Dislocating Urban Theory: Learning with Food‐Vending Practices in Colombo and Delhi

Abstract

Abstract Urban theory, produced in North Atlantic centres, has been perpetrated as universal and recent urban studies have pointed to the limits of this theory, calling for a Southern turn. The Southern call is to dislocate the concentration of power and knowledge in the metropolis. Owing to this concentration, concerns of the metropolis often become (or are made to become) concerns of the periphery. Taking informality as a practice, not embedded in people (marginalised) or places (settlements), I will outline how the study of informality has assured the lineage of metropolitan concerns. Moving away from informal‐formal dichotomy, the paper mobilises informal‐urban dialectic to identify and dislocate the metropolitan concerns of urban theory. Discussing empirical cases from Delhi and Colombo, I build a narrative of academic theorisation of informality and juxtapose it with everyday narrative of its practitioners (food vendors), arguing towards the need for a plural and radically non‐global knowledge production politics.

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