Ananya Roy defines urban informality as a mode of metropolitan urbanisation rather than a marginal sector separate from the formal city. Informality organises housing, land, labour, infrastructure, and property through flexible relations of legality and illegality, making it central to contemporary urban growth. Roy’s argument redirects planning theory towards cities of the Global South, where informal settlements, elite subdivisions, peri-urban expansion, and irregular land markets reveal how the state actively produces the state of exception. Planning power determines which illegalities are tolerated, upgraded, regularised, demolished, or protected, thereby transforming informality into an instrument of urban governance. A specific case emerges in land titling and slum upgrading policies: formalisation promises market access and security, yet it can intensify displacement, debt, gendered hierarchy, and unequal property ownership. Roy’s discussion of the “politics of shit” offers a sharper alternative, since infrastructure becomes a political process shaped by residents’ knowledge rather than a merely technical improvement imposed from above. Her comparison of Third World informality policy with American poverty policy also shows that planning repeatedly treats poverty as a spatial disorder to be corrected, while deeper questions of wealth distribution remain unresolved. The conclusion is decisive: urban informality teaches planners to move from land-use order towards distributive justice, from best-practice models towards critique, and from property rights towards the right to the city.
