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In the existing literature, the disparate cities of Istanbul, Lagos, and Mexico City are mostly described as ‘informal’, as ‘self-built’, or as ‘slum’. This process is a major part of the daily realities of these cities, yet the existing scientific vocabulary does not seem adequate to describe the diversity of everyday experiences in all of these urban spaces. In a recent paper, Monika Streule and I (2013) propose the concept of Popular Urbanisation to consciously and explicitly shift our perspective away from static categories of urban form and artefacts that so often serve to exceptionalise/marginalise, and towards the social production process of such spaces. By opening up the interpretation and representation of such urban spaces to include a consideration of different ways of producing urban space (Kudva 2009), we aim to address the following changes frequently called for: differentiation within informalities (Roy and AlSayyad …