Urban theory, produced in North Atlantic centres, has been perpetrated as universal and recent urban studies have pointed to the limits of this theory, calling for a Southern turn. The Southern call is to dislocate the concentration of power and knowledge in the metropolis. Owing to this concentration, concerns of the metropolis often become (or are made to become) concerns of the periphery. Taking informality as a practice, not embedded in people (marginalised) or places (settlements), I will outline how the study of informality has assured the lineage of metropolitan concerns. Moving away from informal-formal dichotomy, the paper mobilises informal-urban dialectic to identify and dislocate the metropolitan concerns of urban theory. Discussing empirical cases from Delhi and Colombo, I build a narrative of academic theorisation of informality and juxtapose it with everyday narrative of its practitioners (food vendors), arguing towards the need for a plural and radically non-global knowledge production politics.

中文翻译：

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错位的城市理论：在科伦坡和德里学习食品贩卖实践

产生于北大西洋中心的城市理论已被普遍实施，最近的城市研究指出了该理论的局限性，呼吁转向南方。南方的呼声是要破坏大都市中权力和知识的集中。由于这种集中，大都市的关注点经常成为（或被迫成为）外围的关注点。将非正式性作为一种实践，而不是嵌入到人（边缘化）或地方（定居点）中，我将概述对非正式性的研究如何确保大都市关注的谱系。摆脱非正式-正式二分法，本文动员非正式-城市辩证法来识别和错位城市理论中对大都市的关注。讨论德里和科伦坡的经验案例，