Over the past half century, urban informality has become a widely recognized and hotly contested phenomenon. Anthropologists, sociologists, and urban planners have long debated the informal economy and informal urbanism, but historians have only recently entered the fray. In the social scientific literature, informality has often been treated as a relatively recent development—an outcome of rapid urban growth or neoliberal reform—rather than as something deeply embedded in the making of modern cities and states. Informal Cities (University of Chicago Press, 2025) pushes against that view. It traces the long history of urban informality across Latin America, southern Europe, and North Africa, and shows that informal settlements are not simply spaces outside the law or beyond the reach of the state, but are instead produced through legal ambiguity, political negotiation, and everyday social practice.
The volume is the result of a long-running international collaboration based out of the University of Paris. Bringing together historians working in different languages, archives, and regional traditions, Informal Cities develops a transnational framework for the study of urban informality that cuts across familiar geographic and disciplinary boundaries. In this interview, Charlotte Vorms and Brodwyn Fischer, the volume’s editors, reflect on how the project came together, the challenges of writing a genuinely multi-sited history of informality, and the ideas that emerged from years of collective discussion. They also discuss why informality should be understood not as a marginal condition of the global South, but as a broader historical process that has shaped how urban spaces are governed, how inequality is produced, and how states manage political pressures from below.
—Sergio Infante, Yale University
SI: Informal Cities emerged out of a research project at the University of Paris 1–Panthéon Sorbonne. It took the form of a transnational scholarly network and was titled La ville informelle au xxe siècle. In English, that translates to “The Informal City in the Twentieth Century.”
I’d love to hear more about the project. How did the collaborations that led to Informal Cities come about?
CV: My first book, Bâtisseurs de banlieue à Madrid (2012), examined the working-class suburbs of Madrid that were built from the 1860s onward. These neighborhoods emerged within a regulatory and urban planning grey zone. Public authorities tolerated their growth, and at times even encouraged it, while keeping them in a state of extreme legal precariousness. I argued that informality functioned as a mode of government in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Spain. This led me to wonder what distinguished the history of Madrid’s working-class settlements from that of the defective subdivisions (lotissements défectueux) that developed around Paris during the first third of the twentieth century, and how both differed or not from the precarious settlements of the post–World War II era, namely, the French bidonvilles, Italian baracche, Spanish chabolas and barracas, and outside of Europe, Argentine villas miserias, Mexican colonias proletarias, and other slums found around the world.
While scholars have tended to portray urban informality as an inherently contemporary phenomenon specific to cities of the global South, it seemed to me that what I had observed in nineteenth-century Madrid was not fundamentally different; it reflected the same underlying logic. It was from these questions that the idea emerged to bring together an international team of scholars working on both European and non-European cities to investigate this phenomenon collectively from a historical perspective. The project’s—and, I believe, the book’s—distinctive contribution lies in its historical perspective and its European point of departure on a topic that has been explored primarily by other disciplines and in relation to other world regions.
The original group consisted of Rafael Soares Gonçalves (whose work focuses on Brazil, but who has longstanding ties with France), Francesco Bartolini (author of several books on the political and cultural history of Italian cities), and Jim House (who was then writing a book on the shantytowns of Casablanca and Algiers). I was myself working on a book about informal settlements in Spain under the Franco regime. Starting from this European perspective, we sought collaborators working on other geographies, first and foremost Latin America. Brodwyn responded to the invitation with great enthusiasm and immediately assumed a leading role in our collective discussions and in the intellectual direction of the project. It required considerable intellectual openness for a scholar working in a field as prolific as Latin American Studies to see the value of joining a project initially framed from a European perspective, far removed from her usual scholarly networks. Brodwyn subsequently brought additional Latin American specialists into the project. As our work progressed, the team became sufficiently visible that other researchers began contacting us spontaneously to join.
Our team worked together for five years. At each of our meetings—held once or twice a year—we devoted one or two days to presenting and discussing our work with colleagues in the host city. (We met in Paris, Rio de Janeiro, and Mexico City.) The remainder of our time was reserved entirely for internal discussions among the members of the group. I emphasize this point because it represents a luxury that has become increasingly difficult to afford—and one that, in our case, came to an end with the pandemic. It was through these extended conversations, carried on intensively over several days and resumed at each successive meeting, that our collective thinking gradually took shape. We first had to develop a shared vocabulary, to bring our questions and intellectual experiences into tune, so that our different perspectives could each play their own part and, together, compose a new and richer understanding. Informal Cities is the product of this long conversation.
I want to stress the value of this approach. Much is said today about international projects and collaborative research, but genuine collaboration requires time—time to talk, to listen, and to think together. That also means resisting the pressure to publish early. I therefore wish to acknowledge the Émergences program of the City of Paris and the Institut Universitaire de France, whose support made this kind of collective intellectual work possible.
SI: There are important lessons to be had here, I’m sure. Brodwyn, any thoughts?
BF: I completely agree with Charlotte and am so grateful for her leadership. Our work had such a unique balance of openness and rigor, and I think all of us count it as a high point in our intellectual lives during this period.
Before this project, my trajectory had focused mainly on Brazil and Latin America. My 2008 book, A Poverty of Rights, was one of the first studies to fully historicize Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, both in the sense of tracing their legal, economic, social, and political history from archival and oral history sources and in arguing that favelas were key to the production of structures of power, governance, and citizenship that shape inequality in Brazil and elsewhere. I then co-edited a comparative volume, Cities from Scratch (2014), which highlighted the limitations of universalizing, presentist conceptions of informality and presented case studies that highlighted bottom-up dynamics across Latin America. I had also just begun to write the book I am now finishing, Intimate Inequalities, which focuses on informality as a system of power and traces its Brazilian roots to the relational infrastructures of slavery.
When Charlotte and Rafael invited me to join their group, it seemed like a perfect way to deepen my understanding of informality’s history. I knew Rafael already because of his excellent 2010 book, Les Favelas de Rio de Janeiro. When I read Charlotte’s work on Madrid, I saw that we shared a similar commitment to archival rigor and the study of informality as a system of power.
I was also enthusiastic about the possibilities for methodological exchange. The group’s members all share similar questions; we are also each shaped by different traditions of inquiry, research, and argumentation. Because most of us spoke English and at least one romance language, our process was also very multilingual. We each usually wrote and spoke in our own language. I think that enhanced the exchange, because translation often erases so much of what is distinctive in each person’s scholarly practice.
One thing that really stood out to me was the precision and discipline with which Charlotte framed the foundations of our collective discussions. In the scholarly cultures that I was trained in, there is a tendency to frame intellectual projects in broad and even grandiose terms, highlighting the flashiest propositions. But Charlotte worked in precisely the opposite way, leading with simple and specific prompts. Here, I think especially of our collective work on quantifying informality, which was published as a special issue of Histoire & Mesure in 2019. In preparing for that issue, our task was to answer a deceptively unassuming question: “How has informality been counted?” In every case, that question sparked an investigative journey that eventually gave us insight into the empirical and ideological scaffolding of informal governance. It was beautiful to see how a focused mode of inquiry could open up complex realms.
The benefits of intensive collaboration also emerged as Charlotte and I coauthored the introduction to Informal Cities and worked closely on translating and editing the chapters, which were originally written in five different languages. Through this process, we came to understand the divergent structures of thought, narrative, and inquiry that our volume was synthesizing. That was very exciting.
The experience left us with a strong appreciation of how generative sustained collaboration can be—and how rare it actually is in the field of history. We see Informal Cities as a template for how to collaborate across linguistic and geographic borders.
SI: As you note, Informal Cities builds on comparative approaches to informality that underscore the phenomenon’s global reach. The book also has a distinct geography. You cover Latin America, Latin (or southern) Europe, and North Africa. The first two of these regions are also central to Alejandro Portes, Manuel Castells, and Lauren Benton’s now-classic volume, The Informal Economy: Studies in Advanced and Less Developed Countries(1989).
Could you tell me about the ground, both physical and intellectual, that Informal Cities covers?
BF: The question of geographic scope is crucial.
On the one hand, there is nothing more local than informal urbanism. As many of our authors demonstrate, and as Charlotte and I have emphasized previously, informality is structured by relational ties, cultural and material practices, economic interdependencies, and political networks that cannot be understood without an intensely local focus. That might be why most volumes about informality rely on single-city case studies.
But informal urbanism has always been shaped by global currents and thus calls for a comparative perspective. Some of informality’s earliest roots can be found in colonial or imperial logics that structured cities in similar ways across otherwise radically different landscapes. Globally circulating public health and urban planning paradigms—which played a crucial role in inventing and problematizing urban informality—were conceived as universal, exportable doctrines. At the apex of twentieth-century modernist planning, “spontaneous” or “uncontrolled” urbanization was understood by international experts as a byproduct of distorted development or incomplete modernization. Among those same experts, so-called solutions for informality circulated in strikingly patterned ways across otherwise dissimilar contexts. From the Belle Époque to modern-day “global cities,” the flows and strategies of global capital have also been crucial in defining informality and the social struggles that surround it.
At the grassroots, too, many elements of informal urbanism have a global dimension. For instance, similarities between Brazilian and West African vernacular construction techniques can likely be traced to the slave trade. The spread of certain building materials, such as corrugated tin or concrete blocks, is connected to global flows of industry, trade, and technology. The accretion of individual decisions that accelerated urbanization in the mid-twentieth century cannot be separated from global transformations in rural property and production. Just as importantly, the grassroots social movements that have defended informal settlements have long benefitted from transnational ties, which we have found among a variety of groups, from anarchists to progressive Catholics to Communists to modern-day nonprofits, academic networks, and transnational federations.
Given those global connections, it isn’t surprising that the study of what we now call informal urbanism has also been transnational. In the mid-twentieth century, some of the most consequential social scientific studies of mass urbanization across the global South—among the first to frame “shantytowns” as a threat to development—were structured comparatively, both in the sense that they applied a North Atlantic normative template globally and because they were structured around explicit comparisons between, especially, Asia and Latin America. That has continued on an ever-expanding scale, both in works of synthesis by thinkers like Manuel Castells, Mike Davis, and David Harvey and in collections edited by scholars like James Holston, Ananya Roy and Nezar AlSayyad.
Thinking at such large and comparative scales always has a price, though, not least because it erases the grassroots. The comparative tradition was behind one of the most problematic aspects of the informality debates, namely, a tendency to write about the phenomenon as if it were inseparable from poverty and deprivation in a generic global South. This is probably why specific regions—most prominently, Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, but also Europe—have simultaneously cultivated autonomous traditions that speak more effectively to their specific experiences. This localizing tendency might be especially pronounced among historians, who have only lately begun to study informality and who tend to favor inductive methods and national or regional lenses, especially in fields that lack dense empirical research.
SI: That’s true. Unlike other social scientists, historians are wary of generalizations.
BF: As a group concerned with historicizing urban informality, our authors had all worked primarily in this narrower vein. But many of us also joined the group precisely because we wanted a more global and comparative perspective. The challenge was to find a way to gain that perspective without losing the interplay of the local and the global that is the essence of informality—we wanted enough comparison to understand the influence of global flows and networks but didn’t want to compare cases that were so dissimilar that we risked reducing everything to generic commonalities. In my view, this is what happens in sweeping works like scholar-activist Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums (2005) or geographer David Harvey’s Rebel Cities (2012), both of which seriously misapprehend local and regional dynamics because they are so focused on theorizing purportedly global phenomena.
For me, that was why it seemed natural to focus on a group of countries that were divergent enough to teach us something about the reach and limitations of the global but also had common structural features that would facilitate meaningful comparison.
SI: And what were those comparisons?
CV: The book covers Latin America and what, after extensive discussion, we came to call Latin Europe (Spain, Italy, and France), as well as two French colonies (Algeria and Morocco) that had important cross-Mediterranean ties.
Bringing these spaces together is uncommon, and our initial project did not assume their coherence. In fact, our intention was to include other regions, particularly South Asia, where research on informality is especially vibrant. As the project progressed, it became clear that cities in the Romance language–speaking areas of Europe and the Americas and French North Africa shared a number of significant common features. Since informality is, by definition, constituted through its interaction with law and regulation, it is not surprising that places that share a common legal culture and a codified legal tradition also exhibit shared patterns of informality.
Another characteristic these places have in common is the importance they accord to the Catholic Church. The Church played a major and highly ambivalent role in the governance of informal settlements. This institution, and more broadly, the various actors of the Catholic sphere, had a hand in the provision of education, healthcare, and cultural services in these neighborhoods, as well as in the social support and supervision of their populations. Their representatives often occupied intermediary positions, acting as brokers between residents and public authorities.
The flow of influence could operate in many directions, depending on the local context, the period, and the organizations involved. The Catholic Church is a transnational institution through which people, knowledge, and practices circulate. Belgian, French, and Spanish priests travelled to Latin American cities to evangelize and assist the urban poor; for many of them this proved to be a formative experience. Across the Americas, the development policies promoted by international organizations and the United States intersected with Catholic actors and traditions that were particularly dynamic during the pre–Vatican II period. Thus, the similarities between local realities were reinforced by transnational circulations of people, knowledge, practices, and institutional models.
Our work demonstrates the coherence and relevance of this Euro-American space as a framework for examining contemporary urban questions. Precisely because it encompasses a wide variety of contexts within a shared institutional and historical framework, this space provides an excellent laboratory for revealing a common history—namely, the long-term role of informal urbanization in the formation of cities, societies, and states in the countries under consideration—and for showing how its historically situated forms offer particularly revealing vantage points from which to understand the societies of which they are an integral part.
SI: The informal economy is a notoriously slippery concept. Sociologist Jan Breman called it an “ambiguous ragbag” of semi-legal and insecure activities (“A Short History of the Informal Economy,” Breman, 23). Joseph Huber said it was a “conceptual ‘tutti-frutti’” (“Conceptions of the Dual Economy,” Huber, 63). How do you and your fellow authors define the term?
BF: Thanks for the question. We should be very precise about informality, because the term can lead to a lot of confusion and dead ends.
To begin with, we should make it clear that this is not a book about the informal economy. While debates about informal cities were inspired by economic anthropologist Keith Hart’s writings about informal commerce, the two fields have since diverged. We are cognizant of the common origins and connections, but our book mostly engages with informal urbanism.
Urban informality, of course, is its own minefield, and the concept has been widely criticized. It is totalizing, erasing significant heterogeneity; it is derogatory, implying criminality or a lack of form; it is too binary, insinuating that formality and informality are absolute, discrete states rather than gradations on a shared spectrum; it suggests that formalization is a panacea for poverty; it does not express communities’ own sense of identity and history; it is applied only to poor communities in the global South while ignoring other social classes and the global North; it is a byproduct of late-twentieth century neoliberal restructuring and state retreat; it falsely implies a break with normalcy even where informal activities are overwhelmingly predominant.
These and other critiques have motivated many scholars and activists to reject the whole concept of urban informality.
We were wary of focusing too much on semantics at the expense of using a term that captured better than others the issues of legal status, administration, and governance that we wanted to explore. Our sense was that the problem was less with the term itself than with its usage; we adopted urban informality not because it was perfect, but because its specific and precise meanings approximated what we wanted to explore.
The main problem from my perspective is that “informal” is often employed as a generic label for a particular kind of community—in the same way outside observers might use “slum” or “shantytown,” and with the same stigmatizing impact. Used that way, all of the problems listed above come to the fore.
But a more useful definition from our perspective is both more expansive and more precise. My departure point here is Castells’s and Portes’s elegant formulation of the informal economy as something “unregulated by the institutions of society, in a legal and social environment in which similar activities are regulated.” The idea is to home in on the dimension of informality that has to do with a phenomenon’s relationship with law and public resources. Under that definition, urban informality is not criminal, immoral, or tethered to any geography or social class. It does not describe a community’s identity or material form, or purport to be its most important feature. It does not imply that a community generally lacks form or order, or that formalization would be its panacea.
Rather, by our definition, informal urbanism is any way of creating urban property, homes, neighborhoods, and infrastructure that occurs on or outside the boundaries of legally sanctioned state regulation and protection—either in a grey zone where the law is weak, unclear, plural, or otherwise tenuous, or in a zone of tolerance where popular urbanism is clearly disallowed but persists by virtue of grace or regulatory exception. It is also very important to think of informality as a spectrum rather than a binary—relatively few forms of urbanism are entirely formal or informal—and to recognize that it is almost always entwined and interdependent with the formal order.
This definition of informality achieves several things. First, it emphasizes that “informal” is an adjective, not a noun. No type of housing or community is inherently “informal”; they are rather informalized by statutes and procedures that place them outside legal and regulatory bounds. Second, our approach follows urban scholar Ananya Roy in signaling that informality is a configuration of power—power negotiated in a space in which social and political struggles are not mediated by written law or the basic entitlements of citizenship. Such spaces, in turn, both stem from and incubate practices of informal governance—carried out by actors ranging from ordinary residents to holders of high political office—that are critical to larger dynamics of inequality, domination, and worldmaking.
These ways of thinking are key to one of our book’s other major aims: to explore what it means to study informality historically. Until fairly recently, it was rare for historians to take informality seriously. Conversely, social scientists, planners, and geographers who study informality have generally downplayed informality’s historical dimensions. The result has been a double loss—we don’t fully understand informality without grasping it as a historical process, and we don’t fully understand many aspects of history because informality’s role has been obscured. We seek to remedy that not only by tracing urban informality’s sociopolitical and legal history over time, but also by analyzing how it relates to larger historical phenomena such as state-building, fascism, social movements, development, colonialism, and the dynamics of enduring social and racial inequalities.
Just a generation ago, informal urbanism was written about as a very recent phenomenon, usually described as if it were either a feature of neoliberal neglect or a generalized invasion led by rural, poor, or colonized people who upended consolidated cities by squatting illegally and defying established norms. Our conception proposes a different and much more consequential trajectory in which informality is produced through a political process of informalization, integrated through informal governance, and relevant not only in its own terms but also as an integral part of larger dynamics of power and inequality.
SI: Can you each share a chapter that captures the dynamics you seek to illustrate particularly well?
CV: I like all the chapters! “Four Regimes of Informality,” the opening chapter by Antonio Azuela and Emilio de Antuñano, has a key role, which is why we chose to place it at the outset. It demonstrates, in a precise and carefully contextualized way, the interplay between the production of law and of legal non-law—or, more accurately, legal grey zones—within a given society. It also shows how these interactions generate evolution and change, or, to put it differently, how they produce history. The chapter therefore provides an excellent foundation for broader theoretical reflection, offering conceptual tools that enrich the reading of the volume as a whole.
I would also like to say something about the title, Informal Cities, over which we deliberated at length. In the end, we retained the original title of the research project from which the book emerged. We deliberately embrace the expression Informal Cities. It extends the question of informal urbanization to the city and urban society as a whole, moving beyond a sectoral or localized focus on precarious neighborhoods. This book is indeed about cities and urban societies in their entirety, and it demonstrates the extent to which informality is constitutive of both.
BF: I also love “Four Regimes of Informality,” but it is hard to name one chapter that encapsulates the volume’s aims because each does its own unique work. The introduction synthesizes five years of conversations about what it means to historicize informality and what we can learn from the very different historical traditions of Latin America and Latin Europe. The chapters from the first section capture the longue-durée intersection of popular urbanism and informalization, highlighting the paradigms, planning models, and legal regimes that have problematized and informalized popular urbanism across a range of historical contexts. In part two, we have lively portraits of the everyday dynamics and struggles of informal governance, highlighting the heady overlap of policy, politics, intermediaries, and social movements in Italy, Brazil, Venezuela, and Chile from the era of fascism through World War II and the Cold War. And in the last section we show how informalization, informal governance, and social struggles over informality were entwined with slavery, colonial rule, and enduring patterns of racialized governance and popular mobilization in Brazil, Algeria, Morocco, and France. Each chapter is both a snapshot and a provocation, aimed at sparking further research into the intersection of informality and history.
SI: You both endeavor to cross disciplinary and geographic borders. So far, our conversation has mentioned the work of anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, lawyers, and others. One field that has yet to come up and which looms large in the past ten years of the informality debates is political science.
Without getting too deep into the weeds, how does your notion of “informal governance” relate to, say, Gretchen Helmke and Steven Levitsky’s “informal institutions” or to Alisha Holland’s “informal welfare redistribution”?
BF: I admire both works, but there are also important differences.
We share Helmke and Levitsky’s interest in the interplay of informal and formal institutions in shaping policy outcomes. But we don’t focus nearly as much on intra-elite or political party dynamics, and we want to draw attention to the kinds of power generated and exercised within urban contexts, which offers a perspective on the workings of informality that are harder to see at a national level. We also place more emphasis on informalization—that is, how and why certain populations and urban forms become informal—and on how informality’s meanings and mechanisms shift over historical time. We are also very focused on the specific question of how informality shapes social and racial inequality, and on how formal and informal modes of governance intersect with popular experience and agency.
Alisha Holland’s work overlaps more directly with ours—in fact, her concept of forbearance is very close to what I described for Brazil in A Poverty of Rights and what Charlotte and Rafael have also written about, in showing how a bureaucratic administration can govern through exemptions and negotiated accommodations. I think the main difference is in emphasis. Holland lingers most on forbearance as an informal welfare benefit, deployed by politicians either selfishly (because it implies no lasting or enforceable entitlement) or because they lack power or resources to change formal policy. While we are interested in thinking about informality as welfare, Informal Cities focuses more on the power dynamics of informalization and the contradictions of informal governance. We also underline that informal urbanism is a bottom-up phenomenon. It is often built through what sociologist Asef Bayat has called the “quiet encroachment of the ordinary” and always endures through conflictual negotiation and significant grassroots mobilization and struggle. Finally, much of our work focuses on informality’s metahistorical impact on the dynamics of enduring inequalities, which is in some ways the flip side of a welfare-centered approach.
Part of what made our process dynamic was that everyone came to the table with divergent referents—our bibliography is incredibly eclectic. But while some of us follow English-language political science debates about law, citizenship, and governance, others come to political science in French, Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese or draw more extensively from sociology, urban studies, anthropology, and geography. I was personally building on the long tradition of social scientific and postcolonial debates about shantytowns and peripheries. Among modern scholars, I was engaging with urban informality debates or thinking with contemporary sociologists like Javier Auyero (who has revitalized debates about clientelism and state refusal) and Gabriel Feltran (on overlapping regimes of governance).
SI: This brings us nearly to the end. To close us out, I wanted to ask how writing Informal Cities shaped each of your current projects.
CV: Informal Cities is the story of a successful encounter between people from eight different countries—ten, if we include all the participants in the project—representing many academic traditions, speaking five different languages, and working across five different disciplines. Gathering together was a fantastic way of discovering the history of societies that we were unfamiliar with and, above all, of engaging with other ways of thinking. To give you a very concrete example: it made me aware of a certain degree of state-centrism in the way I think about societies, which is probably very French. Conversely, I believe that my own approach to social questions—grounded in an intellectual tradition that is constructivist and microhistorical, and that is also particular to the French academic context I was trained in—may have initially generated some misunderstandings but ultimately came to interest my colleagues. Our conversations left a lasting mark on the book I was writing during the project on Francoism (forthcoming from Flammarion). They helped me better understand, in particular, the influence of my actors’ Latin American experiences.
Last but not least, I made new friends along the way.
BF: I agree that the overall impact is a general horizon shift. More concretely, my single-authored contribution to Informal Cities (a chapter about informality and racial inequality in Brazil) overlaps significantly with my current book. Intimate Inequalities is an urban history of Recife, Brazil from 1870 to 1940 that builds theoretical arguments about slavery’s afterlives from archival microhistories of ordinary people. But it relies on ideas about informalization as a historical process and informal governance as a key component of stubbornly persistent inequalities. Informal Citieshelped me to think more clearly about how informality shapes broader historical processes. I definitely find myself writing with the echoes of our Ville Informelle conversations in the background, and they deserve a lot of credit for whatever broader insights Intimate Inequalities manages to produce.
SI: Thanks to you both for this enlightening interview.
CV: Thanks to you and to the Toynbee Prize Foundation!
Sergio Infante is an Editor at Large for the Toynbee Prize Foundation and is a doctoral candidate in History at Yale University.
Brodwyn Fischer is Professor of History and Director of Global Studies at the University of Chicago, with ongoing research interests in cities, law, race, slavery, and the drivers of enduring inequality in Brazil and Latin America. Her previous books include the prizewinning A Poverty of Rights (2008) as well as Cities from Scratch (with Bryan McCann and Javier Auyero, 2014), and The Boundaries of Freedom (with Keila Grinberg, 2022).
Charlotte Vorms is a historian and Associate Professor at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, where she is affiliated with the Centre d’histoire sociale des mondes contemporains. Her teaching and research focus on the social and political history of cities and urban societies, mainly in Spain and France. She has published Bâtisseurs de banlieue (2012), translated to Spanish as La forja del extrarradio (2022), and What’s in a Name? Talking about Urban Peripheries (with Richard Harris, 2017). Her forthcoming book, a history of Francoism through the lens of informal cities, will be published in 2027.