Ananya Roy stands as one of the most influential thinkers on urban poverty, informality, and the decolonial reframing of global urbanism, with Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development as her landmark work. In this book she unpacks how microfinance, celebrated as a humanitarian tool, operates instead as a global industry that commodifies poverty while producing new regimes of debt and discipline across the Global South. This analysis is paired with her seminal essays on urban informality, where she dismantles the idea that informality is a marginal or exceptional condition and instead reveals it as a mode of urban governance, strategically deployed by states and markets to classify populations, regulate land, and manufacture precarity. Roy’s later work, particularly through the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, intensifies this critique by linking financialised displacement, homelessness, police power, and racial capitalism, arguing that contemporary urbanism cannot be understood without confronting the intertwined forces of empire and inequality. Across her writing, she advances a decolonial method: the insistence that cities of the South are not empirical backyards but theoretical frontiers, capable of unsettling the Euro-American canon and generating new concepts for understanding global urban life. Roy’s contribution thus lies in rethinking the urban poor not as passive recipients of development but as political subjects navigating systems of dispossession, and in proposing an insurgent urbanism attentive to justice, citizenship, and the right to remain.
