Informal infrastructuring: The defining feature of 21st century urbanization

Introduction

This paper offers an explicit provocation intended to spark debate: informality is the primary force shaping global urban transformation. We advance this argument by theorizing the term “informal infrastructuring.” By developing this concept, we explicitly do not ask urban scholars to theorize from the margins or from the “South.” Beyond individual case studies or niche economic transactions, across territories and borders, on the streets, and in the hallways of political power, informality shapes the lives, livelihoods, and futures of many, if not most, of the global population. Through informal infrastructuring, we advance a fundamental claim: informality helps constitute the urban world from above and below.

Conceptually, we focus on the people, places, processes, and politics from below that actively and literally help construct the infrastructures of our everyday lives. Informality, in this sense, is neither residual nor exceptional; it is systemic and structural. It extends across urban space and scales, constrains yet facilitates livelihoods, and shapes governance and the material life of cities and urbanization. It is a feature and function of capitalism, yet it also offers avenues for its critique and subversion. Informality cannot be reduced to the individual site—doing so eschews its political power. As Brenner and Schmid (2015) argue, we need to embrace new epistemologies of the urban; we do this by centering ordinary residents as key agents in building, assembling, maintaining, and adapting the material and social fabric of urbanization. We develop the concept of informal infrastructuring as a bridge in urban theory between the polarizing yet complementary approaches of planetary urbanization and postcolonial urban studies. Ultimately, we highlight the many ways, often undertheorized in scale by urban scholars and rendered invisible by orthodox developmental practices, that informality is neither endogenous to individual cases, nor a marginal trait of urbanization in the putative Global South.

Urbanization is the principal challenge of the 21st century, encompassing not only the expansion of dense cities and built environments, but also the uneven political, economic, environmental, and extended infrastructural processes through which urban space is produced and lived (Brenner and Ghosh, 2026; Brenner and Schmid, 2015). Informality animates the global urban process. We do not claim that informality dictates the full development and spatial features of every city worldwide. The spatial impacts of informal infrastructuring are unevenly distributed. In highly regulated cities, such as Edmonton (Canada), Ann Arbor (USA), or Uppsala (Sweden), informality may seem minimal or appear spatially absent. A process-oriented view, however, demonstrates that informal infrastructuring shapes modern life everywhere. While global capitalism thrives on “informality from above” through governance loopholes and uneven economic development, this paper focuses on the critical informal responses from below, including the labor that builds infrastructure, sustains social networks, and facilitates global supply chains.

Numerous reports and academic studies have documented the 21st century’s radical urban shift, examining urbanization and its associated seismic socio-spatial transformations. From urban triumphalism to planetary urbanization, and postcolonialism to assemblage theory, scholarly interventions on urbanization seek to celebrate, remedy, or problematize our shared urban past, present, and future. Despite the very real progress made across and within these fields, none of these scholarly interventions adequately address what we argue constitutes a primary driver of our contemporary urban moment: the scale and scope of informality (Finn and Cobbinah, 2023). If urbanization in the 19th century can be defined by industrialization and the 20th century by demographic transformation, (post)colonialism, and neoliberalism, how should we characterize it in the 21st century?

Our answer to this question is informal infrastructuring. People around the world rely on and develop informal responses in the absence of formal institutions, infrastructure, or services. In the face of poverty, structural neglect, authoritarianism, and crisis, informality often serves as the only means to meet material and social needs (Bandauko et al., 2023). If people lack formal energy systems, they tap into informal ones. If populations are excluded from formal development models, they use informality to generate livelihoods. Where it makes material sense for people to migrate to cities without public support and housing, they build informal homes and communities and develop nimble transportation networks to aid their socio-economic and physical mobility.

Informal infrastructuring comprises the ongoing, collective, differentiated, and generalizable ways that urban residents and informal practices produce the physical, social, and economic infrastructures that sustain life. Informal infrastructuring enables residents to maintain and repair their everyday environments, support livelihoods, and pursue socio-economic mobility. This is both a physical and social process. Unlike conventional infrastructural analyses that focus on state-led, large-scale, and technocentric systems, informal infrastructuring captures the improvised, often precarious yet deeply creative and politically charged ways that marginalized populations actively use informality to build and remake our collective socio-spatial environment.

Before developing our argument, it is important to pre-empt some critiques. We do not argue that informality is the same everywhere, or that all cities are predominantly informal. We do not dismiss or flatten deeply descriptive accounts of urbanization in pursuit of a theory of everything. Rather, we point out how pervasive and durable informality is on a planetary scale, and how it is structured across contexts and continents. We build on case-specific approaches to informality but argue that these are a necessary but insufficient accounting of the planetary urban process. By expanding and deprovincializing the view of informality, we specifically respond to postcolonial scholars who ask for new frames and referents to understand global urban transformation. By centering informality, we build on and challenge planetary urbanization scholars to grapple with a concept that can only help build a more holistic and textured view of what and who constitute the main drivers of socio-spatial transformation. We lean into these dynamic yet unnecessarily polarizing debates and seek to re-energize urban scholarship to address the central challenges and opportunities associated with the ongoing informalization of urbanization.

It is worth briefly reflecting on some descriptive statistics of this process of informalization. 61% of the global workforce is employed informally (ILO, 2018). By 2050, the United Nations estimates that up to three billion people—nearly half the world’s urban population—may live in informal settlements or “slums” (United Nations, 2023). Two billion people, predominantly concentrated in cities, lack access to formal waste collection services (UN-Habitat, 2021). More than one billion people worldwide experience energy poverty, which is directly linked to the absence of formal energy systems and characterized by inadequate access to affordable, reliable energy for basic daily functions (Min et al., 2024). In sub-Saharan Africa, 18% of residents have convenient access to public transport (United Nations, 2019). In some African and Latin American cities, up to 95% of public transport trips are facilitated through informal services (Ferro and Behrens 2015). 90% of India’s workforce is informal (Raveendran and Vanek, 2020). In Los Angeles, California, about 10% of single-family housing units have an informal second unit (Mukhija, 2022). Self-help housing is a prominent practice in the USA, accounting for about 10% of all newly built, owner-occupied single-family homes nationwide (Durst and Cangelosi, 2021). In London, United Kingdom, incremental backyard extensions are prevalent in both high-income and low-income areas (Galuszka and Wilk-Pham, 2022). Academic scholarship has, hitherto, failed to adequately account for this ongoing global trend. Urban geography continues to emphasize deconstructive and diffuse approaches to informality, thereby provincializing a process that is both highly differentiated and globally generalizable. Put simply, informality is planetary.

This paper advances two related objectives. First, we argue that prevailing approaches to infrastructure remain overly anchored in the idea of it as a fixed object. We therefore propose a reconceptualization from infrastructure to infrastructuring, shifting analytical attention from static systems and emergent “case studies” to the ongoing practices through which access, circulation, and connectivity are produced and negotiated in place and across scales (Bandauko and Arku, 2024; Finn, 2025a; Guma et al., 2023; Lawhon et al., 2023). Second, and more fundamentally, this reconceptualization enables the development of a framework for analyzing how informal infrastructuring constitutes the defining feature of contemporary urbanization, rather than a peripheral or transitional condition.

Revitalized approaches to informality are urgently needed if urban scholars are to address their shared concerns across diverse viewpoints and ideologies (Finn, 2025a). These approaches need to balance the paradoxes inherent in informal discourse and practice (Finn et al., 2025): informality simultaneously represents human resilience and agency, as well as ongoing structural violence and dispossession (Bandauko, 2026). Planetary urbanization represents a theoretical conceptualization that opens the door to such a revitalized approach. Planetary urbanization is concerned with concentrated, extended, and differential instances of urbanization—both within and beyond cities. Informality is at the heart of these instances; it is conceptually and empirically central to concentrated urban agglomeration, drives the operationalization of hinterlands, and is embedded in and responsive to the creative destruction of cities and landscapes (Brenner and Schmid, 2015). Yet informality remains largely outside of the purview of planetary urbanization scholarship. Postcolonial urban scholarship and assemblage urbanism, on the other hand, are deeply concerned with informality, yet consistently provincialize it in space, oftentimes divorced from broader questions and framings of political economy (Simone, 2004, 2022). As a term, informal infrastructuring extends informality beyond its localization, embracing its theoretical and empirical salience and presence on a planetary scale.

Informal infrastructuring recognizes the widespread, creative, and often collective practices through which marginalized residents across the world—in both the Global North and South—forge alternative means to secure access to services, spaces, and livelihoods. Conversely, because informal infrastructuring also responds to marginalization under extreme constraints, it can be understood as both enabled by and even subserving and maintaining inequality by providing the cheap labor and raw materials on which global capitalism relies.

In the next section, we situate our argument within broader debates on urban informality and infrastructure studies. We then develop a detailed conceptual framework of informal infrastructuring, outlining its key pillars and situating it within existing theoretical discussions in geography and urban studies. Central to our approach is an engagement with the political economy of informal infrastructuring, emphasizing how infrastructuring practices and processes are shaped by broader structures of exclusion, inequality, and capital accumulation. We also link informal infrastructuring to the literature on infrastructural labor (Alda-Vidal et al., 2023; Stokes and De Coss-Corzo, 2023). We ask the critical question: who performs informal labor? Finally, we discuss the implications of our conceptual framing for urban research and practice and suggest directions for future scholarship that take the political dimensions of infrastructuring under conditions of urban informality seriously.

Theoretical debates on urban informality

To contextualize “informal infrastructuring,” it is important to locate it within the long-standing scholarly debates on urban informality. Early conceptualizations of urban informality were largely shaped by a dualistic perspective that framed it as a marginal sector outside formal governance systems (Hart, 1973). This approach conceptualized informality through a rigid binary—formal versus informal, legal versus illegal, modern versus traditional (Müller 2017). While influential, this dualistic framing has been challenged for its failure to capture the complex, dynamic, and politically embedded nature of informality (Azunre, 2024; Bandauko, 2025; Banks et al., 2020; Cobbinah, 2025; Roy, 2005). One way to move beyond this static conceptualization of informality is to interpret it as a mode of urbanization and organizing logic (Roy, 2005), and reflective of a structural, historical process across spatial and temporal scales (Finn, 2025a). In this light, informality serves to organize a system of norms that govern the process of urban transformation itself (Azunre, 2024). By embracing this perspective, we acknowledge that informality is not merely a marginal or temporary state (Dovey, 2025), but a dynamic force shaping planetary urbanization.

Therefore, it is important to recognize the nuanced ways that informal practices interact with formal structures, creating a complex, adaptive system of urbanization (Marx and Kelling, 2019). Structuration theory becomes especially relevant in this context (Portes, 1983), as informality is not just the preserve of the urban poor, nor merely indicative of poverty or lack of formal regulation, but is actively shaped and sustained by the actions of individuals and social structures that produce space (Giddens, 1984). Power relations, whether economic, political, or social, shape the opportunities and constraints individuals face. Banks et al. (2020) use a political economy framework to characterize urban informality as a “site of critical analysis,” involving multiple agents, including the poor and political elites, who have diverse interests and employ different modes of power to negotiate their claims to urban space.

While the concept of urban informality originated from the Global South, it is increasingly finding relevance in the Global North (Devlin, 2018; Jaffe and Koster, 2019; Kębłowski and Rekhviashvili, 2022; Maalsen et al., 2022; Van de Pas et al., 2022), a process that has been described as “worlding of concepts” (Roy, 2009). Urban informality has been mobilized as a heuristic device to re-evaluate the development of urban theory, particularly in relation to citizenship, infrastructure, and the state (Müller, 2017). Rising housing precarity, informalized labor regimes, and the growing reliance on resident-led or makeshift service provision all point to common patterns of negotiation and improvisation that cut across global contexts. In this context, critical theoretical interventions understand these planetary processes as rooted in informality. Davis’s Planet of Slums, for example, offers a structural account of how neoliberal globalization has produced a condition of “planetary slumification,” placing informality within global circuits of exclusion, dispossession, and marginality (Davis, 2006).

While Davis foregrounds the reproduction of precarity, other scholars have highlighted more relational forms of agency. Simone’s recent work on the Surrounds underscores how residents mobilize improvised, collective, and relational strategies to negotiate everyday uncertainty, constituting alternative ways of inhabiting and organizing urban environments (Simone, 2022). Equally foundational is the theorization of the “second circuit” of the urban economy, which shows how informal economies are constitutive rather than residual, forming a central component of urban functioning under global capitalism (Santos and Gerry, 2017). Labor market debates, particularly Seekings and Nattrass’s notion of “inclusive dualism,” reveal the interdependence between the formal and informal economies (Nattrass and Seekings, 2019). Taken together, these contributions enrich our understanding of the layered socio-spatial and political-economic dynamics that produce informal urban life.

Informal infrastructuring builds on this work and responds to the call for a new epistemology of the urban (Brenner and Schmid, 2015) by recognizing that ordinary populations actively construct the urban fabric (Bandauko et al., 2025). By doing so, we explicitly untether informality from specific geographies, dismantling essentialist binaries produced through space that contemporary urban scholarship claims to unsettle but continually reproduces. The theoretical orientation of informal infrastructuring necessitates a broader engagement with the expanding body of scholarship that examines how urban life is conceptualized, governed, and experienced across contexts.

Mapping contemporary urban infrastructure debates

Research on urban infrastructure has significantly expanded in recent years (Baptista and Cirolia, 2022; Beveridge et al., 2024; Cavalcanti and Lima, 2025; Falconer and Baum-Talmor, 2025; Lawhon et al., 2018; Monstadt and Coutard, 2019; Vegliò et al., 2025). Urban scholarship often casts infrastructure as the marker of modernity (Dodson, 2017; Graham and Marvin, 2022; Siemiatycki et al., 2020; Stokes and De Coss-Corzo, 2023). The global “infrastructural turn” reads infrastructural development as a correlate of progress. At the center of this debate is the notion of the “modern infrastructure ideal” (Graham and Marvin, 2002), where infrastructural networks (water, sanitation, roads, and electricity) are centrally provided and governed. Rooted in ideals of order, rationality, and visibility, modernist infrastructure logics prioritize monumental projects as symbols of progress, state legitimacy (Bryson et al., 2023), and multinational collaboration. However, as Graham and Marvin (2002) argue, the changing forms of infrastructural provision have created splintered urban landscapes where some groups are systematically excluded. When formal infrastructure is provided, it can reproduce spatial, environmental, and economic inequalities (Baptista, 2019; Lawhon et al., 2023; Venter et al., 2020). Critics also reject the notion of a modern networked infrastructure ideal that serves to undermine people and places that do not conform to formal standards, which assumes a pregiven expectation of what cities and urban life “should” look like (Guma, 2020; Guma et al., 2023; Lawhon et al., 2023; Silver, 2014). There is nothing wrong, in principle, with the provision of formal infrastructure. However, its extension is not an inherent or uncomplicated good that can or should be taken at face value.

These dynamics have sparked debate on the need to understand infrastructure beyond the gaze of formal networked systems (Yan et al., 2024). Literature on ‘southern’ urban infrastructure has challenged researchers to consider new possibilities for social organizing and power relations beyond the state (Lawhon et al., 2018). Postcolonial and critical work in urban geography urges scholars to pay attention to the fragmented, hybrid, and incremental infrastructural practices that characterize urbanization in much of the world (Amankwaa and Gough, 2022; Baptista, 2019; Baptista and Cirolia, 2022; Foli and Uitermark, 2024; Foli, 2023; Guma, 2025; McFarlane et al., 2017; Truelove and Cornea, 2021). As a result, some scholars have studied “infrastructure improvisation,” demonstrating the utility of informal practices in servicing the urban poor (Amankwaa and Gough, 2022; Baptista, 2019; Dipura et al., 2024; McFarlane et al., 2014; Nunbogu et al., 2018; Silver, 2014). Infrastructure provision and urban service delivery are differentiated and can take hybrid forms in informal contexts (Baptista and Cirolia, 2022: 929). For example, residents of slums and informal settlements are increasingly becoming infrastructural agents, improvising, adapting, and co-producing systems of provision in ways that both compensate for and contest state absence (Bandauko and Arku, 2024; Finn, 2025b; Truelove, 2021). These residents build the social and physical worlds that enable their survival and mobility, thereby creating the infrastructure that speaks to the simultaneity of their precarity and ingenuity. The concept of people as infrastructure (Simone, 2004) helps us understand that physical infrastructure systems and networks co-exist with “arenas of people that re-work planned systems of work, social reproduction, and commodity consumption” (Wilson, 2022: 166). This conceptualization foregrounds how human relationships and social collaboration function as critical infrastructures that sustain urban life (McFarlane and Silver, 2017).

Across scales and contexts, scholars continue to attempt to reconcile urban research that is sensitive to local contexts with attention to global structural forces such as capitalism. These tensions can be seen in the debates by leading urban scholars, such as Roy (2009: 820), who insist on the imperative to “blast open new theoretical geographies” to reinvigorate urban geography. Adopting a similar postcolonial theoretical imperative, Robinson (2011, 2016) argues for using theory to destabilize inherited and colonial norms in urban research. These bold theoretical arguments and interventions are shared by Brenner and Schmid (2014, 2015), who seek to radically reinvent urban studies by drawing it away from understanding cities as static, pregiven entities. Rather, we should understand the “urban” as a dynamic, ever-mutating theoretical term that explains the interconnections among people, places, commodities, and networks on a planetary scale.

It is essential for quotidian assessments of cities not to assume a pregiven, seemingly self-evident definition of “the urban” in relation to informality (Brenner and Schmid, 2014). The “urban,” like informality, is not merely an empirical object but a theoretical construct (Brenner and Schmid, 2014). Within this complex milieu of urban theory, we are left asking important questions of everyday infrastructure. What are its spatial scales? Why is infrastructural improvisation necessary, and who performs it? Can any given city be an adequate urban “case study” when it fits into a spatial and temporal context that is much more fluid and dynamic than its designated borders and contemporary processes?

We probe these questions by developing the term informal infrastructuring, which foregrounds the socio-political labor of people who, in the face of state neglect, structural violence, and economic inequality, organize, build, and sustain infrastructure to survive and pursue better lives for themselves and their communities. If we are to take the “everyday” nature of informal infrastructuring seriously, we must connect its processes, agents, and political actors to broader networks that define much of the urban world today. Put simply, we must advance scholarship on informality beyond the case study or city toward an assessment of how it is both differentiated and generalized across planetary scales. Informal infrastructuring emerges as a means to understand, critique, and intervene in the multi-scalar process of urbanization, and points us towards new ways to understand and challenge inherited socio-spatial forms and norms.

If postcolonial urban geography and assemblage theory are truly committed to shedding the putative “northern gaze” of infrastructure and cities, they must find a way to articulate informality through new theoretical registers. In this paper, we advance two such theoretical registers. First, a relational and processual approach that conceptualizes informal infrastructuring as an ongoing mode of urban production, constituted through everyday practices of maintenance, repair, negotiation, and social coordination, from the local to the global levels. Second, a situated and experiential register forefronts informal actors as integral to the production, sustenance, and contestation of infrastructure and urbanization. Together, these registers locate informal infrastructuring within relations of power and governance while challenging hegemonic frames that continue to dominate urban theory. Such registers cannot be limited to the local scale of informality articulated through the fragmentation of urban processes, and of cities from other cities and hinterlands.

Towards an analytical framework of informal infrastructuring

Our discussion is rooted in the concept of “infrastructuring” (Pfeffer, 2019; Wiig, 2023), which captures the processes of city-making as dynamic and produced through relationships that are simultaneously reorganized and reconfigured through infrastructure. Specifically, Pfeffer (2019:1) conceptualizes infrastructuring as “a socio-technical and continuous process of building infrastructure—one in which the relationships between infrastructural components and their users evolve over time.” Similarly, Iossifova (2022) highlights that infrastructuring denotes the transformative agency of complex and dynamic urban configurations. These configurations are entangled with political, social, and ecological systems that help characterize contemporary urbanization processes (Bodenstein and Pfeffer, 2026). Despite the rapid deployment of infrastructuring in urban and human geography, current framings are limited in their ability to more fully explain the socio-economic and spatial processes shaping urbanization globally. For instance, Wiig (2023) and Pfeffer (2019)’s conceptualization of infrastructuring, while useful and provocative, is not rooted in the everyday informal urbanism that defines cities and urbanization worldwide.

To address this conceptual gap, we develop a framework of informal infrastructuring, which consists of 4Ps: People, Place, Process, and Politics (4Ps of informal infrastructuring) (Figure 1). People emphasizes the diverse actors involved—residents, communities, intermediaries, and institutions—whose everyday practices sustain urban life often under conditions of deprivation. Place foregrounds the multi-scalar dimensions of informal infrastructuring, including the material and spatial contexts in which informal infrastructuring unfolds, from local neighborhoods (e.g., informal settlements and ghettos) to cities and global hinterlands. Process highlights the incremental, adaptive, and relational nature of infrastructural production and resource use on the planetary scale, while Politics situates these practices within broader power and governance constellations and struggles over recognition, resources, and rights. Rather than offering a typology of informal practices, the 4Ps constitute a conceptual framework for analyzing informal infrastructuring as a mode of urbanization that cuts across spatial contexts, governance regimes, and North–South binaries.OPEN IN VIEWER

Informal infrastructuring as a dialectical urban practice

The preceding discussion demonstrates that informal infrastructuring enables informal actors to navigate but also reshape the material, institutional, and extended landscapes of urbanization (McFarlane and Rutherford, 2008). Through their self-directed acts of infrastructuring, informal actors engage in a form of infrastructural citizenship (Lemanski, 2020). Informal infrastructuring also serves as a theoretical and conceptual tool to place these situated material and political practices within a broader perspective and scale. By focusing on the processes of informal infrastructuring in and beyond cities, the term can encompass more expansive spatial and social forms.

Informal infrastructuring demonstrates how citizenship is constructed and contested through everyday engagements with the built environment and its systems of provision. Therefore, informal infrastructuring can be linked to what has been called popular infrastructural politics, which centers the “infrastructural agency of subaltern groups and their transformative potentialities through disruptive, dissenting and prefigurative practices” (Téllez Contreras, 2025: 37). As residents engage in informal infrastructuring, they disrupt the modern infrastructural ideal and contest urban space, seeking the possibility of new urban political trajectories (Anand, 2017; Bandauko and Arku, 2024; Minuchin, 2021).

Informal infrastructuring shifts analytical attention from infrastructure-as-object to infrastructuring-as-practice and theory. This approach brings into focus the multiple actors (individuals, households, informal collectives, local associations), temporalities (cyclical, reactive, incremental), and forms of labor (care work, negotiation, improvisation) that underpin urban life. Our concept of informal infrastructuring shifts the analytical focus from adaptations within formal networks to the creation and maintenance of hybrid and alternative physical and social urban life. Informal infrastructuring is dialectically intertwined with formal modes of urban life and reflects a bottom-up mode of world-making—processes through which informal actors not only fill infrastructural gaps but actively reimagine and reconfigure the urban environment in ways that contest exclusionary spatial forms and practices (Bandauko and Arku, 2025; Dulhunty, 2023). In this sense, informal infrastructuring serves as a normative critique of such infrastructural gaps while simultaneously speaking to the efforts of ordinary people to remake and reimagine better outcomes for themselves and their communities.

Centering labor in informal infrastructuring

The question of who builds, maintains, sustains, and repairs urban infrastructure is critical to the conceptualization of the term informal infrastructuring. The labor embedded in and central to informal infrastructuring speaks to the importance of the class-based, racialized, and gendered work of building, maintaining, and repairing the social and material fabric of urbanization (Gidwani, 2015; Stokes and De Coss-Corzo, 2023). This labor is typically unrecognized or deemed peripheral in official development and planning discourses (Siemiatycki et al., 2020), and absent from assessments tracking the flows of goods and commodities across global value chains.

Simone’s concept of people as infrastructure challenges material interpretations of infrastructure by highlighting people’s activities, collaborations, and relations as a veritable form of infrastructure in itself (Simone, 2004: 408; 2021). The central idea in Simone’s conceptions is to challenge and question the “top-down, calculated, delineated, codified, and functional ways of seeing urban life and space” (Stokes and De Coss-Corzo, 2023: 430). The concept of people as infrastructure offers a deconstructive analytic lens for understanding how urban life is made possible through the relational, affective, and improvisational practices of ordinary residents. It illuminates spaces and activities often deemed peripheral or superfluous to dominant models of capitalist urban development, revealing them instead as foundational to the social reproduction of cities in the Global South.

Rather than viewing residents’ practices as symptomatic of infrastructural absence or failure, people as infrastructure repositions these practices as dynamic and generative—sites where technical knowledge, social cooperation, and political imagination converge to sustain urban life. These practices constitute alternative forms of infrastructural logics that operate alongside or in opposition to formal systems of urban governance and capitalist accumulation. What Simone’s (2004, 2022) work does not achieve, however, is pointing to a path forward for these relational practices, nor does it clearly articulate how they can be scaled to serve as a substantive critique of capitalist political economy. We recognize that informal labor and networks are crucial to global urban transformation, yet we lack a clear understanding of how to leverage their durability and ingenuity to advance the material, social, and economic interests of people worldwide. We are aware that informal residents rebuild and repair social and material infrastructure, but articulating this fact does not explain why this process is so widespread, nor does it help build a collective political project rooted in informality. By this, we do not mean a singular movement, ideology, or policy template. Rather, we refer to a shared political horizon that recognizes informal infrastructuring as a structurally produced and collectively enacted response to systemic exclusions embedded in contemporary urbanization.

We therefore depart from Simone’s (2004) idea of people as infrastructure by emphasizing the recursive relationship between human agency and material systems in contexts where infrastructure is not only scarce but politically withheld. This relationship is the urban norm rather than the exception. It is not taking place in the peripheries or on the margins of urban life. It is not “beyond” capture or control (Simone, 2022).

Informal infrastructuring is grounded in the politicization of informality itself. Deconstructive and diffuse descriptions of everyday life can enrich understanding of the everyday challenges and possibilities of urbanization, but they fall short of charting the structural pathways necessary to materially improve it. The structural pathways we propose move beyond individualized coping narratives and local exceptionalism, emphasizing how informal infrastructuring can be leveraged as a basis for collective urban politics across space. First, this entails re-situating informal practices within broader political-economic structures, thereby reframing informality as a relational and structural outcome and process rather than an endogenous urban condition. Second, it requires recognizing and strengthening the collective capacities already embedded in informal infrastructuring—such as cooperative labor, mutual aid, and negotiated relations with state and non-state actors—as foundations for political organization and collective bargaining. Third, these pathways call for multi-scalar articulation, linking localized practices of informal repair and provisioning to citywide, rural, national, and transnational struggles over housing, land, resource access, infrastructure, and citizenship.

Our concept of informal infrastructuring examines how informal labor and politics are not only enacted but also collectively organized and spatially embedded within planetary urbanization (Finn and Bandauko, 2024). Informal infrastructuring captures the everyday practices through which people mobilize knowledge, relationships, and limited resources to provision water, sanitation, energy, commodities, and mobility. However, we want to emphasize that informal infrastructuring goes beyond these localized processes of infrastructure improvisations, as the SDI and WIEGO examples discussed above illustrate. ¹

While Simone highlights how social cooperation substitutes for material systems in African cities, informal infrastructuring draws attention to how residents materially produce infrastructure—even if makeshift, precarious, or intermittent—through embodied, often gendered labor (Siemiatycki et al., 2020). For example, in Malawi’s capital city Lilongwe, residents perceive sanitation provision as their responsibility, and construct and maintain their own infrastructures such as pit latrines, using local materials to reduce costs (Alda-Vidal et al., 2023: 6). However impressive, these self-constructed sanitation infrastructures should never be romanticized as they are fragile and often collapse, exposing residents to significant health risks.

The precarious nature of self-built infrastructures underscores the urgent need for targeted support that recognizes and strengthens informal infrastructuring (Bandauko and Finn, 2025). This call is directed primarily at planners, policymakers, and political decision-makers, whose selective provision—or deliberate withholding—of formal infrastructure often produces the very conditions under which informal infrastructuring becomes necessary. The Lilongwe example exposes a critical dynamic: informal infrastructuring is not only a practice of survival and improvisation but also a terrain strategically produced, sanctioned, co-opted, and exploited by the state and capital. As Roy (2005) reminds us, informality is not merely an empirical condition but a mode of state power, enacted selectively to determine whose practices are tolerated, criminalized, or instrumentalized. The delegation of sanitation provision to residents in Lilongwe illustrates how the state can offload public responsibilities onto communities while retaining the authority to discipline, regularize, or dispossess them—an enactment of elite informality that mirrors broader processes in which residents’ labor becomes a precondition for future extraction, redevelopment, or corporate takeover. Examples such as Mumbai’s Dharavi, where developers or private waste-management firms appropriate squatters’ improvements or waste-pickers’ innovations, underscore how informal infrastructuring can subserve accumulation by dispossession rather than constituting political critique in a straightforward manner. Similarly, informal miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo identify gold, copper, and cobalt deposits and are routinely evicted, along with their burgeoning communities, from their working and living sites to make way for state-supported multinational industrial mining companies (Geenen and Claessenss, 2013; Katz-Lavigne, 2019).

Recognizing the paradoxes of informality adds nuance to our argument and formulation of informal infrastructuring (Finn et al., 2025). We emphasize informal infrastructuring as a mode of world-making and contend that it is deeply entangled with regimes of capture, calculation, and governance that depend on, and often prey upon, informality’s precarity. By demonstrating how informality is simultaneously a domain of state-sanctioned extraction and of collective, generative possibility, we clarify that informal infrastructuring is neither inherently emancipatory nor merely subjugating, but rather folded into broader projects of urban transformation, control, and capital accumulation.

The political economy of informal infrastructuring

Informal infrastructuring is embedded in the political and economic forces that shape the very production of urban space. Thus, informal infrastructuring does not occur on a blank slate. It is a structural phenomenon that is linked to historical, social, geopolitical, and cultural conditions and connections (Finn, 2025a; Hommes et al., 2022). As a result, we need to develop a complex understanding of the political economy of informal infrastructuring across spatial, economic, and political domains (Banks et al., 2020; Ouma et al., 2024). Spatially, this means recognizing how informal infrastructure is distributed across the urban landscape. Economically, it involves tracing how informal infrastructuring is financed, commodified, or sustained through everyday transactions, informal markets, and patronage networks. Politically, it requires examining how informal infrastructures are linked, governed, and distributed, whether through tolerance, co-optation, regulation, or erasure. This will help demonstrate how residents mobilize infrastructure and build urban life as a form of political claim-making (Caldeira, 2017; Collord and Nyamsenda, 2025).

This multi-scalar approach is critical to understanding informal infrastructuring as a deeply contested and negotiated practice rooted in broader processes of inequality, governance, and resistance. Informal infrastructuring is often suppressed, reflecting a bias towards the modern infrastructural ideal (Addi, 2025) and hostility toward people with lower socio-economic status, immigrants or refugees, and/or those who endure the long-term effects of the racialization of space (Finn, 2025b). Informal infrastructuring is not external to capitalism but is dialectically entangled within it, demonstrating the role of contingent agency in challenging or reinforcing its associated inequalities. It is central to the dynamism and density of city life, as well as to the broader processes of extended urbanization outside of them (Brenner and Schmid, 2015). Informal infrastructuring operationalizes places and landscapes to support the socio-economic dynamics of everyday life while being essential to the metabolism of urban growth and development (Brenner and Schmid, 2015). It is therefore central to the organization and production of urban life and to the expansion of the urban fabric across multiple spaces and scales (Lefebvre, 2003; Kanai and Schindler, 2022). Informality is challenged by and operates in a dialectical relationship to the formal economy, orthodox planning, and development. These formal models pursue privatization and the enclosure of land, whether through state-led evictions of informal settlements in cities or the commodification of hinterlands to enable resource extraction and socio-spatial transformation.

Informal infrastructuring should be viewed as a crucial part of the circuits of global capital (Lawhon et al., 2023). Informal infrastructuring is not only about residents “making do” (Thieme, 2018) but also about negotiating access, recognition, and legitimacy within uneven power geometries. It operates at the intersection of state practices, grassroots labor, and capitalist market logics and is often shaped by contested claims over infrastructure, space, and natural resources.

The presence and durability of informality are integral to how cities are assembled, governed, and appropriated (McFarlane, 2011). More broadly, the term speaks to the structural networks that enable urban growth, irrespective of whether they improve or degrade everyday life. Informal infrastructuring, therefore, becomes a “dialectical urbanization logic” (Gilbert and De Jong, 2015: 520), entangled in governance practices, land markets, and urban services deficits. The process of informal infrastructuring is, thus, always political. In this sense, informal infrastructuring contests urban space not by standing outside of development and planning, but by inhabiting, unsettling, subserving, and recalibrating it from within.

Discussion

In this paper, we develop the concept of informal infrastructuring to illustrate how urban dwellers not only respond to material needs but also co-produce alternative urban futures, social networks, and solidarities that are often invisible to planning regimes and centralized governance structures yet remain entangled within them. Our conceptual framing brings infrastructural agency to the fore, positioning informal actors as active agents in shaping urban life through adaptive, relational, and politically generative practices. In so doing, we push forward theorizations of infrastructural labor by centering the politics of informality, infrastructural citizenship (Lemanski, 2020), and urban survival in contexts marked by inequality, structural violence, and everyday improvisation (Silver, 2014). Rather than viewing these efforts as temporary stopgaps or regulatory violations, governments, NGOs, and urban planners should work collaboratively with informal actors to improve the standards and durability of community-built infrastructure. There is a clear need to move beyond narrow technical framings and examine how infrastructure is entangled in relations of power, governance, and inequality—what we refer to as the political economy of informal infrastructuring.

Unlike approaches that focus largely on the material realities of infrastructure, we have articulated the political possibilities and paradoxes of informal infrastructuring. Informal infrastructuring can be seen as a form of everyday politics through which marginalized communities claim the right to the city (Mitchell, 2003) and to resources by assembling their own networks of care, survival, and service provision. These acts can be quiet and ordinary (Bayat, 2012), but they carry significant political weight in contexts where the state is absent, selective, or repressive. They may challenge dominant infrastructural paradigms that privilege technocratic, large-scale interventions, instead valuing collective agency, embedded knowledge, and resilience. Moreover, these practices can act as a platform for grassroots mobilization, enabling residents to negotiate with authorities, demand recognition, or resist displacement. Thus, informal infrastructuring is not only about provision, but also about power, legitimacy, and visibility in urban development, governance, and planning. Moreover, informal infrastructuring can be catalyzed as a critique of, and drawn into explicit conversation with, formal structures and processes. We know from existing debates that formal and informal structures are entangled, yet they are still treated mainly as binary in both theory and practice.

Informal infrastructuring reveals how residents reconfigure social and material arrangements to access water, electricity, sanitation, natural resources, and mobility—often in informal yet socially and politically generative ways. It reflects the movement of people, ideas, and commodities across different places and territories. It demonstrates that the nature of urban growth and the spreading and thickening of the urban fabric (Lefebvre, 2003) constitute a deeply informal process.

In demonstrating this, informal infrastructuring unsettles dominant urban thought and bridges branches of urban theory scholarship that are often mistakenly viewed as diametrically opposed. Informality speaks to the concerns of everyday urban scholarship, and its study elucidates important case-specific insights. However, reducing the scale and study of informality to individual cases undermines its generative theoretical possibilities while adhering to a naïve urban empiricism. This approach is most often reproduced in strands of policy-oriented research, technocratic planning practice, and some ethnographic or case-study–driven urban scholarship that prioritizes descriptive immediacy over structural analysis. In these accounts, referred to by critics as “methodological citysim” (Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2015), informality is treated as an endogenous, self-contained phenomenon, bounded by the city’s apparent limits and detached from wider historical, political-economic, and geopolitical processes.

Such naïve urban empiricism privileges what is visible and measurable at the local scale, while obscuring how informality is co-produced through state power, global capital, colonial legacies, and translocal networks. As a result, informality is treated as an empirical condition to be documented or managed, rather than as a relational, multi-scalar process that demands theoretical engagement beyond the city as treated as a self-evident unit of analysis. The contextual and cultural specificities of individual places are better understood when assessed within the total “whole” within which they operate (Goonewardena, 2011). Place-based assessments of informal infrastructuring must be understood as the “specificity” through which the “generality” of global capitalism is produced and lived. In this paper, we have demonstrated that informal infrastructuring is not on the margins of urban, social, and spatial change—it is the urban transformation itself.

Herein lie the political and theoretical possibilities of informal infrastructuring. Informality, without a doubt, poses enormous challenges to the urban question at large. However, it also represents a decentralized form of economic, spatial, and political action. Informal infrastructuring demonstrates that these actions can and do build cities and facilitate urbanization, but also challenge dominant modes of development that require political acquiescence in the name of good governance. If informality remains ostracized and repeatedly misframed as peripheral, where does its continued growth fit within modern conceptualizations of democracy and popular sovereignty? Informal infrastructuring can serve as a conceptual and empirical tool to demonstrate that urban life relies on the agency of ordinary residents, who use their own means and power, however constrained, to create the conditions necessary for their survival, while also enabling life and the modern economy worldwide. Informal infrastructuring extends theorizations of infrastructuring (Pfeffer, 2019; Wiig, 2023) and opens new empirical and conceptual ground for rethinking informality as a domain of urban citizenship (Anand, 2017; Bryson et al., 2023; Lemanski, 2020), resistance, and possibility.

By developing the concept of informal infrastructuring, we unsettle and disrupt conventional and hegemonic inscriptions of infrastructure, which are technocratic and often centrally governed. We also challenge and reject the delegitimization and invisibilization of informal infrastructuring practices across planetary space. We embrace the call for “new geographies” of urban theory-making, urging a departure from entrenched norms and a move toward a more inclusive framework that accounts for the complexities of urbanization worldwide (Robinson, 2016; Roy, 2009).

Informal infrastructuring aims to inspire a renewal of urban thought and theory. It is impossible to ignore how widespread and durable informal infrastructuring is, and how central informality is to the building and shaping of physical and social space. We call for a radical rethinking of what constitutes urban transformation and development, infrastructure, and who is recognized and legitimized in this process.

Our intention is not to romanticize informal infrastructuring but to propose an alternative framework for understanding urbanization (Lawhon et al., 2023). Urban scholars should be brave enough to open up new conceptions of urban life. Theoretical approaches to urban geography can be unnecessarily divisive, operating in artificial silos. Informal infrastructuring suggests a way to break down these silos by drawing on the work of planetary urbanization, postcolonial urban studies, and assemblage urbanism to demonstrate their shared utility in explaining and intervening on the most important urban challenges of our time. As a term, informal infrastructuring seeks to bridge these divides by placing informality at the heart of urban transformation.

This leads us to a pragmatic final point. The introduction to this paper presents a descriptive account of the scale and scope of informality worldwide. If one accepts the projected reality of informal growth, whether desirable or not, the question arises: now what? Informal infrastructuring offers an avenue for scholars and practitioners to work with and support informality across spaces and scales (Bandauko and Finn, 2025). It accepts the enormous challenges and constraints of informality while simultaneously identifying the political and social potential inherent within informality. Across the world, people are working to build cities, facilitate interaction and mobility, construct infrastructure, support their own survival and that of their communities, and ultimately underpin the global economy. This is the work of everyday informal life on the planetary scale.

Conclusion

This paper introduces the concept of informal infrastructuring as a theoretical and practical framework that centers embodied labor, social networks, and material improvisation. Through these practices, everyday residents mobilize to build, maintain, and adapt critical systems of provision in the face of chronic structural neglect. However, these practices are not solely symptoms of infrastructural failure or state absence. We argue that informal infrastructuring is an ongoing process of infrastructural claim-making, governance, and socio-material innovation.

Informal infrastructuring is constituted by the billions of people using informality to build, repair, and maintain places in the urban world. It also encompasses the extended informal processes that operate across borders and scales to supply inputs to the global urban metabolism. Lastly, the politics of informal infrastructuring reveal the tensions and paradoxes of informality in response to structural economic and political exclusion while simultaneously holding immense political potential. Realizing this potential is contingent on a new and expanded conceptualization of informality at the planetary scale.

Our approach disrupts technocratic and state-centric understandings of infrastructure, and instead centers the relational, collective, and politically charged practices that underpin urbanization. Part of our contribution lies in offering informal infrastructuring as an analytical bridge between divergent strands of urban theory—postcolonial critiques of modernist planning, infrastructural labor and citizenship, and planetary urbanization. We do not romanticize informal infrastructuring; instead, we argue for its recognition as an essential, legitimate, innovative, and generative set of practices and processes that deserve conceptual and policy attention.

Informal infrastructuring compels us to rethink who counts as an infrastructural actor and how knowledge, power, and material resources circulate dialectically through formal economic and governance systems. These practices are not merely reactive or compensatory; they are world-making. They create spaces of autonomy and experimentation, generate alternative urban futures, and open pathways for new political imaginaries. Informal infrastructuring is thus both an analytic and a praxis—revealing not only how cities are made under conditions of constraint, but also how urbanization might be reconfigured in theory and practice.

Future research should empirically apply the informal infrastructuring lens across diverse geographies to examine how it shapes planetary urbanization. Comparative analysis can illuminate both globalized patterns and context-specific dynamics of informal infrastructural production. Research should also examine how local and national governments, as well as development partners, can create enabling environments that support, rather than suppress, informal infrastructuring. Moreover, future work should explore the class-based, gendered, and racialized dimensions of infrastructural labor. Who does the work of building and maintaining the urban world, under what conditions, and with what forms of recognition or compensation?

The concept of informal infrastructuring invites urban scholars to break with inherited binaries and develop more ambitious, relational, and politically attuned theories of informality and urbanization. Overall, informal infrastructuring calls for a shift in urban theory and planning practice: from the localization of informality to its planetary deprovincialization, from state-led provision to distributed agency, and from object-centric to process-oriented understandings of informal socio-spatial transformation. Informal infrastructuring identifies that informality is the defining feature of this transformation in the 21st century. If this argument is correct, the onus falls on researchers and practitioners to radically reimagine the future of urban practice and scholarship.