The Dark Side of Urban Informality in the Global North

This article deals with housing illegality/informality in Italy, where it represents an established aspect of urban development. It presents a case study focused on Desio, a town close to Milan in northern Italy. Here housing illegality occurs by virtue of the well‐established presence of a mafia‐type criminal organization (the ‘Ndrangheta).

Inverse Planning in the Cracks of Formal Land Use Regulation

This paper focuses on a case of ‘non-public planning’ in an informal neighbourhood of Maputo, Mozambique. Here, several residents undertook some planning duties (e.g. drawing up a detailed plan) in order to regularise their informal dwellings in lieu of the Municipality, due to its inertia. This was an attempt to …

The multifaceted politics of informality in Jerusalem

The chapter investigates the multifaceted politics of housing informality in Jerusalem arising from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the city. It stresses the concomitant existence of different kinds of informality in different areas of the city: Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem lying on the Israeli (western) side of the ‘security barrier’, …

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 …

Expatriates and the city: The spatialities of the high-skilled migrants’ transnational living in Moscow

The paper focuses on residential strategies and patterns of highly skilled migrants from Western countries in Moscow. During recent decades, transnational migration of highly skilled workers has grown and diversified; as a consequence, residential practices and socio-spatial behaviour of this kind of migrants (the so-called ‘expatriates’) in the destination city diversified as …

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