Rethinking Informality: Politics, Crisis, and the City

If informality has been conventionally understood as a territorial formation or as a labour categorisation, this paper offers an alternative conceptualisation that conceives informality and formality as forms of practice. The paper examines how different relations of informal and formal practice enable urban planning, development and politics, and explores the changing relationship between informality and formality over time. To illustrate the political potential of conceiving informality and formality as practices, it highlights the fall-out from a particular urban crisis: the 2005 Mumbai monsoon floods. In the final section, the paper offers three conceptual frames for charting the changing relations of informal and formal practices: speculation, composition, and bricolage.

[1]  F. Miraftab.  Neoliberalism and casualization of public sector services: The case of waste collection services in Cape Town, South Africa , 2004 .

[2]  G. Mohan,et al.  Participation: From Tyranny to Transformation: Exploring New Approaches to Participation in Development , 2013 .

[3]  Frances Cleaver,et al.  Distilling or diluting? Negotiating the water research-policy interface , 2008 .

[4]  A. Roy.  Why India Cannot Plan Its Cities: Informality, Insurgence and the Idiom of Urbanization , 2009 .

[5]  Michael Goldman,et al.  Speculative Urbanism and the Making of the Next World City , 2011 .

[6]  H. D. Soto.  The mystery of capital : the role of property rights in creating wealth and alleviating poverty , 2004 .

[7]  E. Ostrom,et al.  Beyond Formality and Informality , 2006 .

[8]  The Crossroads of Class and Gender: Industrial Homework, Subcontracting, and Household Dynamics in Mexico City , 1987 .

[9]  Exposing Vulnerabilities: Monsoon Floods in Mumbai, India , 2007 .

[10]  A. Roy.  The Blockade of the World‐Class City: Dialectical Images of Indian Urbanism , 2011 .

[11]  S. Sassen.  The Global City , 1992 .

[12]  AbdouMaliq Simone,et al.  For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities , 2004 .

[13]  G. Macleod,et al.  Renewing Urban Politics , 2011 .

[14]  A. Roy.  Strangely Familiar: Planning and the Worlds of Insurgence and Informality , 2009 .

[15]  J. Briggs.  The land formalisation process and the peri-urban zone of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania , 2011 .

[16]  J. Romm.  Hell and High Water , 2006 .

[17]  E. Ostrom,et al.  Linking the Formal and Informal Economy , 2006 .

[18]  D. A. Ghertner.  Analysis of New Legal Discourse behind Delhi's Slum Demolitions , 2008 .

[19]  Frances Cleaver,et al.  Reinventing Institutions: Bricolage and the Social Embeddedness of Natural Resource Management , 2002 .

[20]  B. Diken.  City of God , 2005 .

[21]  L. Weinstein.  Mumbai's Development Mafias: Globalization, Organized Crime and Land Development , 2008 .

[22]  Geoffrey Payne,et al.  Urban land tenure policy options: titles or rights? , 2001 .

[23]  Nicky Gregson,et al.  The Bargain, the Knowledge, and the Spectacle: Making Sense of Consumption in the Space of the Car-Boot Sale , 1997 .

[24]  A. Roy,et al.  Medieval modernity: On citizenship and urbanism in a global era , 2006 .

[25]  S. Watson.  The Magic of the Marketplace: Sociality in a Neglected Public Space , 2009 .

[26]  AbdouMaliq Simone.  City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the Crossroads , 2009 .

[27]  Sian Lazar,et al.  Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil , 2009 .

[28]  O. Yiftachel.  Theoretical Notes On `Gray Cities': the Coming of Urban Apartheid? , 2009 .

[29]  S. Graham.  Infrastructure, Interruption, and Inequality: Urban Life in the Global South , 2010 .

[30]  Lasse Gerrits.  City futures: Confronting the crisis of urban development , 2012 .

[31]  T. Ingold.  Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description , 2011 .

[32]  J. Anjaria.  Urban Calamities , 2006 .

[33]  Robert Neuwirth,et al.  Shadow cities : a billion squatters, a new urban world , 2005 .

[34]  A. Roy,et al.  Urban Informality: Toward an Epistemology of Planning , 2005 .

[35]  Beverly J. Ingram,et al.  Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World , 1988 .

[36]  Danny Hoffman.  THE CITY AS BARRACKS: Freetown, Monrovia, and the Organization of Violence in Postcolonial African Cities , 2007 .

[37]  A. Roy.  Slumdog cities: rethinking subaltern urbanism. , 2011, International journal of urban and regional research.

[38]  James Heitzman,et al.  Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia (review) , 2005 .

[39]  B. Cooke,et al.  Participation: the New Tyranny? , 2001 .

[40]  Peter Hall,et al.  The global city , 2010 .

[41]  Abdoumaliq Simone,et al.  The politics of the possible: Making urban life in Phnom Penh , 2008 .

[42]  Aihwa Ong,et al.  Worlding cities : Asian experiments and the art of being global , 2011 .

[43]  Lourdes Benería,et al.  The Crossroads of Class and Gender , 1987 .

[44]  Dilip da Cunha,et al.  Soak: Mumbai in an Estuary , 2009 .