Reflecting on the commodified nature of the city, Lefebvre (1996) described the modern capitalist city as both a place of consumption and the consumption of place. If the city itself operates as a commodity, what forces drive its continual production and erasure? Legal, political, economic, and social institutions are central to shaping equitable policies that address this question.

As Harvey (2012) observes, cities emerge as products of institutional power, where finance capital, state planning, and governance regimes intersect to manage crises and influence urban processes. The Young Scholars Workshop 2025 is a space to unpack this complex interplay of institutions in city making. Moving beyond depictions of cities in the global South as merely special cases of globalisation—or as illustrative examples for Euro-American urban theories—the workshop invites scholarship that recalibrates the geographies of authoritative knowledge and resists neo-orientalist framings of the Global South as the Other (Roy, 2009).

We look forward to receiving research that illuminates the relationship between institutions and urbanisation through the following subthemes (while remaining open to related contributions).