Sur-Urbano

Our cohost today is Irene Farah and our second guest of the season is Prof. Calla Hummel. We are discussing Prof. Hummel’s recent published book, Why Informal Workers Organize: Contentious Politics, Enforcement, and the State. Given that over half of Latin America’s workers are estimated to be informal workers, a percentage that is estimated to have grown in the pandemic, the book’s exploration of why informal workers choose to organize – or not – is very timely and important. We talk to Calla about what factors contribute to informal workers organizing, xyr experience working as a vendor, about how governments should relate to informal workers.

Dr. Calla Hummel is an assistant professor in the University of Miami’s Department of Political Science, with a PhD from the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. Xe studies when and why informal workers organize and the impacts that the world’s two billion informal workers have on local and national politics, by using statistical, ethnographic, survey, computational, and formal methods.

Irene is PhD Candidate in City & Regional Planning at UC Berkeley. Previously, she worked in the Center for Spatial Data Science at the University of Chicago. Her research revolves around themes of inequality, focusing on topics of urban informality, governance, health, and spatial analytics. In particular, she is interested in how recent shifts in governance structures in Mexico City impact how informal workers, street level bureaucrats, and local politicians negotiate over the use of public space, with a particular focus on street vendors.

Are judges the new planners? In our first episode of "Sur-Urbano", we discuss Sergio Montero, Luisa Sotomayor and Natalia Ángel Cabo's recent article “Mobilizing Legal Expertise In and Against Cities: Urban Planning Amidst Increased Legal Action in Bogotá”. The authors note that there has been a rise in legal action around urban policy and planning in Colombia, which means that legal experts and judges often end up dictating things that used to be within the realm of planners – social housing, transport corridors, and public space. 

We talk to Sergio Montero, an Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning and Development at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, associate editor of the journal Regional Studies and director of LabNa (Laboratorio de Narrativas Urbanas).

Check out the article here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02723638.2022.2039433?journalCode=rurb20