By Debolina Majumder and Michaela Collord

Across the Global South, cities, and city-regions are growing fast, drawing attention to questions of urban development and its place in contemporary processes of capitalist development. But development for whom? By whom? These are pressing questions amidst growing (urban) inequalities. They are all the more preoccupying given widespread assumptions that urban labouring classes remain weak and, in many instances, ‘surplus’ to the needs of capital. Pushing back against these assumptions, researchers and organisers gathered recently to ask, what would urban development look like if it started with workers? What would it mean to envisionlabour-led urban development (LLUD) —rather than capital- or state-centred development? Their collective reflections follow, as does an invitation: join their conversation via a new listserv.

Across the Global South, rapid urbanization is reshaping cities, post-metropolitan regions, and the wider landscapes of extended urbanization. Driven by unprecedented demographic growth, these processes are increasingly central to contemporary capitalist development and its uneven socio-spatial outcomes.

In many places, urbanisation has either bypassed a parallel, labour-absorbing industrialization process, or else exposed industrial workers to hyper-exploitation amidst a global rise in insecure, low-paid work. Absent manufacturing, sectors such as finance, real estate, transport, and retail are major sites of urban investment and capital accumulation. This investment, in turn, caters to elite and middle-class aspirations for ‘world-class’ cities, driving forward the commoditization of land, the expansion of ‘real estate frontiers’, and related processes of ‘accumulation by dispossession’. Meanwhile, most urban workers are confined to ‘traditional’ or ‘informal’ sectors—petty trade, informal transport, waste collection, and the like. Indeed, according to some influential readings, these precarious majorities suffer from a dual marginality, even irrelevance; they are both ‘surplus’ to the needs of capital and politically impotent, incapable of sustaining the powerful labour movements credited with advancing welfare reform in earlier urbanizing countries.

In focusing on cities, however, there is reason to challenge assumptions about the supposed dual marginality of urban labour. The historian Frederick Cooper warns that ‘urbanization’ as a concept—like ‘development’—risks becoming less an analytical tool ‘than an ideology’, reinforcing assumptions of linear progress in the social sciences. Precarious workers, in turn, appear ‘marginal’ in so far as they do not conform to a particular vision of ‘productive’ labour, of labour-capital relations, or of entrenched class cleavages. What is lost, though, is an appreciation of the more ‘complex’ relations linking labour, capital, and the state.

A critical labour studies literature has begun to unpack some of this complexity. Scholars underscore how precarious sanitation workers, for instance, provide ‘infrastructural’ labour, which underpins the conditions for capital accumulation in the city. Relatedly, urban informal economies—rather than the domain of self-employed ‘entrepreneurs’—are structured by ‘hidden’ labour relations, e.g., owner-operator or creditor-debtor relations. Recognising and analysing labour-capital—as well as state-labour— relations can, in turn, help make sense of diverse processes of class formation and struggle. Although often fragmented and vulnerable, this struggle is by no means absent. From street vendors to platform-based delivery workers to slum dwellers and peri-urban smallholder farmers, urban ‘classes of labour’ challenge their socio-economic and political exclusion. In the process, they reshape everyday lives and livelihoods as well as the production of urban space itself.

Despite the contributions of this critical literature, urban workers and their visions of the city are still often overlooked, including in development theory and strategy. An insightful reflection on a recent Development Studies conference noted a tendency to adopt ‘narrow conceptions of “Development” as either aid-based or big power rivalry’. More generally, as development theorist Colin Leys reminds us, all development theory assumes—and, indeed, requires—an ‘agent of theory-execution whereby the effort can latch on to the real world’. Yet most development theories—whether aligned with the (Post)Washington Consensus, Developmental State theory, Modernization Marxism, or related—centre not labour but capital, assigning business and state elites the role of ‘agent’. Even approaches advocating ‘pro-poor’ growth tend to treat ‘poverty’, planning, and ‘basic needs’ as domains for technocratic intervention, for instance, through often contested, top-down social protection initiatives.

What would development theory look like, then, were it to prioritise urban workers, waged and unwaged? How might centring labour struggle alter understandings of urban development—for whom and by whom? What would it mean, in brief, to envision labour-led urban development (LLUD)?

These questions motivated a recent workshop. The gathering drew inspiration from labour geography and a more radical tradition in development theory, including Ben Selwyn’s The Struggle for Development (2017). In it, he introduces his concept of ‘labour-led development’, which the workshop applied to cities and the diverse workers who sustain them. Researchers and organisers shared experiences spanning diverse geographies, forms of labour, processes of class formation, and dynamics of labour struggle. In what follows, they offer reflections on the workshop and wider themes.

To summarise, workshop contributions divided roughly into four sessions. The first focused on ‘reframing (urban) development’, offering critical reflections on development theory. This included a contribution from Ben, in which he elaborated on his analysis of contrasting, elite- vs. labour-centred development paradigms. He noted, moreover, variation within ‘labour-centred’ development, which may be: ‘pro-labour’ where state actors design policies to benefit workers; ‘labour-driven’ where workers’ collective action elicits concessions from the state and capital; or ‘labour-led’ where collective action itself generates gains for workers and their communities. Building on these foundations, subsequent workshop sessions progressed from a micro to macro focus; they went from fine-grained analyses of labour and class formation processes to a consideration of how and why labour movements scale up, challenging capital- and state-centric development paradigms at city and national levels.

Overall, the contributions yielded a rich array of insights, including about: how ‘moral, social, and ideological’ institutions may mediate labour relations and class formation, as in Bihar’s thekedari system of labour sub-contractualization (see Maskara, below); how through a ‘politics of gathering’, ‘urban space can become a critical terrain for articulating shared demands and forging solidarities’, as among diverse migrant workers in Jordan’s Ad-Dhulayl export-processing zone (Grüneisl); or how ‘labour-led development may not appear as a stable or institutionalised project’ but, as in the case of Iranian steel workers, may assume ‘defensive forms’ that nevertheless play a role in protecting urban social reproduction under conditions of economic crisis (Nikou).

Ultimately, these workshop contributions—and this collective blog—are part of a work-in-progress. The idea is to acknowledge, explore, and where possible, unite with ongoing labour struggles. It is also to advance the discussion about LLUD—and about the short-comings of elite-centred development theory. We invite readers to join that conversation too—currently organised through a listserv. To be added to the listserv, please contact the workshop co-organisers at debolina.majumder@manchester.ac.uk and michaela.collord@manchester.ac.uk.

From authoritarian developmentalism to labour-led urban initiatives (Turkey) – Mehmet Erman Erol & Çağatay Edgücan Şahin

In his opening presentation, Ben Selwyn outlined what he calls the three images of urban development: (i) cities as zones of capitalist dynamism, (ii) cities as zones of exploitation, and (iii) cities as zones of resistance and labour-led development. Our contribution to the workshop focused on the Turkish case, using a similar logic and structure.

Turkey has been governed by the Islamist-leaning Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, since 2002. From the outset, the AKP viewed cities and urban transformation projects as central to its vision of development and economic growth. Depoliticisation at the national level was accompanied by centralisation at the local level, with government-controlled institutions such as TOKİ (Mass Housing Development Administration) playing an increasingly prominent role. From the 2010s onwards, there has been a growing emphasis on urban megaprojects (such as the Third Istanbul Airport, the Third Istanbul Bridge, new tunnels across the Bosphorus, and Canal Istanbul). However, the AKP’s urban vision has been contested by the labouring classes since its early years, culminating in one of the largest urban uprisings, the Gezi protests, in 2013.

Since then, under increasingly authoritarian political conditions, urban working classes have continued to struggle against the exploitative conditions, socio-environmental impacts and inequalities generated by this urban vision. This discontent has also been reflected in local electoral politics, with the opposition (led by the Republican People’s Party (CHP)) achieving significant victories in 2019 and 2024, particularly in major metropolitan municipalities such as Istanbul and Ankara. There is a growing body of literature on these elections and the tensions between the central government and opposition-led municipalities; yet there has been little critical, labour-centred engagement with the opposition’s substantive development and urban vision, nor with the labour-led urban initiatives that both inform—and go beyond—this opposition vision.

 Our discussion sought to address this gap, recentring the diverse forms of labour struggle—protests, strikes, and new co-operative experiments—shaping how Turkey’s urban development is contested and reimagined.

Worker-led urban transformation in special economic zones (Ad-Dhulayl, Jordan) – Katharina Grüneisl

What does it mean to centre workers in urban struggles and transformations? And how might it matter to read labour struggles as urban struggles? More specifically, what becomes visible when we decentre the confined workplace as the primary site of labour struggle, and instead attend to the role of urban environments as grounds for labour organising? This workshop on labour-led urban development brought into dialogue debates in urban studies and labour research that often remain disconnected. It invited us to rethink workers not only as labouring subjects, but as urban residents and potential agents of urban transformation.

I contributed to this discussion by focusing on special economic zones as a particular form of urban—or more precisely, rapidly urbanising—space. Often located on the periphery of existing cities or deliberately isolated from them, these zones are nevertheless characterised by a dense and often highly diverse concentration of working populations. In my presentation, I examined the export-processing zone of Ad-Dhulayl in Jordan. Ad-Dhulayl was established in the late 1990s as an isolated garment production cluster on agricultural land. Over time, it has evolved into a sprawling urban settlement accommodating tens of thousands of South Asian migrant workers, Syrian refugees, and economically marginalised Jordanian and Palestinian communities who have settled in proximity to the factories.

Against this backdrop, I explored a worker-driven initiative to collaboratively plan a community centre, an effort that ultimately failed to materialise. Precisely in its failure, however, this example raises important questions about how labour struggles can take on an urban dimension, and why this matters. Rather than mobilising around narrowly defined workplace grievances, diverse groups of garment workers—across lines of gender, nationality, and language—rallied around shared experiences of everyday life in a deteriorating industrial environment: exposure to polluted air, inadequate infrastructure, and a profound lack of social services.

In the authoritarian context of Jordan, labour organising is tightly restricted and formal channels are often politically co-opted. The ostensibly apolitical framing of a worker-led proposal for a community centre enabled what Marco Di Nunzio has described as a “politics of gathering”, a form of collective articulation that might otherwise have faced immediate repression. While these proposals ultimately remained, as workers themselves put it, “dreams in the dust,” they nonetheless reveal an important dimension of collective agency. They show how urban space can become a critical terrain for articulating shared demands and forging solidarities—particularly in contexts such as special economic zones, where labour recruitment practices are designed to fragment the workforce.

Balancing elite politics with bottom-up organising in cities (Manchester and Seoul) – Mat Johnson

Our contribution to the workshop spanned a number of core themes including capitalist dynamics, exploitation, and emergent forms of LLUD, although mostly in the global north. Building on other contributions that emphasised the role of bottom-up resistance, organising, and campaigning in shaping LLUD, we explored the contradictory role of ‘elite actors’ in the form of city mayors in taking forward—but also potentially co-opting—a pro-labour agenda.

We presented a comparative case study analysis of two city mayors: Andy Burnham in Greater Manchester (GM) and Park Won-soon in Seoul. Both have championed living wages, secure employment, and mechanisms of voice and representation within their respective cities but through different political channels. While Andy Burnham sought to build legitimacy across a wide constituency of actors by “crowdsourcing” his manifesto, Park Won-soon, a former pro-democracy activist, was able to mobilise a dense network of labour and civil society organisations (CSOs) to take forward his progressive agenda. At the same time, reflective of their limited legislative powers at the city level, both mayors relied heavily on their personal convening power to bring together a range of labour, social, and business actors.

The risk is that being so closely associated with individual politicians, rather than political parties or broader labour institutions, local progressive policies can be reversed or crowded out by national reforms. There may also be a shifting spatial politics within urban areas that is less favourable to broader progressive causes as indicated by the results of the May 2026 local elections in the UK.

We argue that mayors can be important allies for LLUD but the long-term sustainability of a pro-labour agenda depends on balancing top-down leadership with sustained, bottom-up capacity building within communities and workplaces.

Labour-led development and the Crisis of Organisation (Iran) – Ida Nikou

One of the recurring questions throughout the workshop concerned the relationship between labour struggle, social reproduction, and development. Can demands over wages, housing, food, and social protection be understood as labour-led development (LLD)? Or do such demands remain trapped within state-managed redistribution and crisis management?

My contribution approached this question through the case of Iran, where workers confront a combination of sanctions, inflation, wage erosion, repression, and increasingly severe forms of social crisis. Under these conditions, labour struggles are often pushed onto a defensive terrain centred on survival. Yet this does not make them external to development. Struggles over wages, rent, subsidies, and basic social protection are also struggles over how urban life is sustained and who bears the costs of crisis. They concern the organisation of social reproduction itself.

At the same time, I argued that developmental demands do not automatically become labour-led. LLD requires organisational capacity. Workers must be able not only to demand relief but to collectively shape, coordinate, and sustain outcomes. This becomes especially difficult under conditions of deepening crisis, where both the severity of material pressures and the disruption of organisation narrow what can be demanded and what can be sustained politically.

Drawing on the cases of Haft-Tappeh and the National Steel Industrial Group in Iran, I examined assembly-based forms of worker organisation that emerged during the mid-2010s. These assemblies developed participatory decision-making structures, accountable delegation, and alternative claims to representation independent of state-controlled institutions. Although these organisational experiments generated durable repertoires of collective action and democratic coordination, they remained structurally vulnerable to repression, delegitimation, and replacement through state-managed representative channels. Rather than stabilising into durable institutions, they repeatedly emerged, expanded, fragmented, and reappeared under pressure.

This raises a broader question for labour-led urban development. In contexts shaped by crisis, fragmentation, and unstable conditions of reproduction, LLD may not appear as a stable or institutionalised project. Instead, it often emerges in uneven, interrupted, and defensive forms, shaped by fragile conditions under which workers attempt to organise and reproduce urban life.

Varieties of unfreedom for urban labour migrants (India) – Nabeela Ahmed  

This contribution intervened on the themes of labour unfreedoms and urban struggle, centring the role of labour migration and mobilities in considering labour-led development.

 Labour migrants recruited to low-income, unprotected, and exploitative work in India’s informal urban economies—including in precarious sectors such as brick kilns, domestic work, or construction—are repeatedly exposed to the worst of urban crises. Yet, they have the least access to protections, rights, and entitlements or labour organising opportunities. The 2020 Covid-19 lockdown helped expose their otherwise invisibilised exploitation as has, most recently, the 2026 fuel crisis.

I drew on empirical research with labour migrants moving within India from rural areas to work in informal urban sectors to present how labour unfreedoms are various even within the same citizenship regime.  This work challenges the dominant focus on international labour migrant struggles. I argue that mobility and citizenship can shape and limit both labour struggles and resistances. Labour migrants are routinely excluded from urban citizenship rights and entitlements, including the right to organise as labour unions to challenge labour exploitations, despite their labour enabling neoliberal urban expansion and development.

 Following McGrath et al.’s (2022) call to critically study unfree labour, I argue that migrant labour can be unfree in a variety of ways. These range from physical mobility to entry/exit into labour markets, reliance on brokers, varying levels of interlocking debt traps, wage rates, and access to state social protection. In adopting an intersectional approach to analysing the variety, spatiality, and temporality of labour unfreedoms, I argue that labour struggles must be considered in relation to mobility, the postcolonial state, and as a gradational spectrum of unfreedoms in order to understand opportunities for labour-led development.

From the politics of labour contracting to a labour-led development (Bihar state, India) – Manish Maskara

My presentation contributed to the discussion on labour-led development, particularly in the context of circulatory internal labour migration. It explains the presence and/or absence of political action by migrant labourers from the East Indian state of Bihar (Bihari labourers) working in India’s migrant-intensive building construction industry.

The system of capital accumulation in building construction is organised via the (historical) sub-contractualization of labour relations, colloquially called the thekedari system. The paper asked the question: How does sub-contracting shape class politics? It steered the conversation on rethinking class relations from the lens of ‘the political’ intricately linked to production relations by examining the thekedari system not as an economic arrangement of employer-employee relations or an organisation of production process, but as a set of moral, social, and ideological institutions that configure the architecture of exploitation and its lived experience.

My work-in-progress paper argues that the thekedari system shaped by thekedars and builders who share the surplus accumulated, through the enabling role of the state, invokes and introduces different modes of discipline and control at construction sites and labour camps, including relations of morality, trust, and reciprocity configuring the possibilities of political action by Bihari migrant labourers. The system, by virtue of the relationality between builders and thekedars and thekedar-labour relations complicates the neat distinction between pro-labour development, i.e., development from above, vs. labour-led development, i.e., development from below. Relatedly, it compels us to rethink how do migrant labourers become political. It also allows us to examine if the current policy impetus on pro-labour development encouraging the rise of platforms connecting workers to jobs in the construction sector maintain, bypass, or possibly erode the class relations configured by the thekedari system.

This discussion was timely, considering the massive strikes in India by sub-contracted migrant construction labourers (April 2026), among other contract labourers, who fall under the umbrella of ‘unorganised’ workers and remain largely non-unionised. The presentation invited thought provoking questions on how the political is shaped beyond the realm of the material, what are the enabling conditions encompassing circuits of production and reproduction for different organisational forms for migrant construction labourers, and the implications of possible insulation of production from politics due to subcontracting labour relations.

Shock mobilities and the broken route to urban citizenship for migrant workers (India) – Mukta Naik

The exodus of millions of migrant workers from India’s cities during the COVID-19 lockdown shocked the world, but it was hardly a one-off event. Exit has been the standard response to different kind of shocks for migrant workers suffering sectarian violence, fuel crises, evictions and slum clearances ahead of mega events and even coercion to return to vote in source-region elections. Shock mobilities like this, where acute disruption abruptly and radically reconfigures migratory routines, make visible otherwise hidden power relations and operational processes, and raise questions about the relationship between rare and routine events in migration studies (Xiang et al 2022).

I assert that while these frequent shock-induced exits not only reveal what literature has already captured as the failure of cities to offer decent jobs and living conditions, basic services and social security to migrant workers (Kundu and Ray Saraswati 2012, Deshingkar at al 2022), they also highlight a key tension between the economic and political logics, as well as the de jure and de facto regimes of internal migration.

The Constitution of India grants citizens the freedom to move within national borders, which enables the spatial redistribution of labour for the country’s unfettered economic development. The same Constitution grants States the lion’s share of power in terms of implementation of government schemes including those related to welfare disbursement, strengthening incentives for citizens to assert place-based belonging. It is not surprising that for migrant workers stuck in informal and precarious work and housing in the city, voting in places of origin brings greater long-term returns for the household, extended family and larger kinship group. This allegiance makes exit a better option when migrant workers face economic or social shocks in the city. Repeated shocks and related exits from the city reinforce their choice to retain strong political ties in the origin, where their citizenship and related social safety nets are assured. Further, since migrant workers who do not vote in the city are unable to make claims for basic rights from urban politicial representatives, they increasingly focus on using their membership of informal worker collectives to demand improved wages and better working conditions from employers and contractors, and request landlords and localised providers for better housing and privatised services.

In recent times, the Special Intensive Revision exercise conducted by the Election Commission, and the Citizenship Amendment Act and National Citizen Register activities carried out by the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India a few years ago, have increased fears of citizenship disenfranchisement. Muslims have been particularly targeted, especially in states bordering Bangladesh. Even Bengali-speaking Muslims in states far from the border have been detained and asked to prove their citizenship. The inability of destination states to curb the racial profiling of Indians from the north-east has also fanned tensions in India’s metropolitan centres.

I argue that the tensions between economic and political logics, and de jure and de facto registers of migration are not merely a feature of postcolonial democracies, characterised by informality, and which carry forward colonial legacies of sedentarism and otherism (Bakewell 2013). Rather, the absorption of a global paranoia around citizenship and illegal immigration into the governance of internal migration has severely curtailed the citizenship possibilities of migrant workers in cities and thus made shock mobilities, particularly exit, a rational choice for them. While in theory, understanding worker mobilities is crucial for the planning and governance of cities, the absence of a citizenship pathway for rural migrants entering cities in the Global South is reinforcing fluidity and disenfranchisement, making the categorisation and enumeration needed to achieve planned urban development a daunting task. 

Debolina Majumder is an urban and labour geographer and incoming Hallsworth Research Fellow at the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester. Her research interests include critical urban theory, geopolitical economy, and the geopolitics of labour. 

Michaela Collord is a Lecturer in Politics and Development at the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester. Her research interests include urban politics, labour informality, and labour organizing, especially in East Africa.

References

Bakewell, O. (2013) ‘“Keeping them in their place”: the ambivalent relationship between development and migration in Africa’, in R. Munck (ed.), Globalisation and Migration, London, Routledge, 112–129.

Deshingkar, P., Naik, M. and Ahmed, N. (2022) ‘Covid-19 and India’s ongoing migration fiasco: some lessons for policy and research’, Economic and Political Weekly, 57(30), 30–35.

Kundu, Amitabh, and Lopamudra Ray Saraswati. “Migration and exclusionary urbanisation in India.” Economic and Political Weekly (2012): 219-227.

Xiang, Biao, William L. Allen, Shahram Khosravi, Hélène Neveu Kringelbach, Yasmin Y. Ortiga, Karen Anne S. Liao, Jorge E. Cuéllar, Lamea Momen, Priya Deshingkar, and Mukta Naik. “Shock mobilities during moments of acute uncertainty.” Geopolitics 28, no. 4 (2023): 1632-1657.