The Homegrown City

The brilliance of The Homegrown City lies in its emphasis on a simple but rarely acknowledged truth: that the true experts of urban life are the inhabitants themselves-the local builders, artisans, and families who, through sheer ingenuity and collective agency, shape environments in ways that official planning often fails to imagine. Written by two researchers who have spent decades living and working in some of the world's poorest neighborhoods, the book presents a deeply humane approach to urbanism, suggesting many practical modalities for improving the quality of urban life, even in crowded megalopolises. -- Amitav Ghosh, Author of <i>The Great Derangement</i> An important contribution to the literature on urban development. Rather than focusing on how capital makes cities, they show how residents create cities that respond to their needs.Thus, they show the guidance that makers of informal settlements provide for enlightened planning -- Susan S. Fainstein author of <i>The Just City</i> A powerful provocation to rethink urban theory and practice in the twenty-first century, The Homegrown City maps insurgent infrastructures of appropriation, inhabitation, and collective spatial practice that proliferate within-and unsettle-the neoliberal city. It casts these emergent spaces as counterforces to dispossession and as laboratories for imagining and building alternative urban worlds -- Neil Brenner, University of Chicago This subversive book brings forward a new vision of urban co-living, based on more than two decades of observation, practice and dialogue in a variety of cities. It offers a searing critique of the dominant approaches to community, locality, form and function in cities and invites both theorists and practitioners to build more creatively on the forms of urban life that still surround us. -- Arjun Appadurai, New York University