Transitory Urbanism

Gihan Karunaratne is an architect and academic whose work critically engages with contemporary issues in architecture, urbanism, and spatial practice. Drawing on experience in both pedagogy and professional practice, his work integrates design research, urban theory, and socio-spatial analysis. His academic inquiry is grounded in a sustained interest in the processes through which cities evolve in response to ongoing physical, economic, and social transformations. His research focuses on urban transformation and its implications for the everyday lives of marginalised communities. Central to this work is an examination of the “underbelly” of the city, with particular attention to informal settlements and conditions of urban precarity. Through this perspective, he interrogates themes of resilience, spatial justice, and the adaptive strategies that emerge within contexts of uncertainty and instability. Karunaratne’s research places particular emphasis on cities in the Global South, where rapid urbanisation and entrenched inequality generate complex and often contested spatial conditions. He approaches informal urbanism not as a condition of deficiency, but as a dynamic site of social and spatial negotiation. His publications address a range of topics, including informal settlements, resilient and displaced urbanism, and mapping as a critical practice, thereby contributing to broader academic debates on urban transformation, informality, and spatial justice.

• Introduction (Gihan Karunaratne) Part 1. Incremental Transitions: Coloniality and Adaptivity 1. Sea-ing Ghana’s Transitory Urbanism: Everyday Infrastructures, Colonial Legacies and Future Promises of Railways and Port infrastructures in Tarkwa and Sekondi-Takoradi (Costanza Franceschini and Carola Hein) 2. Transitory Urbanism: Adaptive Spaces and Evolving Identities in Shenzhen’s Village-in-City Communities (Ali Cheshmehzangi) 3. Collecting Colonies: The Place of Native Villages at Turn-of-the-Century U.S. World’s Fairs and Expositions. (Alan J. Plattus) Part 2. Fluid Cities: Weaving Diasporic Urbanity 4. On Oceanic Methods for the 'Citi(zen)s at Sea' (Doreen Bernath) 5. Harbour Unconscious: Encounter, Displacement, and Liminal Chinoiserie (Tian Pan) 6. The Lighthouse in Urbanism: Typologies, Trade Networks, and Theoretical Perspectives Through Port Cities in East and Southeast Asia (K. B. Izac Tsai) 7. Negotiating Belonging: Migrants’ Home-Making Practices in Transitional Urban Spaces- A Swedish Case Study (Azadeh Fatehrad) Part 3. Negotiation and Resistance: Shifting Spaces of Belonging and Justice 8. Voices from Dadaab: Women's narratives of survival and violence (Fabienne Hoelzel) 9. Seeking Refuge, Pursuing Education: Ukrainian Refugee University Students in Australia (Olga Oleinikova) 10. Non-orthogonal as resistance: How the favelas reveal the coloniality of modern urbanism (Fernando Luiz Lara) 11. Structured Transience: Migrant Self-Governance and Negotiated Urban Order in Paris (Abel Mavura, Felipe Hernández) 12. From the Ground to Sky: Transitory Urbanism of the under-served Communities of the City Colombo, Sri Lanka (Gihan Karunaratne, Jagath Munasinghe and Nusrat Jahan Mim) Part 4. Urbanism Otherwise: Between Transience and Intelligence 13. Spaces of Knowledge: Art, Walking and Transient Urbanism (Jaspar Joseph-Lester) 14. After the Blast: Spatial Reconstruction and Reimagination Following the Beirut Port Explosion (Aude Azzi and Frederik Weissenborn) 15. Inhabiting the interstices: Occupations, Ruins and Quilombo Urbanism in São Paulo (Giovanna Astolfo) 16. On the Move: Household Factories and Everyday Resistance Tactics in Tangxia Town, China (Ruzhen Zhao and Carolina Vasilikou)