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We live in an increasingly urban, increasingly unequal world. This is nowhere more evident than in cities of the global South, where many residents face deep injustices in their ability to access vital services, participate in decision-making or to have their rights recognised as citizens. In this regard, the rallying cry of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to 'leave no one behind' offers significant potential to guide urbanisation processes towards more equitable outcomes, particularly for the urban poor. Yet the SDGs have also faced a series of criticisms which have highlighted the gaps and silences in moving towards a transformative agenda. This article explores the potentials of adopting a relational lens to read the SDGs, as a mechanism to navigate these internal contradictions and critiques and build pathways to urban equality. In particular, it offers three questions if we want to place urban equality at the heart of the agenda: who owns the city; who produces knowledge about the city; and who is visible in the city? Drawing from the practices of organised groups of the urban poor, this article outlines the key lessons for orienting this agenda towards the relational and transformative aims of urban equality.

AbstractThis article explores the everyday politics through which citizenship is negotiated by diverse residents, analysing the case of Bansighat, an informal settlement in Kathmandu, Nepal. It focuses on both the collective tactics of the Nepali women's federation of the urban poor—Nepal Mahila Ekata Samaj—as well as the quotidian practices of diverse residents around water and sanitation. This analysis reveals the variegated politics through which citizenship plays out—reflecting complex interactions between wider processes of urban transformation in Kathmandu, localized socio‐spatial conditions of Bansighat and long‐standing social relations in Nepali society. The empirical findings help to make more explicit the politics through which some residents are able to capitalize and transform diverse tenure and infrastructural practices into a broader sense of legitimacy or belonging in the city, while simultaneously engendering exclusions for others. This article accordingly reflects on how broader class and ethnic power relations play out through everyday citizenship negotiations, generating differentiated experiences of citizenship for diverse individuals.