services and vulnerability reduction, and how policies can integrate rather than displace these adaptive capacities. Case studies from South and Southeast Asia, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa highlight the role of collective action, cooperative housing models and hybrid governance arrangements in forging more inclusive, resilient cities.

Research from Nature Portfolio

No recent Nature Portfolio content available.

Urban Informality and Resilience in Global South Cities publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in urban informality and resilience in global south cities across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Urban informality: A mode of settlement and economic activity developing outside formal planning and regulatory systems, often characterised by self-help construction and informal markets.

Resilience: The capacity of urban systems and communities to absorb, adapt to and recover from shocks or stresses, while maintaining essential functions and structures.

Land subsidence: The gradual sinking or settling of the ground surface, frequently driven by groundwater extraction, geotechnical changes and unregulated urban development.

Climate buffer infrastructure: Engineered or nature-based systems designed to mitigate climate-related hazards—such as flood basins, seawalls or green embankments—which may have unintended social consequences.

References

1. Politicising land subsidence in Jakarta: How land subsidence is the outcome of uneven sociospatial and socionatural processes of capitalist urbanization. Geoforum (2023).
2. Displacement Induced by Climate Change Adaptation: The Case of ‘Climate Buffer’ Infrastructure. Sustainability (2021).
3. Land Occupation, Re-occupation, and Housing Cooperative: Commune Formation by Jakarta’s Urban Poor. Agrarian South Journal of Political Economy A triannual Journal of Agrarian South Network and CARES (2024).