Inventraset Assemblages

This book grounds an understanding of global South cities in the ways informal urbanism works to sustain livelihoods. ‘Inventraset’ is a portmanteau word that captures the interrelations and synergies between informal street vending, transport and settlement, and between these modes of production and the more formal city. Our focus is on the spatial logic of these interrelations at multiple scales, as livelihoods are invented, rules are transgressed, and the spatial order becomes settled. This is not a call to rename informal urbanism but to understand it as far more than the inverse of the formal.