Introduction: A processual approach to informalization

Introduction

After decades of global economic restructuring, in which the shift from manufacturing to services has produced unprecedented levels of inequality affecting employment, public services, and livelihood in cities in the Global North, these locales are seeing an expansion of informal work as a means of coping with declining formal sector employment, and in response to the downsizing of the welfare state that in prior decades provided a safety net to mitigate economic precariousness. Because informality has long been associated with the poorer economies of the Global South, these transformations are generating new questions about the extent of convergence across cities of the globe. To the extent that informality has long been considered an attribute of ‘backward’ economies that have not yet adopted the property rights regimes and institutional capacities to provide for and regulate citizens and their activities, its spread to cities of the Global North allows not just a questioning of the concept of modernization but also the assumed locations and forms in which it manifests. Most importantly, these transformations call for a new empirical agenda focused on informalization and its implications for the state’s capacities to establish social, spatial, political, and economic order at the scale of the city. This monograph issue of Current Sociology examines global patterns of informality and their impact on the city as a privileged site from which larger societal orders emanate and through which new modernizing processes and conflicts over them now manifest.

Modernization and informality

Historically, the construction of the modern state combined with the requisites of capitalist development to give life to multiple efforts to order complex social and economic practices, often with the aim of better controlling societies and enabling more robust markets. This project was unevenly accomplished in various countries of the North and South through the development of instruments of regulation such as maps, censuses, and a legal system of land property. These instruments were usually imposed by state authorities, allowing them to simplify complex realities by creating standard legibility. As Scott (1998) demonstrates in his North–South comparative study of modernization, the modern state developed two main mechanisms through which order and control were formalized: the simplification of complex realities through legible instruments (maps, statistical categories, etc.) and their miniaturization (i.e., the organization of territories into smaller manageable units within which only relevant variables were considered).

It is important however to add a third mechanism: dichotomization, that is, the discursive and ideological imperative to separate the formal and the informal, the public and the private, the traditional and the modern, or even the advanced and the backward. Where all three formalization processes occurred successfully, the resulting modern state was better able to centralize legitimate authority at the expense of other forms of political authority (such as traditional chiefdom, urban guilds, or the like). As such, actions of state actors were informed by the assumption that development occurred through the conquest and reshaping of ‘untamed’ spaces and practices through social and spatial integration and in the service of formalization.

On the national scale, this entailed a ‘colonization’ of national space through major infrastructural projects like roads, water, and electricity, with the aim of integrating people, places, and natural resources into a larger project of employment and economic expansion. At the level of the city, architect-planners’ programmatic concerns with rationalizing social and territorial control were manifest in the development of urban plans with a strict spatial and social order, whose compliance was in turn regulated by the state, whether local or national. Different parts of the city were not only preserved for different social and economic functions and populations, there was little room for any ‘pre-modern’ mixing of land uses or informal activities in those areas designated as sites for a modern economic and political order. As was argued for society itself (Parsons, 1937), strict differentiation of function and standardization of norms as well as their legitimate regulation by the authorities became the hallmark of the modern city (often leading to the coexistence of a ‘formal’ and an ‘informal city’ in contiguous metropolitan space), while citizens themselves internalized the ethos and social expectations associated with modernity and the state’s monopoly of the institutions of coercion and the imposition of order.

The ambitious endeavor of formalization finds its roots and justification in the Enlightenment’s desire for regularity as well as a linear conception of history framed by the ideas of progress and development. It was based on the presupposition that past actions condition the calculated future, thus leaving little room for considering the contingencies of present conditions. Although most clearly seen in the Global North where modern social sciences’ adoption of rationality as the epistemological foundation of knowledge reinforced such views and the political project of modernism more generally (Foucault, 1980), the modernist ethos as a way of organizing society also extended its reach in territorial scale. With the global dominance of the North, a similar ontology was imposed on the Global South through various forms of colonialism and imperialism, leading to uneven patterns of capitalist development (Amin, 1976, 1994).

To be sure, in the spirit of activist political economy coming from critics of capitalism, this ethos did not evolve without challenge. Many such responses first emerged on the scene in the 1970s, as the world economic system was going through important transformations, as countries of the Global South were winning independence, and as new social claims were emerging on the streets of cities around the world (feminism, youth movements, environmentalism). These events helped lead to scholarly and political interrogation of these so-called modernizing processes, with much of the focus on the economic dimensions of the extension of modernity in global space, and how it produced uneven economic development, economic dependency, or unequal core–periphery relations that reinforced the hegemony of the Global North over the South.

Scholars argued that Northern hegemony – and the attendant theorization of the modernizing ethos of dominance through a political economy lens – was significant not just because it created dependency of the South on the North or reinforced global inequalities, but because it led to a territorial subdivision of functions and connections within Southern countries themselves, reproducing uneven development on a variety of scales smaller than the nation-state. Concern with the negative effects of this phenomenon was reflected in the embrace of such notions as internal colonialism (Walton, 1975), urban core and periphery (Timberlake, 1985), and (urban) citizen vs. (rural) subject (Mamdani, 1996), concepts which captured the ways that the imposition of the North’s modernist projects produced a new array of spatial, political, governance, and citizenship distinctions within countries of the South, primarily between cities and countryside, as well as within cities themselves between populations more socially and spatially linked to the elite economic and political projects of colonial domination and ‘indigenous’ residents who migrated from a countryside ravaged by colonial extraction.

From static condition to ongoing process

Our objective in this monograph issue is to move beyond these stark distinctions between the ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ world, and to reflect on the limitations associated with dichotomous framings of the formal and informal, the traditional and the modern, and their related assumptions about the nature of governance, citizenship, and urban form. Building on Jennifer Robinson’s notion of the ordinary city (2006), as well as Ananya Roy’s more recent efforts to rethink North and South (Roy and Crane, 2015), we are more interested in what these activities, concepts, and locations share in common.

In order to achieve these aims, we focus on processes and mechanisms of informalization, as well as formalization and even re-informalization, rather than on formality or informality as objects (i.e., an economic sector, a form of human settlement, a set of political habits). That is, we seek to explore the nature and quality, more than the mere existence and quantity, of ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ practices. We are particularly interested in exploring whether cities with more spatially, economically, and politically vibrant residues of informality are managing the transitional moment brought by intensifying urbanization and global economic crisis differently than those more ‘modern’ locations where formal and highly regulated political, economic, and spatial practices have been more fully absorbed into city life.

As a conceptual starting point for advancing and thinking through these aims, we use the notion of uneven formalization rather than uneven capitalist development (or uneven modernization), primarily because there is relative consensus about what constitutes capitalist development (and modernization) as well as the fact that it has been identified as operating both globally and unequally. In contrast, the discourses and practices of informality remain shrouded in misperception and normative ambiguity, and, with a few exceptions (see Hernandez et al., 2009; Mukhija and Loukaitou-Sideris, 2014; Wacquant, 2008; Williams and Schneider, 2016), are generally assumed to be properties of cities of the Global South. By asking questions about the nature, extent and spread of informality within and between cities of the Global North and South, and by analyzing such developments as ongoing and incomplete, we both acknowledge and move beyond the developmental biases in conceptualization even as we are better able to theoretically accommodate a phenomenon (informality) that may have intensified everywhere as a consequence of recent economic transformations – whether in the North, as it faces deindustrialization and economic crisis, or in the South, where such problems have a much longer history.

Likewise, recent developments require an understanding of the shifting and uneven temporalities of informality. For example, although the tendencies towards standard formalization were particularly strong in the industrialized countries during the Fordist age (labor laws, tax compliance, respect for the rule of law), this has changed more recently with the profound changes brought by accelerating globalization and urbanization processes. In less industrialized countries, the trends have been historically different and temporally connected in the first phase to urbanization without industrialization (Arrighi, 2010 [1994]). As such, a focus on processes of formalization and informalization as they unfold in space and time will allow scholars to shed the modernist trappings associated with standard methods of classification and observation, by providing an opportunity to determine the conditions under which the established rules and regulations of capitalist development and modernization (i.e., markets, laws, property rights, democratic procedures) are in fact violated or transgressed in everyday practice even when they are universally embraced or enshrined in the institutions of modern states and societies.

Such developments require us to question whether informality – understood here through the lens of flexibility, negotiation, or situational spontaneity that push back against established state regulations and the constraints of the law – is more widespread than is commonly assumed. It also suggests that we ask what political requisites or teleological presuppositions might account for the failures to ‘see’ informality and its partial or uneven spread in space and time; and to consider whether the pursuit of such questions can shed new light on contemporary processes of state restructuring, citizen–state relationships, and larger patterns of social and economic development more generally defined.

Granted, there already is a very large literature on informality, focused primarily on informal firms and work (Hart, 1973; Moser, 1978; Portes et al., 1989) in which the assumption is that such activities emerge because cities of the Global South face difficulties in ‘catching up’ with the North by providing work or establishing universal welfare systems that guarantee health and education. Similarly, many studies of informal settlements (‘slums’) have focused on the necessity to formalize property titles and to modernize the state’s tools for contract enforcement in countries of the Global South (De Soto, 1989). As such, despite the fact that there remains hearty and vibrant debate over what exactly constitutes the boundary between the formal and the informal as well as their relationships to each other, the presence and significance of informality in cities of the Global South is not under debate even if it is acknowledged that it is more visible in some cities than others.

What is not nearly as well explored, however, are the shifting temporal, spatial, and sectoral contours of informalization, whether within a single national setting, or within and between locations in the Global North and South. The aim of this monograph is to explore such patterns with an eye to breaking down assumptions about when and where informality materializes. In so doing, we build on recent research that has explored a wider range of social and political relations so as to expand the definitional boundaries of the concept of informality beyond the purely economic (Auyero, 2007; Davis, 2012), and in ways that profoundly impact our understanding of how city spaces are used, developed, and reshaped (Simone, 2010).

The collection begins with a section titled ‘Cracks in the modernization process’ which showcases articles that raise questions about the relationship between modernization and informality in contexts as diverse as the Netherlands, Mexico, Spain, and Pakistan. This is followed by a second section that delves more explicitly into the relations between formalization and informalization in Johannesburg, Delhi, East Jerusalem, and Sao Paulo, examining the context-specific legal, social, economic, and political mechanisms that link these processes together in each setting. The third section and conclusion offer theoretical and epistemological reflections on how we might effectively think beyond dichotomization through novel forms of comparison, a focus on circulation, and an embrace of ambiguity.

Cracks in the modernization process

In this first section, we explore the ways that informality challenges, undermines, engages, or transforms the basic modernizing principles of society. Fundamental organizing structures and processes commonly associated with modernity, such as citizenship, public services and infrastructure access, and the provision of welfare benefits to offset the worst effects of economic crises, are put to test. In the Netherlands and Spain, Mexico and Pakistan, the performance of modern principles does not unfold as neatly as expected. In her study of citizenship practices in Utrecht, Verloo ethnographically explores how bureaucrats enact statehood and interprets citizens’ margin of maneuver in the implementation of security and welfare programs. What she calls the dramaturgy of interactions between formal and informal, is illustrated through a method of narrative mapping. She describes citizens and bureaucrats’ version of a local story in order to distinguish between tactical and strategic citizenship. Some stories, she argues, are more ‘tellable’ than others, and tensions between these diverging interpretations of problems to be solved constitute cracks in the modern ideal of citizenship.

In its modern liberal conception, the citizen–state relationship is often seen as technical (the protective state, supplier of services, and risk manager). It is also seen as evolving within a stable framework for the expression of conflicting opinions (vote, participation, contention). This relationship is co-constructed by citizens and the state in order to channel political conflicts and sustain democracy. Modern citizenship is thus defined as an ensemble of individual rights and responsibilities such as voting and expressing opinions through institutionalized mechanisms such as public consultation, schools, or registered social movement organizations. Verloo’s article adds to this debate by vividly illustrating how citizenship is much more than institutionalized relations. It also is performed at the street-level through minute everyday interactions.

The interactive nature of state–citizen relations is a recurrent theme in most of the contributions. In De Alba’s and Naqvi’s articles, it is explored through the lens of state adaptation strategies intended to cope with the breakdown of the ideal of universal public access to infrastructure such as water or electricity. While De Alba offers a typology of intermediary practices developed by the state to cope with water scarcity in the Mexico City region, Naqvi focuses on the flexible practices of low-level bureaucrats in the electric power sector in Islamabad. In both instances, state actors (bureaucrats or intermediaries) deviate from their own rules for the benefit of the public good. Such flexibility in the implementation of the law may take different forms, but in analytical terms there is convergence between the two cities, seen in the ways the state personalizes its interactions with residents for the sake of responding to their most pressing water or electricity demands. The result thus deviates from those articulated by formal bureaucratic procedures, something Shlomo (this issue) conceptualizes as ‘subformality.’

Interactive, personalized state–citizen relations in Utrecht, Mexico City, or Islamabad are infused with power relations. The modern state formalization project aimed at depersonalizing such relations in order to prevent abuses of power. With numerous cracks in this modernization project, however, it is clear that relations of domination and abuses of power have not been eliminated. De Alba’s reflections on the work of state-paid intermediaries illustrate how clientelistic practices are morphing with the country’s transition to democracy, and thus are not entirely eliminated. Similarly, one of Naqvi’s ethnographic vignettes describes how the powerful take advantage of flexibility through corruption, something also underlined by Pradel-Miquel in his study of Barcelona coping with austerity measures.

Power relations is the running theme of Pradel-Miquel’s contribution to our collective reflection on cracks in the modernization process. Using the case of Barcelona, he suggests that the severe economic crisis and austerity measures underway in Spain have transformed another modern ideal, that of rights-claiming. Grounded in the sociology of social movements, Pradel-Miquel illustrates the breakdown of the modern ideal of organized resistance. To understand how people in the poorest neighborhoods of Barcelona react to austerity policies, he argues, we must understand how the re-emergence of informal practices (waste picking, squatting) are transformed from morally justified survival practices to political claims and in certain cases have led to the co-production of new policies.

The central tenet of the sociology of social movements is that the state–citizen relationship is inherently agonistic in that it is based on competitive and often confrontational claim-making. The fact that these claims most often emerge from cities is rarely theorized. Consequently, political action beyond the formal public sphere is not recognized. Yet, formal claim-making is only one way to interact with the state; negotiation is another (for instance, bribing a corrupted official). Hiding from the state is yet another way (e.g., squatting). Bayat (2004: 81, 94) suggests that political subjectivity comes more in the form of a ‘quiet encroachment of the ordinary,’ which he defines as ‘noncollective, but prolonged, direct action by individuals and families to acquire the basic necessities of life (land for shelter, urban collective consumption, informal work, business opportunities, and public space) in a quiet and unassuming, yet illegal fashion. … the struggle of the actors against the authorities is not about winning a gain, but primarily about defending and furthering what has already been won.’ Pradel-Miquel’s article is filled with such examples. More so, he demonstrates how these informal practices have become central to movements with more international exposure (such as the Indignados).

In short, these four articles invite us to rethink fundamental concepts of modern society: citizenship, universal infrastructural access, and organized resistance. They expose different modernities, to use De Alba’s phrase, recalling Robinson’s (2006) work on ordinary cities. They highlight how governance is produced (as Naqvi puts it) rather than what normative ideals are enshrined in laws and state institutions.

Towards relationality

Focusing on the how entails paying attention to processes more than fixed objects. In this second section, we discuss informality in relational context, examining the connections established between informal groups and other actors and institutions, including the law. The state, the law, and the informal sector are repositioned from essentialized objects to relational processes involving various actors, spaces, and temporalities. Indeed, Schindler’s article argues forcefully that economic activities such as hawking or waste picking are not inherently informal. Instead, informality is assigned to them temporally and in certain specific spaces. This is what Tuvike, Neves, and Hilbrandt name ‘instants of informality’ in their contribution to the third section of this monograph edition.

This set of articles not only examines the social and political negotiations and servicing co-arrangements that informal sector actors establish with other civil society forces and/or the state. They also assess the ways these allegiances impact the basic building blocks of modern society: the distribution of justice, class relations, equality, and legitimate authority. Samson’s article explores how the law (more specifically a court ruling) is used by a group of reclaimers of reusable and recyclable materials in Soweto to produce new meaning. Instead of defining the informal as being outside the law, Samson describes strong ‘inneractions’ with the law (i.e., relations from within rather than between two discrete entities). Grounded in a Marxist relational ontology and critical legal studies, she demonstrates how a court ruling took life through constant production of meaning by reclaimers. Indeed, people rarely read or understand court judgments, but they use them in ways that are socially significant. On the Marie Louise landfill, the court ruling is interpreted in such a way as to exclude other potential workers and control the territory. The distribution of justice, in other words, is not the sole monopoly of the law and the public justice system.

A similar argument is developed by Denyer Willis through a case study of the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), a justice system organized by a criminal group in Sao Paulo, which he compares with the extensive practice of car cloning in the city. Denyer Willis speaks of clones and facsimiles existing not simply in parallel to the public justice system; car clones also are functional components of the same authority and practice system. Car clones are strongly related to public authority because, if they operate in exceptional territories, it is the exception that produces the norm. Stated differently, what is considered ‘normal’ public authority exists only because something is considered ‘exceptional.’ The normal and the exceptional, the formal and the informal, explains Denyer Willis, ought to be considered relationally as part of a single urban system – at least in Sao Paulo, for example, where bureaucrats themselves cannot distinguish between state-issued car identification and cloned ones. Denyer Willis’s contribution sheds light on the fact that the distribution of justice and authority does not emanate from a single center (the state). Instead, the state has lost the monopoly over authority and the distribution of justice.

Schindler’s article picks up on this critique of state-centered analyses of governance. With two examples of how non-state actors regulate wastepickers and hawkers in Delhi’s middle-class spaces, he argues that non-state actors have an effective sanctioning and regulating role. Middle-class associations have an effective role in regulating services and access to their residential and commercial spaces. Schindler then asks why the state is always privileged as the reference point of informality. He proposes instead to think in terms of local governance regimes, which decenters the analysis from state actors and sheds light on how class relations regulate urban space.

Recognizing the relationality of local governance regimes enables a much more complex analysis of how modern cities work. Yet, we should not stay blind to the consequences for equality. Equality of access to the ‘right to the city,’ including humane living conditions, is one of the strongest, yet most contested, ideals in modern society. If flexibility, adaptation, and non-state-centered arrangements may provide basic access to public goods where none was available, it paradoxically may also require setting aside the modern ideal of uniformity, standardization, and universality. This is what Shlomo examines in his article on efforts to formalize the public transit system of East Jerusalem. In this politically tense context, formalization efforts associated with Israeli state intervention in historically Palestinian neighborhoods were met with suspicion and resistance. Shlomo describes how planners deviated from professional norms and regulations in order to achieve some level of formalization. In order to stabilize the urban order, planners compromised and embarked on an irregular planning process. The result was inferior outcomes in the East side in comparison to the West side of the city – with these differentiated formalities, or ‘sub-formalities,’ serving to normalize marginality and inequality. This mutation of modern rationality, Shlomo concludes, actually reinforces state control, thus reminding observers that its originating aim was not to reduce inequality so much as to solve problems of urban disorder.

In sum, the four articles in this section illustrate how basic social needs such as the distribution of justice, the production of authority, the regulation of class relations, and reduction of inequalities are not the sole terrain of the state. Instead, myriad governance regimes, social interpretations of the law, irregular professional practices, and clones are negotiated. The multiple actors of these assemblages gain their identity in the very relational and contested processes of distributing justice, producing authority, regulating class relations, and reducing inequalities. Starting and ending points for negotiating justice, authority, power, and equity are not necessarily informal or formal; but outcomes or roles assigned along this continuum are produced through interaction itself.

Beyond dichotomization

In the last section of the monograph, our objective is to reflect on theoretical and empirical alternatives to modern dichotomizations. Some thinkers have already attempted to go beyond dichotomization. Marxist dialectics, for instance, is a fundamentally relational ontology. Classes exist only in relation to one another. These relations, Marx insists, are structurally-entrenched and conflict-ridden. It is precisely this emphasis on conflict that can only be resolved through revolution, which has been criticized by modern democratic theorists from Rawls to Habermas. Indeed, democratic theory sees in deliberation and negotiations a privileged channel to resolve conflict.

Crudely speaking, however, as inequalities between nations grew with the deepening and global extension of capitalism, critical social scientists began to engage in battle around two opposite forms of thought: structural determinism as influenced by Marx on the Left, and radical individualism as influenced by Hayek on the Right. Both camps sought to challenge and revolutionize social sciences, under the labels of critical political economy, postmodernism, and postcolonialism; and they all spoke strongly against the modern rationality dominating social sciences and radiating from Europe and North America in the forms of positivism and structural determinism. Scholars soon began documenting the ways in which the larger modernizing project of globalization – as both a discourse and a material practice – was annihilating social organization and political order at the level of the nation-state (often inspired by the earlier work of Foucault, 2004 [1977]). The use of the global scale as a key political and analytical reference point for understanding modernization was further bolstered by simultaneous critiques that Marxism, with its fundamentally conflictual view of the world (dominant–dominated, capital–labor, Global North–Global South), fell into the same modernist quest for simplification and order that mainstream social sciences perpetrated, thus hiding the messiness of reality (Latour, 2004). With the frontal challenge to Marxism, prior questions of uneven spatial and economic development, at whatever scale, lost much of their constituency (Roy and Ong, 2011).

The critique of modernist rationality did bring some important gains, including the questioning of foundational or key social scientific concepts such as society, nation-state, and wage labor. By so doing, critical voices began speaking against the modernist preoccupation with formalization, although not always framed as such, and implicitly advocating for a more purposeful recognition of informalization processes and their role in social transformations. But even with these advances, the attention to physical spaces, and particularly to the sub-global or sub-national territorial scales of modernizing processes, slowly began to diminish. Our intent in this monograph is to reinsert a critical appreciation of scale and spaces of re(in)formalization into this larger theoretical inquiry. It focuses its attention on how formalization unfolds in space, particularly in urban spaces, and asks whether (and how) patterns of economic globalization, governance, and the quotidian lived experience of contemporary urban life have mediated these processes and challenged dichotomizations.

The privileging of urban spaces as both the site and appropriate scale for our critical engagement with modernization theory speaks to the ‘return’ of informality in critical urban studies (Roy, 2005). This postcolonial literature on urban informality is more explicitly theoretical and critical than earlier work (for a good synthesis of these earlier studies, see Schindler, this issue). Its starting point is the various manifestations of informality in urban space, from land invasions to hawking, from street violence to street art (Rao, 2006; Yiftachel, 2009).

As early as 1970, Sennett argued for the importance of understanding how cities make use of disorder to produce new political regulations. More recently, Magnusson (2011) proposed a rethinking of political ontologies in order to ‘see like a city’ rather than like a state – by this meaning that critical social sciences might more fruitfully look into urban ways of life if we are to better understand the complex contemporary period (Boudreau, 2010). This collection of articles builds on both sets of inquiry, asking whether and how cities accommodate major societal transitions through informalization and with what implications for our theoretical understanding of modernization. The premise of this collection of articles, in short, is that the urban is where we can find alternatives to dichotomization.

There is a growing literature on relational thought which is captured in concepts such as assemblage or more broadly in non-representational theory. Our aim is not to directly insert this monograph into these debates. Instead, we wish to begin from concrete empirical examples of how people living in cities think beyond rigid categories of the formal and the informal and the power relations involved in these uses and abuses of categories. The articles of this last section provide three different epistemological devices that help us begin to conceive of alternatives to dichotomization: iterative comparison, the use of ambiguous categories, and the use of hermeneutics.

In their iterative comparative endeavor, Tuvike, Neves, and Hilbrandt reflect on how to compare differently. Using their individual research on informalization in Bafatá, Berlin, and Tallinn, they ground their reflection in the literature on urban comparativism. As different as these cities may be, the authors begin from the intuition that their ‘instants of informality’ are comparable. This monograph in its entirety, moreover, proceeds similarly: it begins with individual research to produce conceptual insights across a range of urban contexts that attend to what Tuvike, Neves, and Hilbrandt call ‘multi-sited individualizing comparison’ (see the concluding essay of this monograph for more on this).

And precisely because of the differences among the three cities, instead of focusing on converging and diverging aspects in each city, Tuvike, Neves, and Hilbrandt proceed through propositions that hold true in all three cases (and for the whole of this collection). Instead of positioning their cities on a development track (with more or less informality), they proceed through iteration. Comparative propositions, they suggest, constitute conceptual premises for identifying more meaningful ‘instants’ of informality. And epistemologically, such sensibilities are grounded in a situational approach: concepts and meaning are defined through the dialogical process of comparison, not beforehand as with a grid of comparable characteristics (see also Lamotte, this issue for a discussion of the situational approach developed by Mitchell, 1956).

In his article, Haid offers a second device to begin thinking beyond dichotomization: ambiguous categories, what he calls the ‘Janus face’ of urban governance. His empirical focus, like that of Naqvi, De Alba, Verloo, and Shlomo in this monograph, is on everyday stateness. Why, when, where, and how does the state act beyond its own rules? Haid’s reflection is inspired by Roy’s proposal to see informality as a device to understand the state. Through three vignettes from public parks in Berlin, Haid explores the ambiguity of state categorization practices. He asks what is being labeled as informal, when it is tolerated, when it is instrumentalized, or when it is repressed. In Thai Park, for example, food vendors are tolerated, but the state refuses to grant them licenses. In Tempelhofer Freiheit, ‘intermediate users’ are formally recognized as ‘urban pioneers’ to generate development through creative practices. In Gorlitzer Park, informal uses are repressed through the creation of a drug-free zone that gives more leeway to police.

Ambiguous categorization produces uneven geographies of law enforcement, as discussed by all authors in this collection. Reflections on the consequences of such practices on modern ideals of equality ought to be taken seriously. At the epistemological level, however, ambiguous categorization, just like iterative comparison, can prove to be as fruitful a device for analysis as it is for action.

Finally, Lamotte’s article proposes a third device: hermeneutics. Lamotte explains how Los Ñetas – a gang born in the prisons of Porto Rico and who circulated to New York City, Barcelona, and Guayaquil – produce a Ñeta world. It is not only the circulation of migrants that produces this Ñeta world, but also the development of a Ñeta law. Grounded in situational anthropology, Lamotte’s analysis explains how Los Ñetas came to create an imagined community of their own, a multi-sited global situation of co-presence which has meaning to its members. In their respective cities the Ñetas sustain various types of relations to the formal state (legal recognition as a non-profit organization, recipients of welfare benefits, and/or victims of criminalization). Yet, they also participate in a global Ñeta community, or world. With the concept of a ‘legal order’ developed to make sense of the relations between indigenous law and state law, Lamotte explores how Ñeta law functions. More than a set of rules to discipline and sanction, Ñeta law constitutes a world vision and prescribes continuous work on the self. Ñeta members live on a quest for perfectibility. Their choice to follow state law or Ñeta law is made following an ethical line of conduct. And this requires constant interpretation of the law (as illustrated by Samson as well). This is what Lamotte calls Ñeta hermeneutics.

How then can we as scholars develop alternatives to modern dichotomization? The articles here show how state and non-state actors themselves do not act with essentialized dichotomous categories of the formal and the informal. Instead, they think and act relationally. This is an invitation for researchers to develop relational analytical devices as well. The three devices developed in this last section of the monograph are closely connected to the empirical categories described throughout the publication. Iterative comparison resembles in many ways the practices of personalized interaction described in all the articles. Ambiguous categorization, more explicitly discussed by Haid, also recalls practices of adaptation and flexibility described in the other contributions. Finally, hermeneutics speaks to the various empirical practices of interpretation described explicitly by Lamotte, Samson, Denyer Willis, Verloo, but also in less explicit ways in the other articles.

The methodology of critique

All the articles involve some form of comparison: between social groups, between various forms and uses of informality (and with respect to the latter, over time, within the same city and across cities). What can be learned from these comparisons and how should we compare across different articles to achieve larger claims? How might a category of action, a specific practice, or an idea circulate from one place (or from one social group) to another, and what forms of knowledge does this produce and for whom? To a certain degree, all cases analyzed in this publication share some common (modern) concepts: citizenship, law, state, or order. Yet local understandings of these practices and shared concepts will vary according to local institutions and political cultures. Even so, if the same concepts circulate and cross-feed between places and actors, are we witnessing the formation of a new language of urban governance in the Global North and South (Simone and Boudreau, 2008)?

Taking a step back and pondering these questions, we suggest that more than order, dichotomies, regularity, and standardization, the articles presented here highlight mutually-productive interactions, adaptation, and flexibility. They also, however, point to domination, abuse, neglect, and the normalization of marginality. This suggests that any new language of urban governance must also sustain a critical project for emancipation emerging from both comparison and ethical interpretations (to use Lamotte’s term). The question thus remains as to how to compare both productively and ethically.

In the last several years, a lively debate on comparative urbanism has flourished in the fields of sociology and geography (Edensor and Jayne, 2012; McFarlane, 2010). Inspired by various literatures, from policy mobility, planetary urbanization, ordinary cities, to postcolonial calls for taking into account theory from the South, this debate positions the act of comparing what seems incommensurable as a critical form of knowledge production. There are generally two comparative approaches in this debate. First, scholars working with overarching concepts such as neoliberalization or planetary urbanization will search for local variations not so much in ‘quantity’ or degrees of neoliberalism, but in ‘quality’ or forms (Peck, 2015). Second, scholars more directly located in postcolonial approaches will insist on the need to let theory emerge inductively from a myriad of contexts.

Similarly, in this collection comparison comes as an outcome; it was not systematically projected prior to conducting research. Unlike Tuvike, Neves, and Hilbrandt’s iterative and dialogical comparative experiment, not all the authors of the articles met to discuss their work. Yet, as editors of this monograph issue, we have been able to practice what we might call intertextual comparison. In this way, we are prone to highlight what Tuvike, Neves, and Hilbrandt would call common ‘propositions’ emerging from the articles. Intertextual comparison reveals that cities in the North as much as in the South are witnessing increasingly visible cracks in their modernization process: from new forms of clientelism to the flexible and differentiated enforcement of rules, from new forms of citizen participation and legal interpretation to (dis)organized claiming, from a mutation of modern rationality in professional practice to the distribution of authority and legitimacy across state and non-state actors. What characterizes these practices is relationality, not dichotomization. This entails that we focus analysis on processes of (re)informalization. The texts in this publication reveal a set of interrelated mechanisms through which such processes unfold: interpretation, interaction, adaptation, and domination.

Putting these articles together, we aim to think inductively about ways to go beyond dichotomization (between the formal and informal, the North and the South, the state and outside the state, the modern and the traditional, etc.). The modern habit of classifying, comparing quantitatively or through convergence or divergence, or hierarchizing, is difficult to change.