The illicit side of urban development: Corruption and organised crime in the field of urban planning

The paper deals with issues of corruption in the planning domain. It centres on thorough analysis of the case of Desio (Milan, Italy), where a recent judicial inquiry discovered several instances of corruption related to the drafting of the local master plan, in an environment characterised by the rooted presence …

The Illicit and Illegal in Regional and Urban Governance and Development

Discussions of the illicit and the illegal have tended to be somewhat restricted in their disciplinary range, to date, and have been largely confined to the literatures of anthropology, criminology, policing and, to an extent, political science. However, these debates have impinged little on cognate literatures, not least those of …

Formal Institutions and the Production of Informal Urban Spaces

The paper provides an introductory theoretical framework for this special issue. Firstly, the main weaknesses of the traditional ‘geography of informality’ are analyzed, including its tendency to focus on urban poverty in the ‘Global South’, to privilege its economic causes, and to treat the phenomenon in terms of clear-cut dichotomies. …

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