Legros offers an unusually productive comparison between Dakar and Tunis by entering the political production of non-regulated neighbourhoods from below. Rather than treating informal urbanisation as the absence of governance, the thesis examines how space is actively produced through regulation, negotiation, clientelism, access to services and local political arrangements. Its iconic contribution is to replace the binary formal/informal city with a field of situated governmental practices. Methodologically, the comparison preserves differences between two North and West African contexts while using similar questions about authority, land and popular neighbourhoods to generate relational insight. The work bridges urban political anthropology and planning theory because it reveals governance as something performed through everyday transactions rather than contained exclusively within official institutions. Informality becomes a mode of spatial regulation, not simply a planning failure, making the thesis central to any comparative epistemology of African urbanisation.
URBANISM MEETS ART