The Entrepreneurial Slum: Civil Society, Mobility and the Co-production of Urban Development

Colin McFarlane (Durham University, UK) published in Urban Studies Volume 49 Number 13 (October 2012)

Abstract

This paper explores the co-production of urban entrepreneurialism by examining the work of civil society groups in producing mobile models of slum entrepreneurialism.

While slums and slum activists have been largely absent from accounts of urban entrepreneurialism, they increasingly play important roles in co-constituting mobile entrepreneurial models and in producing and valuing particular forms of entrepreneurial subjectivity.

A focus on the co-production of entrepreneurialism requires attention to both the mobile models that constitute relations between different groups, from states and donors to activists and residents, and the local contexts and histories that shape, translate and differently enact entrepreneurialism.

The paper concludes by highlighting three implications for research on urban entrepreneurialism.

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