these debates, grappling with their existing boundaries by analyzing processes that lie beyond their current attention.
Explaining how informality works within or parallel to bureaucracies that are largely accountable, present, and capable requires a more “intimate” analysis of regulatory processes at the level of everyday implementation. Thus, in order to understand the negotiation of transgression and regulation, I take my cue from perspectives on state enactment that stress its agentic, situated, and relational dimensions. Such perspectives examine the state up-close in order to better comprehend the agency of all parties concerned, foster an understanding of their negotiations from a situated perspective, and analyze how these practices relationally shape and are shaped by how state and urban governance become enacted.
My argument is that this reading of how people negotiate irregular housing conditions in everyday situations is not only more in tune with the ways in which informality is governed in Berlin’s allotment gardens than accounts of informality that focus on “states ‘with muscles’” are (Boudreau et al., 2016: 2397), but permits us to grasp the normalcy of these negotiations as well. The explanatory promise of a focus on these “quieter registers of power” (Allen, 2016: 11) is that it pinpoints modalities of inclusion and exclusion that play out at the everyday scale. Such an analysis not only shows what is up for negotiation and the degree of latitude that is tolerated, but also demonstrates the small-scale mechanisms through which power relations work to privilege certain practices and declare others as untypical. In this reading, informality becomes a lens to view the everyday production and reproduction of urban inequalities. Translating the concept in this way may allow us to overcome assumptions of unbridgeable differences between Northern and Southern states. Moreover, it moves us beyond the confines of informality research on the global South, the poor, and the agency of a predatory state.
This chapter continues in three parts. First, a review of informality scholarship serves to explicate the approaches to the state and urban governance that undergird this work. In the next section, my aim to think of informality “differently” involves the mobilization of a repertoire of conceptual angles that deal especially with state enactment at the everyday level of urban regulation. The final section concludes by exploring possible conceptual gains of this perspective for an understanding of urban informality and the negotiation of regulations in the urban everyday.
Research on Informality and Its Accounts of the State
The concepts of informality and the state are inextricably intertwined, although research has defined these links in shifting and fundamentally different ways. A genealogical perspective on the epistemological history of the term “informality” readily explains some of these shifts. While its conceptualization is frequently associated with anthropologist Keith Hart (1973; see also Hann and Hart, 2011) and the work of the ILO (1972; cf. Steenberg, 2016), its first appearance in scholarship has been contested (Rakowski, 1994).1 Yet, in these earlier conceptual formulations, informality was undoubtedly a (by)product of reading states and state governance in that particular place and particular time (generally meaning research sites in the global South in the 1970s). As it has frequently been noted, earlier, more “structuralist” understandings (Rakowski, 1994) focused on the exclusion of practices of, for instance, any trading, building, dwelling, or transport provisioning from the formal economy. They defined informal practices through their presumed “location” beyond the reach of state bureaucracies, as well as through their small scale, and the idea that they were carried out by so-called “ordinary” people. Thus, despite controversial voices (e.g. Portes, 1983), major parts of this early, more policy-oriented literature framed the concept as a problem of regulatory capacity or administrative oversight that merely concerned under-resourced populations in Southern cities. Similarly, more “legalist” perspectives (cf. Rakowski, 1994) that emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century (de Soto, 2000, 2002) focused on the “entrepreneurial dynamism” (Bromley, 1990: 330) of the “informals” but continued to hold informality to be a sphere outside of the law and, by way of equating both concepts, of the state.
These approaches also forged unhelpful analytical relations between imaginaries of informality and state modernity. Consider geographer Jennifer Robinson’s (2006: 4) understanding of modernity “as simply the West’s self-characterization of itself in opposition to “others” and “elsewhere” that are imagined not to be modern.” In this reading, the early definitions of informality I previously discussed can be seen to have strengthened the idea of Western state modernity while reinforcing assumptions about the difference of the “Southern state.” To be sure, the notion of informality as the “‘other’ of states” was derived from the idea of a “well-developed state” with modern, rational institutions – and imagined to be located in “the Northwestern quadrant of the world” (O’Donnell, 2001: 7). Yet somewhat contradictorily, researchers aligned informality with the supposedly “dis-functioning” and “traditional” states of the global South, despite these states appearing to lack all the previously named definitional characteristics of the Western state. Rather than questioning imaginaries of “Western state rationality” or aiming to understand geographical varieties in the workings of state practices, the use of the term informality in these cases thus reinforced the “othering” of what was cast as “the Southern state.”
Critiques of such teleological conceptions of informality and development have since become ubiquitous. I refer to a set of ideas that specifically address the urban dimensions of a wider postcolonial critique that prominent thinkers, such as Dipesh Chakrabarty, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak, have advanced since the 1980s. Based on the epistemological contributions of postcolonial theory and led by Robinson’s influential contribution, Ordinary Cities (2006), urbanists began to debate the essentially parochial nature of urban theory (see e.g. Watson, 2009; Edensor, 2011; Sheppard et al., 2013). Above all, this “Southern urban critique” (Lawhon and Truelove, 2019) challenges the idea of Europe as a signifier of modernity (Escobar, 1995), in relation to which all else is “coming late, lagging behind, and lacking in originality” (Mufti, 2005: 474).2 In the study of cities, this “teleological imperative” (Krishnaswamy, 2005: 70) had led to a profound imbalance in the production of theory and the pretension of theoretical claims. Consequently, postcolonial urbanists have highlighted the tensions between a wider recognition of historical difference vis-à-vis the universal truth claims of dominant Western approaches while, at the same time, confronting “assumptions of incommensurability” between urban experiences in Northern and Southern sites (Varley, 2013: 125).
In line with this approach, contemporary urban research has increasingly positioned itself against binary understandings of formality and informality. By showing that social spheres are embedded in a complex network of different relations that may be formal or informal to different extents, this literature reconceptualized the nexus of informality and the state. First, accounts that outline the use of informality as a governmental tool have offered useful conceptualizations of the ways in which state institutions assert authority through the use of informality (Yiftachel, 2009a, 2009b; Bear, 2011; de Alba, 2017; Shlomo, 2017; Bénit-Gbaffou, 2018; Tucker and Devlin, 2019). Ananya Roy’s (2005) seminal article “Urban informality: Towards an epistemology of planning” was the first in a series of pivotal publications (2009a, 2009c, 2009d, 2011) that highlight the ways in which states use informality to mediate their relations with civil society by continuously rearranging the boundaries of legitimacy (see also Yiftachel, 2009a, 2009b; McFarlane, 2012). These accounts not only point out that the formal/informal labeling serves as a means through which states exert authority, but also that the maintenance of flexible and ever-shifting boundaries between formality and informality, legality and illegality ensures a continuous grip on populations. As Roy convincingly writes, “it is through this logic of informality that the state polices an arbitrary and fickle line between legality and illegality, creating a territorialised flexibility and demonstrating its political potency” (2018: 2243). Moreover, the literature illustrates how state agencies resort to illegal or extra-legal means (Goldman, 2011; Ghertner, 2018), thereby creating boundaries between “wanted” and “unwanted” populations (Ghertner,
