appears in the subtitle of this book. Formality, too, remains a difficult term because its use ultimately reifies a conception of both terms – formality and informality – as opposing, binary principles. However, to put the production of formality at the center of this investigation allows me to circumvent the dichotomy that defines informality through its lack of formality. The processes under scrutiny in this book are then not described as the deviant other, or the negative counterpart of an ordering principle, but as part and parcel of the making of order. As these processes depend on a multiplicity of different legal frames (including laws, government programs, contracts, and the like), numerous actors (including state agencies, civil associations, and individuals), different power relations (including social ties, networks, and political allegiances) through which all actors concerned produce a plethora of orders considered to be legitimate, I employ the term in its plural form. I speak about urban formalities because thinking about the state at the level of the municipal scale forces us to understand the density of the materialities that are being negotiated, the heterogeneity of the actor constellations involved, the multiple sites of political encounter, and the complexity of overlapping statutory frameworks in multilevel administrations.
Moreover, despite my attempt to decenter in/formality, it is crucial to remember that formality and informality are ideas that are used in the field to certain ends (although in a much wider vocabulary). Formality implies claims to the legitimacy, regularity, or efficacy of order due to a supposed alliance with institutional frames. Rather than the product of negotiation, claims to in/formality are, in this sense, a resource on which people draw to produce urban order. Thus, while my reading foregrounds the processes of negotiating regulations, these concepts remain useful in an analysis of regulation as they allow us to consider how all concerned actors use these claims in their negotiations.
Summary: Chapter 2
This chapter details the book’s central line of argumentation, as well as its underlying theoretical approach. It argues that contemporary literature on informality, by casting the state in ways that tend to either underscore its flexible and oppressive use of informality or the ways in which citizens obstruct state powers by resisting them “from the outside,” methodologically has less to say about the more interactive practices of negotiation that this book is concerned with, where the roles and interests of “both sides” are more fluid and frequently merge. To analyze informality through the small-scale and incremental powers of negotiation, the chapter discusses theoretical traditions that place weight on the normative judgments and social embeddedness of those who are negotiating, the legal-material processes of regulatory enactment, the entwinement of institutions in social life, and the ways in which these processes of enactment reflect back on and transform wider processes of institutional transformation. To conclude, the chapter suggests that this reading of how people negotiate irregular housing conditions in everyday situations is 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) and, moreover, permits us to grasp the normalcy of these negotiations as well.
Notes
1 1 See, for instance, still earlier literature on Latin America (e.g. Abrams, 1964). As Marx and Kelling rightly note, “we need to be wary about identifying a singular historical trajectory of debate” (2019: 3).
2 2 In Provincializing Europe, a centerpiece of this debate, Chakrabarty has labeled these conventions as “eurocentristic,” denoting that even in more global ways of theorizing the world, “‘Europe’ remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories, including the ones we call ‘Indian,’ ‘Chinese,’ and ‘Kenyan’” (2008: 27; for similar arguments see Mufti, 2005; Connell, 2007, 2014; Hawley and Krishnaswamy, 2008).
3 3 But see Simone, 2010; Hackenbroch, 2011; Hackenbroch and Hossain, 2012; Lindell et al., 2019, among others.
4 4 In contrast, for Diane Davis, “a focus on informality provides a lens for understanding urban governance as a system of practises that link citizens, state, and markets” (2016: 6). Davis argues that the ways in which the local state decides to deal with informality (ranging from toleration to suppression) are not only relevant to understanding the priorities of states with regard to order, law, and citizenship, they also work, as she writes, to “restructure … or transform … their own nature and activities” (ibid). The state’s dealing with informality can thus be conceived “as a process of state formation, meaning that informality serves as the driving force in determining the nature and contours of the state, and not vice versa” (ibid: 7).
5 5 See Allen (2003) for a distinction between these different modes of power.
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