The atmospheres of massiveness: The politics and times of the maybe in Southern megaregions.

In this introduction to the special issue on massive urbanisation, the collective that has prepared this issue reviews the thinking and experiences that have been important to them. The reflections centre on the use of 'massive' in Jamaican patois, where it has two countervailing meanings. On the one hand, it means an inordinate lack of sensitivity to the real conditions taking place, a sense of extreme self‐inflation beyond reason. On the other, it means a collectivity coming into being without a set form, but reflective of a desire for collaboration and mutuality. Massive urbanisation thus means here both the voluminous expansion of speculative accumulation, extraction of land value, replication of vast inequities and disfunction, and the continuous emergence of new forms of urban inhabitation, a constant remaking of the social field by what has been called the urban majority. All of the contributions attempt to work with this sense of doubleness, amplifying the creation of particular atmospheres of the urban as a materiality of its heterogeneity. A collective of urban researchers working in nine major regions of the Global South came together over the past 18 months to think through the notion of the massive beyond its conventional connotations of mushrooming populations and a voluminous and explosive mass beyond apprehension or control. The collective also sought to think of urban extensiveness as something involving the temporality of dreams, ambivalent desires, improvised manoeuvres, and unruly inclinations in addition to the generalisation of commodity forms and capital accumulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]