CALL FOR PAPERS
Workshop: Envisioning Labour-Led Urban Development
Global Development Institute, University of Manchester
Thursday to Friday, 23-24 April 2026
Please find below a full description of the workshop focus and three thematic areas.
Workshop organisers: Debolina Majumder and Michaela Collord
Drawing from Benjamin Selwyn’s (2017) concept of “labour-led development,” critiques of existing paradigms of sustainable and just transitions, and hybrid movements espousing the right to the city, this workshop aims to collectively envision the key features of what we call “labour-led urban development” (LLUD) in the Global South.
We will explore what “just” urban development looks like from the perspective of the urban working-classes. What alternatives to existing capitalist development paradigms might this perspective entail? And what forms of organisation and struggle—past and present—have helped realise these visions?
The workshop will take stock of the theoretical contours and practical applications of labour led urban development across three key thematic areas:
(1) Reframing (urban) development;
(2) Urban struggles and new development agendas; and
(3) Power, politics, and popular organising.
A more detailed outline of these themes is below. Following the workshop, we hope to submit contributions as part of a special issue of the Global Labour Journal.
Format: Hybrid. We welcome both in-person and virtual contributions.
Target participants: Academics, representatives of labour and land movements, advocacy groups, and policymakers.
Workshop session types: Conventional panels and more open-ended interventions, e.g., training activities and roundtables discussions.
Abstracts: Please submit an abstract (500 words max), either of a paper or a proposed intervention in another format. Please explain how your contribution draws on your research, advocacy, policy work, and/or organising, which thematic area you intend to speak to, and how you further elaborate labour-led paradigms of urban development, both in theory and practice.
Submission instructions: Please email your abstract and a brief personal bio indicating your engagement with labour-led development by 15 January 2026 to debolina.majumder@manchester.ac.uk and michaela.collord@manchester.ac.uk.
Envisioning Labour-Led Urban Development
Across the Global South, a process of “late” urbanization is unfolding—marked by rapid demographic growth but, in many places, without a parallel industrial transformation and with the added pressures of climate breakdown. These conditions foster stark inequalities in urban development. Elite and middle-class aspirations for “world-class” cities, the commoditization of land, and the expansion of a “real estate frontier” have gone hand in hand with processes of “displacement by money” and “accumulation by dispossession”. At the same time, widespread labour informality and trade union decline seemingly undermine prospects for powerful labour movements, which are credited with advancing social welfare reform in many “early” urbanizing regions.
Even so, the popular contestation of urban inequalities has been as fundamental a feature of “late” urbanization as the inequalities themselves. From street vendors to platform-based delivery workers to slum dwellers and peri-urban smallholder farmers, urban working-class populations continue to challenge their socio-economic and political exclusion. They adopt diverse practices of subversion and occupation, self-help and co-operative organising, direct confrontation, as well as on occasion, collaboration and “co-production” with the state. While vulnerable to fragmentation from below and political capture from above, these efforts remain ubiquitous, shaping everyday lives and livelihoods as well as the production of urban space itself. Yet, such movements and their visions of urban development and justice remain marginalized in “elite-led” development theory and strategy—focused more narrowly on the global competitiveness of cities—or even in some progressive approaches that treat “poverty”, planning, and “basic needs” as domains for technocratic intervention, often while overlooking employment as a relevant policy area.
The workshop encourages submissions based on three key areas of intervention:
1. Reframing (urban) development
We seek submissions which can help situate the theoretical contours of a labour-led urban development paradigm in relation to existing paradigms of alternative development within and beyond the urban scale. These paradigms include feminist and caring cities approaches, solidarity and popular economy perspectives, “new developmentalism,” degrowth, and models of municipal socialism. An LLUD analysis may also contain productivist elements, consistent with the common development studies emphasis on structural transformation; however, important questions include not only whether and how barriers to success across many parts of the Global South may be overcome but also whether successful diversification and upgrading efforts are beneficial for labour. Meanwhile, we encourage the identification of new development priorities consistent with the immediate realities of Global South urban regions. These priorities may include improved labour conditions; value-added from small-scale and artisanal production, including of basic consumer goods for the domestic market; improvements in household consumption, including access to affordable housing; and cross-cutting all these issues, the decommodification of land and the ‘right’ to urban space. Overall, we encourage contributors to reflect on what it may mean to ‘reframe’ or reorient the study of development to capture the lived realities and needs of working-class urban majorities.
2. From urban struggles to a new agenda
A primary aim of the workshop is to ground the discussion of new labour-led development paradigms in experiences of urban struggle. As such we invite submissions which centre the histories, wins, losses, and contours of such struggles in different Southern cities. They may include spatial justice and anti-displacement campaigns, struggles against labour exploitation and precarity, co-operative organising, transnational solidarities and knowledge exchange networks, and efforts to realise democratized urban governance and collective social infrastructure. Our aim is to engender a discussion on how various movements might relate to one another, the alternative development agendas that these struggles advance, and their influence on policies, for instance, relating to (diverse forms of) employment-generation, public infrastructure and housing, and dignified social reproduction.
3. Power, politics, and popular organising
Just as urban development often reinforces inequalities and elite priorities, so too does urban politics. Urban struggles remain vulnerable to internal divisions as well as to repression and co-optation by state actors, capital, and related powerful interests. With these political challenges in mind, the third and final thematic area will focus on different forms of organising, from trade unions, to co-operatives, community organising, and new social movements. The aim is not to elevate any particular form, or to assume its emancipatory potential, but to explore how organising forms and strategies evolve, and how they come to reflect dynamics urban struggle and political contestation. From this more grounded analysis, we can begin to consider what organising forms, under what conditions, may help support a labour-led urban development paradigm.
Photo by Shawn Clark on Unsplash.