This paper introduces the concept of “bypass urbanism” to account for a process of urbanization that is reordering center-periphery relations of urban regions into new hierarchies. Bypass urbanism became visible through a comparison of large-scale urban transformations at the peripheries of Kolkata, Lagos, and Mexico City by zooming out and considering their impacts on the socio-spatial structure of the extended urban regions. Bypass urbanism is not emerging from the construction of a singular new town or real estate project, but is the result of the simultaneous development of an ensemble of various independent but related projects. Therefore, bypass urbanism usually does not emanate from a coherent planning initiative, even less so from a hidden “master plan” at the hands of any single developer or state agency, but it emerges through a convergence of interests over large areas of land at the geographical periphery of urban regions that have been made available for new urban developments by various measures. We understand bypass urbanism as a multidimensional process that includes material-geographical bypassing, the bypassing of regulatory frameworks, and socio-economic bypassing in everyday life. It results in the creation of exclusive and excluding spaces that enable middle and upper-class lifestyles, at the same time leading to the peripheralization of extant urban areas that are bypassed and neglected. The massive scale of bypass urbanism that we have observed represents a new quality of urban development resulting not in isolated urban enclaves or archipelagos, but in the fundamental restructuring of the extended urban region with far reaching and incalculable repercussions.

本文介绍了“绕过城市主义”的概念，以说明城市化的过程，该过程正在将城市区域的中心－外围关系重新排序为新的等级体系。通过对加尔各答，拉各斯和墨西哥城周边地区的大规模城市转型进行比较，可以看到绕过城市主义，方法是缩小并考虑其对扩展城市区域的社会空间结构的影响。绕过城市主义并不是从单一的新市镇或房地产项目的建设中兴起的，而是各种独立但相关项目的整体同时发展的结果。因此，绕过城市主义通常不是源于一致的计划倡议，更不是源于任何单个开发商或国家机构掌握的隐性“总体计划”，但它是通过对城市地区地理外围的大片土地上的利益汇合而出现的，这些土地已通过各种措施用于新的城市发展。我们将绕过城市主义理解为一个多维过程，包括物质地理绕过，规管框架绕过以及日常生活中社会经济绕过。它导致创造了专属空间和排斥空间，从而使中上阶层的生活方式得以实现，同时导致被绕过和被忽视的现存城市地区的外围化。我们观察到的大规模绕过城市主义代表了城市发展的新质量，而不是孤立的城市飞地或群岛，