Abstract
The US-American city is an organised place. What distinguishes a city is the orderliness of its public sphere, convenience of its layout and services, beauty of its architecture and fairness as well as the responsiveness of its institutions. Much of this orderliness is attributable to laws, regulations and policies that work in tandem with private market and community initiatives. But the vibrancy of a city depends on the variety and spontaneity of activities that break the monotony of order.
Though the manifest order of the American city consists of plans, zoning and public health laws, traffic rules and organised markets as well as established neighbourhoods, often embedded in them are opportunistic and informal businesses, housing and activities. These unplanned, and usually unrecognised, functions and forms constitute the informal city that lies not so hidden within the structure of the ordered city. This is the city of street vendors, day labourers, rented basements and unauthorised subdivisions, privatised public spaces, street art, music as well as spectacles. These are some of the expressions of informality in American cities. They bring a touch of ordered-disorder to cities.
The informality of businesses and housing is widely recognised and extensively studied in the Third World cities, where informal activities are sometimes the dominant elements of urban life. For American cities, informality is a neglected topic. The Informal American City is a successful attempt to bring out the wide range of manifestations of informality within the American cities. This edited book offers 15 case studies of informal practices, such as garage sales, secondary suites in homes, community gardens, food carts, day labourers and rental parking on house lots and other unauthorised activities, described mostly by urban planning academics.
The book defines informality right on the first page as ‘multitude of activities taking place beyond the regulation of the state’. This conception of informality is woven into the analytical frameworks of almost all case studies, whose contributors have examined wide-ranging activities that fall at best near the margins of legality and civic order. These are not illegal activities of criminal intent, e.g. racketeering, the drug trade or prostitution. The Informal City is different from Sudhir Venkatesh’s (2013) Floating City, which describes the underground economy of New York.
Yet there is a paradox embedded in this conception of informality. It takes nourishment from ‘not conforming to regulations or public norms’, but policy prescriptions in almost all cases call for bringing such activities within the ambit of sympathetic and progressive regulations. Make them legitimate and accommodate them in cities’ public order, this is the common thread of contributors’ judgment. But if they come within the purview of regulations, many of these activities may lose their viability. They may cease to be informal. Also it is not entirely true that these activities are unregulated. They are subject to many rules, licences and inspections, but of course not many urban planning policies and regulations.
Yet I recognise there is no neat way of going around this paradox theoretically. The study of informality has to be based on local conditions, context and outcomes. The ‘beyond the regulation’ offers the first cut for probing into the phenomenon of informality. It is a working hypothesis for observation.
The contributors to this book have examined the commonly understood forms of informal businesses such as street vending, food carts, day labour markets, city farms, community gardens and garage sales for supplemental incomes. These activities: 1) are not entirely unregulated – they are subject to parking, food handling, public health and land use regulation, though those may be applied lightly; 2) often combine social relations with economic transactions. Margaret Crawford shows that garage sales turn into gifting away items and inviting buyers into homes. Jeffery Hou documents that community gardens lead to community barbeques, potlucks and plant sales. Street vendors and day labourers look after each other by keeping an eye out for city inspectors who may give out tickets for occupying public places without permit. The point is that the lower scale informal enterprises deploy social capital in economic transactions. This is a point often made in the literature on ethnic economies and niches: informality has sociological underpinnings.
Another category of urban informality examined in the book is the various forms of informal housing and the use of public space for private shelter. Vinit Mukhija estimates that 5.4% of the single-family homes in Los Angeles have secondary suites, mostly unauthorised. The important point to note is that these suites are not concentrated in poor areas. They are everywhere. The rich embrace informality also.
Peter Ward’s chapter on self-help communities points out the phenomenon of unauthorised subdivisions based on mere platting of land on urban peripheries in Texas and other southern states. His conclusion that people find ways of ‘creative workaround to survive and move forward’ is a reaffirmation of individuals’ resourcefulness and enterprise. Other examples of informal shelter include use of public places for sleeping, resting and domestic chores. In this respect the unique case of Atlantic City is fascinating, where an abundance of public spaces allows the homeless to sleep and find shelter without much harassment. The point of these examples is to underline the fact that in myriad ways people find some living arrangements that can sustain them, even if less than satisfactory. Of course informal arrangements come to the rescue of the unhoused, but it is normatively a problem of the lack of public welfare services and not just a testimony to the usefulness of informality.
Gregg Kettle has an interesting perspective on informality, illustrated by the case study of street vending in New York. The distinction has to be made between informality as a ‘law avoiding’ or ‘law breaking’ activity. The relation of an activity to law is central to the concept of informality. But law can be ‘crystal’ (i.e. objective or specific such as a speed limit) or ‘mud’ (requiring subjective discretion in interpretation). It appears given an administration that does not misuse its discretionary powers; mud rules may be desirable to make informal activities into formal. What I take from this discussion is to allow some leeway for opportunistic, market-oriented activities without attempting to bring them into the enclosure of rigid rules, even progressive rules. Be sparing with the orderliness of planning.
Regarding the urban planning’s response to informal activities, almost every chapter (and author) in the book recommends accommodating and incorporating informal activities in the planning system. Aid and assist but bring the informality of all kinds into the urban order; this is the conclusion of the book. There is an emphasis on spatial policies that accommodate needs for informal housing, taco trucks, driveway rentals for parking, street vending and other manifestations of informality.
Yet an awareness of the counterbalancing of community interests also pervades in these judgments. The editors of this volume take a very balanced though sympathetic view of informality in the concluding chapter: recognising that informality is not always a virtue; accepting that legalisation and regulation of informal activities can have ‘devastating’ effects on them; and advocating a reformist stance towards informal activities by upgrading them.
Informality is one of those ‘wicked’ problems that urban planning often encounters. It has both social benefits and costs. It can generate negative externalities (obstructions on sidewalks, land use conflicts, misuse of public spaces, public health hazards, etc.), just as it represents the resourcefulness, creativity and enterprise of people. The informality and formality of activities are arrayed along a continuum. Unlike the Third World informal cities, informal activities in US-American cities are not entirely outside the regulatory regime. Street vendors in New York, for example, are subject to 45 separate rules, and food carts to 55 (p. 233). The point is that informality has to be viewed and treated as an expression of opportunistic and context-dependent activities, a form of ordered-disorder. It must be allowed to flourish as a form of social and individual entrepreneurship, without too much regulation and over planning, while containing its undesirable but unintended effects.