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AbstractThis article introduces the concept of popular urbanization to describe a specific urbanization process based on collective initiatives, self‐organization and the activities of inhabitants. We understand popular urbanization as an urban strategy through which an urban territory is produced, transformed and appropriated by the people. This concept results from a theoretically guided and empirically grounded comparison of Mexico City, Istanbul and Lagos. Based on postcolonial critiques of urban theory and on the epistemologies of planetary urbanization, we bring urbanization processes in these urban regions into conversation with each other through a multidimensional theoretical framework inspired by Henri Lefebvre focusing on material interaction, territorial regulation, and everyday experience. In this way, popular urbanization emerged as a distinct urbanization process, which we identified in all three contexts. While this process is often subsumed under the broader concept of 'urban informality', we suggest that it may be helpful to distinguish popular urbanization as primarily led by the people, while commodification and state agencies play minor roles. As popular urbanization unfolds in diverse ways dependent upon the wider urban context, specific political constellations and actions, it results in a variety of spatial outcomes and temporal trajectories. This is therefore a revisable and open concept. In proposing the concept of popular urbanization for further examination, we seek to contribute to the collective development of a decentered vocabulary of urbanization.

As in most other countries, the definition of urban areas in China is fairly complex. Since taking power in 1949 the Chinese government has defined and redefined the definition of "city" three times: in November 1955, in December 1963 and in October 1984. The article explores the structure of China's urbanization, and changes over time in the level of urbanization. (DÜI-Sen)

AbstractIn this article I draw on ideas associated with minor theory to address the politics of knowledge that permeate the discourse and aspirations of planetary urbanization, and think through what is at stake in some of its broader claims. Existing critiques challenge the evacuation of agency, subjectivity and forms of difference in the planetary ambitions of the theory and call out its inattentiveness to lived experience. Here, I seek to further these critiques by addressing lived experience not as some 'real' against which all things are measured, but to find the political grounds where social actors are made and act on the shifting conditions of their lives. I excavate some of the social relations flattened or ignored in planetary urbanization's key propositions by drawing on three texts that allow us to imagine the planetary without foreclosure: a map from Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly‐Schapiro's Nonstop Metropolis; the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute as an almost forgotten alternative, and an example of urban research and practice that is at once intimate and global; and artist Zoe Leonard's pieces 'Analogue' and 'You See I Am Here After All'. By drawing out some connections to and among these works in time and space, I reframe the planetary with reference to countertopography to reveal and spark consciousness of the makings, undoings, contingencies and possibilities of contemporary urbanization—global and intimate, planetary but lived.

Books reviewed in this article:Susan D. Blum, Portraits of "Primitives": Ordering Human Kinds in the Chinese NationLiz Zhang, Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks within China's Floating PopulationNancy N. Chen, Constance D. Clark, Suzanne Gottschang and Lyn Jeffery (eds.), China Urban: Ethnographies of Contemporary CultureJohn R. Logan (ed.), The New Chinese City: Globalization and Market Reform

Books reviewed in this article:Bruno Latour and Emile Hermant, Paris ville invisibleWilliam J Mitchell, E‐topia: 'Urban life, Jim — but not as we know it'Antoine Picon, La ville territoire des cyborgs