Watson’s intervention relocates planning theory from a presumed universal centre to the conflicts generated by actually existing urbanisation in the global South. Her iconic formulation is the “clash of rationalities”: the encounter between techno-managerial, marketised systems of government and marginalised populations whose livelihoods depend on informal and adaptive urban practices. The theoretical contribution is not a regional exception to Northern planning but a critique of planning’s inherited universals. Methodologically, Watson works by unsettling categories—informality, legality, service provision, rationality—through their collision with urban conditions that inherited planning systems routinely misrecognise. The paper therefore turns positionality into an epistemic method. Its bridge to comparative urbanism is precise: theory can no longer treat Southern cities as incomplete versions of a normative model, because their conflicts reveal the limits of the model itself. The South becomes a site from which planning concepts are revised rather than merely applied.
