Everyday politics and sustainable urban development in the Global South

This paper introduces a framework of sustainable urban development that considers the everyday politics of cities and their neighbourhoods. First, it considers the challenges facing cities in the Global South, and calls for renewed attention to the daily political struggles of urban residents. Second, it reviews the scholarship on the politics of urban governance and incorporates the politics of belonging and how citizens make claims to urban space into logics of sustainable governance. Third, it presents a framework of sustainable urban development based on thinking about cities and their neighbourhoods as urban commons. Fourth, it illustrates the theory with examples from the Ghanaian cities of Accra and Ashaiman. Fifth, it concludes by discussing how the framework generalizes to cities in Asia and Latin America, and offers possible policy interventions that incorporate the underlying political conditions that contribute to sustainability.