CityReads│Informality: The Urban Logic of Global South

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Informality: The Urban Logic of Global South

Informality is anorganizing urban logic.

Ananya Roy and Nezar AlSayyad. 2004. Urban informality: transnational perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia. Lexington Book.

Source: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780739107416/Urban-Informality-Transnational-Perspectives-from-the-Middle-East-Latin-America-and-South-Asia

The phenomenal growth of cities around the Third World in the last four decades indicates that the urban future does not lie in Chicago or L.A., and that it will not be shaped according to the schools of thought named after them. Rather, the future lies in cities like Cairo, Rio de Janeiro, Istanbul, and Bombay.

But the ideas of the Chicago School, and more recently, the Los Angeles School, have dominated discourse on cities, urbanization and urbanism, not only in the United States and Europe, but also in the countries of the developing world. Third World cities were mainly generated in the crucible of the Chicago School. Charles Abrams’s seminal Man’s Struggle for Shelter in an Urbanizing World, oneof the first books to deal with Third World cities, is a good example.

However, third world cities can best be investigated by looking at them. One important and common characteristic of these places is that older modes of urbanism are being replaced by “new” forms of urban informality. It is in this regard that urban informality, as situated in many Third World cities, may be emerging as a new paradigm for understanding urban culture.

Ananya Roy, professor of Post-colonial study, is one of the early scholars who doresearch on urban informality. Urbaninformality: transnational perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America,and South Asia edited by her and professor Nezar AlSayyad of urban planning and urban history, focuses on the questions of why we need to pay attention to informality, what is informality and how to analyze it from transnational perspective in the context of globalization and liberation.The papers in this volume offer numerous points of departure for future theoretical and practical research in the field of urban informality.

Why informality is important to urban studies?

Urban informality as a way of life is not new. Indeed, one may argue that it has existed since the Middle Ages in different forms, and that informal economies have persisted in many rural areas, particularly in the developing world. Urban informality may neither be a totally new analytical concept, nor a new urban process. What may be new now is the re-emergence and retrenchment of urban informality as a way of life at this moment of globalization and liberalization.“Time”is the core to the interpretation of informality as a new urban lifestyle or an analytical framework. With the arrival of globalization and liberalization in 1970s, dramatic political and economic changes begin to happen in various countries, and urban informality changes synchronously. This is especially phenomenal in the third world countries.

What may most be needed today in thinking about urban informality is a shift of analytical framework. Thus, the current era of liberalization and globalization should be seen as giving rise to a new form of informality — one with several key attributes: large adjustments in quantity and structure, for example, some informality is re-emerging and increasing, and some informality is retrenching; highly permeable to urban life and production, the informal process has invades the work, time, family and gender roles of multiple individuals as neve rbefore; the emergence of complex, multi-subject relationships, including the interaction of urban-rural society, the state, the market and social groups or individuals. Roy says in the last chapter that urban informality is the"representation". That is, through the lens of informality, we cansee the forces of globalization and liberalization that determine today’s urbanfabric, reveal the operational thinking of capital, political and culture from the phenomenon of “informal” people, activities and organizations, and finally capture the “way of life” of contemporary urban people.

Urban informality does not simply consist of the activities of the poor, or aparticular status of labor, or marginality. Rather, it is an organizing logic which emerges under a paradigm of liberalization. It is a process of structuration that constitutes the rules of the game, determining the nature of transactions between individuals and institutions and within institutions

What is urban informality?

Urban informality refers to the manifestation of informal processes in the urban environment. Any discussion of informality inevitably must begin with the emergence of the “informal sector” as a concept in the early 1970s. The discussion was ultimately rooted in descriptions of the movement of labor tocities in the 1950s and ’60s. Among the earliest to identify this trend, WArthur Lewis proposed a two-sector model for understanding the new migration ofpeople and the manner of their employment. Urban informals today represent an“[ever] increasing number of unemployed, partially employed, casual labor, street subsistence workers, street children and members of the underworld.”

When taking formality as reference, “If formality operates through the fixing ofvalue, including the mapping of spatial value, then informality operates through the constant negotiability of value and the unmapping of space.”

In its operationalized definition, it covers subjects as discrete as poverty,labor, and space, so there is no clear demarcation of informality in the book. Researchers usually distinguish by profession, and take the degree of rationalization as the key variable. Informal means traditional and marginal. In the early, hart and the international labor organization put forward a setof binary opposition dichotomy between the formal sector and the informal sector. Groups that working in the informal sector are therefore placed in this category. Immigrants, slum dwellers and other subaltern were explicitly identified with informality from the very beginning. The informal seems to be branded with poverty and marginality at the source of the academy.

But today, no matter in what principle or unit, its scope and attributes seem increasingly diverse and borderline obscured: The same individual may have both formal and informal jobs. Husbands and wives within one family may belong to the formal and informal sectors respectively. It is even more common to see that informal and formal sectors are linked together in the economy chain. But not only that, many middle class are also forced into the informal sectors. Once it comes down to the concrete analysis, this book believes that the only appropriateway is to consider the fluid informality in the context of specific regional experiences and at the local scale.

How to study urbaninformality ?

The book deals with this question in three thematic sections: “Liberalization, Globalization and Urban Informality”, “The Politics of Urban Informality” and“Transnational Interrogation”. First of all, as mentioned above, the rapid problematization of informality in the current era is premised on the change of The Times, which means that informality must be anchored in the structure of liberalization and globalization. Is liberalization good or bad? What is the relationship between liberation and informality? Liberalization would lead to modernization and conflict in Karachi, replacing the old informal sectors with other new informal sectors; The modern economy and market principles of liberalism may cause problems such as inequality and exclusion to the grassroots, thus pushing them to adopt the strategy of the “quiet encroachment”. All these issues mustbe reconsidered or clarified in the new context. Secondly, the perspective ofpolitics. When the liberalization force enters the country, developmentalism, nationalism and ethnic culture emerge constantly. As a result, multiple subjects compete for resources in the form of the space, center or marginality. The gentrification in Calcutta, the housing problem in Egypt and the nationaland ethnic conflicts in Israel all analyzed the political orders represented by urban informality from different perspectives. Last but not least, understandthe informality from a transnational perspective. What the book is talking about are “not only different geographies of informality but also different geographies of knowledge.” Each localized or uneven distribution geography implies the existence of the discourse of the “elsewhere”. To examine or interrogation the question of one context with the idea of another background will make us redirect and locate the interactions of different geographies. Only in this way, we can reach beyond the geographic boundaries to larger and deeper questions.

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