Roy’s “Urban Informality” is a decisive intervention because it transforms informality from an object of planning into a critique of planning knowledge itself. Roy argues that informality is not simply the absence of planning, nor a residual condition of poverty, nor a developmental stage awaiting formalisation. It is a mode of urbanisation produced through the state’s own practices of classification, exception, tolerance, demolition, regularisation and selective legality. The informal is not outside power; it is often produced by power as the flexible zone where rules can be suspended, applied unevenly or used strategically. This is why Roy calls for an epistemology of planning: planners must examine how their own categories produce the unplannable. The essay also displaces the old hierarchy between First World models and Third World problems. Roy argues that cities of the global South are not merely empirical cases to be explained by theories generated elsewhere. They are sites of theory production. Informality reveals a general condition of urban governance: the city is not governed only through stable law, but through calculated exceptions. Slums, elite developments, peri-urban settlements, illegal subdivisions and speculative landscapes may all inhabit different forms of informality, even when only the poor are labelled informal. The term therefore becomes political: it can stigmatise vulnerable communities while concealing elite illegality. Roy’s essay is essential for urban studies, geography, planning theory and postcolonial studie
