Decolonizing Planning: Power and Knowledge in the Informal City

by Bjørn Sletto (Editor), Tanja Winkler (Editor), Efadul Huq (Editor)

Overview

This pioneering book challenges dominant technocratic approaches to planning, focusing on the transformative potential of innovative, alternative, and community-centered initiatives. It outlines planning processes founded on endogenous knowledge, ontologies, and social relations that point towards decolonizing urban pedagogy and practice.

With contributions from scholars and their community partners working in marginalized societies across the globe, the book presents diverse approaches to planning from transnational and transdisciplinary perspectives. Chapters draw on detailed case studies to examine a wide range of methodologies and praxes, including planning derived from Indigenous epistemologies and the role of grassroots planners. They cut across traditional categories, modes of planning, and regional divisions, rethinking dominant paradigms and highlighting the value of decolonial thinking in the field.

Students and scholars in planning, urban geography, development studies and urban design will greatly benefit from the cutting-edge insights presented in this book. It is also a useful resource for planning practitioners, as well as professionals in international development agencies and NGOs working with low-income communities, particularly in the Global South.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781035319961
Publisher:	Edward Elgar Publishing
Publication date:	10/28/2025
Series:	Decolonizing Research series
Pages:	292
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Edited by Bjørn Sletto, Community and Regional Planning, University of Texas at Austin, USA, Tanja Winkler, School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics, University of Cape Town, South Africa and Efadul Huq, Program in Environmental Science and Policy, Smith College, USA

Table of Contents

Contents
1 Introduction to Decolonizing Planning 1
Bjørn Sletto, Tanja Winkler and Efadul Huq
PART I RATIONALITIES
2 Decolonizing resilience: Learning from unexplored stories
and perspectives surrounding hazard and disaster risks in
Puerto Rico 26
Santina L. Contreras, Monique A. Lorenzo Pérez and Lorna
G. Jaramillo Nieves
3 Urban design otherwise: Weaving learning alliances for
co-creation in/with popular neighbourhoods in Medellin 45
Catalina Ortiz and Luz Mila Hernandez Pineda
4 Decolonizing planning for socio-environmental protection in
the periphery of Fortaleza, Brazil: Reflecting on the power of
epistemic disobedience 64
Clarissa Freitas, Naggila Frota and Carla Nascimento
5 Urban decolonial narratives by grassroots urban actors in
Lusaka, Zambia 86
Gilbert Siame, Cinthia Freire Stecchini and Ian Marshall Matimba
PART II REPRESENTATION
6 Caring for life/Cuidar la vida: Documenting grassroots
territorial control and self-determination in Tirua 106
Magdalena Ugarte, Natalia Caniguan, Javier Marihuen and
Miguel Melin
7 Local collectivist capability and the people’s plan for ChitturThathamangalam, Kerala, India 126
Jayaraj Sundaresan, Malini Krishnankutty and Richard Scaria
8 ‘I am a planner too’: Confessions of a grassroots ‘slum’ leader 146
Tanzil Shafique and Mohammed Taher
9 Killakina: Decolonizing planning for rematriating land and life 163
Gladis Grefa and Alexandra Lamiña
10 Situated pedagogies in preservation planning: Transgressing
borders and co-producing knowledge through arts-based and
engaged scholarship 181
Magdalena Novoa and Elizabeth Aguilera
PART III REFLEXIVITY
11 Residents’ learning-by-doing whilst planning from the
‘border’: Towards an interstitial understanding of planning
praxis 204
Nobukhosi Ngwenya and Mabhelandile Twani
12 Decolonizing planning studio pedagogy: Grappling with
tensions and dissonances 223
Clara Irazábal, Bi’Anncha Andrews, Maxine Gross and
Joanne M. Braxton
13 The Nilgiris Field Learning Center: an experiment in the
making 244
Neema Kudva, Anita Varghese and Mira Kudva Driskell

Editorial Reviews

‘A shape is cut at the edges, not the center. For planning, the practice, pedagogy, and knowledge of city building have long been shaped at the edges of urban life among marginalized communities. Through struggle and practice, resistance and insurgence, and daily care, these communities produce ways of knowing and building that have always shaped cities despite (not because of) what is taught and advocated, what is legitimized and justified, in planning institutions at the center. This co-edited volume, composed of chapters co-authored with community partners, exemplifies anticolonial knowledge co-production, bringing the excitement of shapes formed at the edges of urban communities across the world, along with the refusal of despair and a radical hope for a different planning. Decolonizing Planning: Power and Knowledge in the Informal City is an important book for all who refuse to accept planning as it is and who recognize how anticolonial insurgent planning practices are re-shaping the field.’

Faranak Miraftab