Theoretical Notes On `Gray Cities’: the Coming of Urban Apartheid?

The author analyzes the political geography of globally expanding urban informalities. These are conceptualized as `gray spaces’, positioned between the `whiteness’ of legality/approval/safety, and the `blackness’ of eviction/destruction/death. The vast expansion of gray spaces in contemporary cities reflects the emergence of new types of colonial relations, which are managed by urban regimes facilitating a process of `creeping apartheid’. Planning is a lynchpin of this urban order, providing tools and technologies to classify, contain and manage deeply unequal urban societies. The author uses a `South-Eastern’ perspective to suggest the concept of `planning citizenship’ as a possible corrective horizon for analytical, normative and insurgent theories.