Inspired by the three imaginary cities, we examine the real-world urban villages, explicating their socio-urban context, the characteristics of the urban villages and their dwellers, and the dwellers’ productive work that valorize the urban villages.Īcuto, Michele, Daniel Pejic, and Jessie Briggs. They at once exemplify the unseen periphery of Leonia, whose land and dwellers disproportionately bear the weight of the urban growth, environmental burdens, and the collective moral failings of inequity, precarity, and misrecognition they reflect the unjust and just Berenices which coexist within each other, whereby their advancement may be found in the distinctive speech, habits, and culture of its dwellers at closer inspection they may resemble the seemingly regimented city of Andria, unveiling a microcosm of innovation, community, and ground-up movements which strive to make the urban village visible again. Through three city typologies in Invisible Cities, we conceptualize the common threads running through urban villages in Jakarta and Shenzhen. Whereas in obscured narratives, the urban village carries the city’s “unwanted” load of population, laborers, and settlements. In overt narratives, the urban village is a burden of the city of untamable informal settlements, hindrances to modernization, and dead weight on scarce land. We use these as points of departure to reflect on urban villages in Global South cities. The burden of the burgeoning city is expressed through imageries of urban expansion, resolute progression, density and overcrowding, and the infernal city in the book. Through Calvino’s Invisible Cities, this chapter examines the phenomenon of relentless urban growth and its accompanying social and environmental burdens on land and its dwellers.

Calvino cities