Neither friend nor enemy: Planning,ambivalence and the invalidation of urban informality in Zimbabwe

‘No sitting on imaginary fences’

As we concluded a conversation on urban informality in Harare, Zimbabwe, Principal Planner W (PPW) gave what he dubbed ‘a live illustration’. He cleared his neat desk and placed my clipboard at one end of the table, and a folder at the other end. Pointing at his handiwork, he explained,

These are the two alternatives we have in urban planning, viz., a choice between legal order and illegal disorder [sic].… As expert professionals, we planners reflect logical categories recognised in society. In planning, every single thing or activity must be put in one of the two categories, viz., legal versus illegal, which means order versus disorder.

He darted across the room to a cluttered bookcase and grabbed a disposable tumbler containing an assortment of coins, staples and paper clips. Emptying the contents onto the table, he spread them in the space between the clipboard and the folder. He explained, ‘This amorphous mass is the so-called informal sector occupying an imaginary no-man’s-land.’

Turning to Arnold, my research assistant, he asked, ‘What do you call somebody who refuses to fit into any category?’ He paused, indicating he needed an answer. A bewildered Arnold shifted uncomfortably and hesitantly responded, ‘Err, is it misfit?’ PPW tapped Arnold on the shoulder, saying:

That’s right, son. Misfits…. Dangerous misfits. They choose not to fit into any recognised category.… [B]ut we can’t allow that to happen, can we, really? Planning … can’t cope when anything or anyone sits on imaginary fences. It’s either kuno [here] or uko [there]. Waiketa? [You get the point?].

As he spoke, he pushed the ‘amorphous mass’ first to the clipboard and then to the folder, leaving the space in between clear. He concluded, ‘Planning says no to a fictitious no-man’s-land. There is no grey area in planning…. Everything in its place.’

PPW’s reference to misfits reflects ‘prejudicial attitudes that are given form in the world through … exclusionary institutions’ such as planning (Garland-Thompson, 2011: 591). This discussion happened in 2008. I did not think much of it until I replayed the recorded conversation in 2010. Intrigued, I extracted all instances where order/disorder, legal/illegal, formal/informal were mentioned. The fascinating results prompted me to ponder over these binary oppositions and how they were often appealed to in explaining, justifying or charting planning strategies.

At its most scientistic, planning relies on the strict categorisation and disposition of things in space. In the regulation of space, the basic categories revolve around legality/illegality. They serve as the template for regulation and criminalisation. Based on interviews with planners in Zimbabwe, this article discusses the inability of informality to fit into planning’s binarisms. I argue that because informality cannot be pigeonholed in either of the two categories of ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’, it instils a sense of unease in technocrats. Using Bauman’s figure of the stranger, I recast endless attempts to suppress informality as a symptom of hostility towards those who do not fit within binary antagonisms. Interpreting this as a failure of the order modernity is devoted to achieving through binarisms, I contend that as long as there is a single-minded devotion to order through binary schemes, informals will be (re)produced as ‘spatial undecidables’. I argue for the acceptance of ambivalence and the embracing of informals as different Others. This article makes theoretical and empirical contributions on a theme that is hitherto unaddressed. Despite the centrality of naming/classifying in planning controls, there has been no engagement with strangerhood in planning research.

In the next section, I discuss planning’s fixation with naming/classifying and the notion of the stranger, depicting strangerhood as an outcome of an obsession with binary oppositions as the basis for order. I then present and discuss the study, showing planners’ portrayal of informality as strangerhood. Before concluding, I reflect on the empirical material and discuss the article’s theoretical and empirical significance by among other things, juxtaposing it with Yiftachel’s concept of ‘gray spacing’.

Planning, space and the fixation with naming/classifying

Planning is the state’s premier spatial technology of domination (Pile, 1997). The domination is accomplished through abstract space (Lefebvre, 1991), a product of ‘representations of space’ comprising ‘the discursive regimes of theories, spatial and planning professions and expert knowledges which conceive of space’ (Shields, undated). Lefebvre (1991: 33) claims that these representations of space are ‘tied to the relations of production and to the “order” which those relations impose, and hence to knowledge, to signs, to codes, and to “frontal” relations’. They denote ‘conceptualized space’– the space of spatial experts like planners (Lefebvre, 1991: 38). According to Lefebvre (1991: 38), these experts ‘identify what is lived and what is perceived with what is conceived’, thereby making this conceptualised space ‘the dominant space in any society’. To achieve this domination, planners cut up urban spaces, meticulously naming and categorising them. By dint of this, the authorities determine ‘who or what is normal or what is abnormal, who or what is appropriate and who or what is inappropriate, and who or what can be conceived and who or what is inconceivable’ (Amin and Thrift, 2002: 105).

This bid to control space largely relies on classification, ‘a basic ideological mechanism’ (Cresswell, 1996: 161). In planning practice, it is classification that primarily determines where things should be and what, how and when things should be there. Accordingly, concerning space and place, it is the order imposed by planning that limits ‘when, where and how a thing shall be done’ (Freud, 2004: 38). Through this dominative mechanism, planning ultimately determines what is in place and out of place (Cresswell, 1996), and thence what is legal and illegal. For all their multiplicity and detail, planning controls fundamentally encapsulate this binary opposition in various permutations: permitted/forbidden legitimate/illegitimate, and so on. Spatially, one of the central functions of these binary antagonisms is to serve as the basis for criminalizing what is deemed to be out of place. The ‘either/or logics of categorisation’ (Pickering, 2001: 209) are indispensable to planning’s modernist conception of order, progress, betterment and wellbeing. However, oftentimes, this binarism faces challenges that subvert it, thanks to the figure of the stranger in the form of informality.

Planning, informality and strangerhood in urban Zimbabwe

The study

The article draws on qualitative research with planners in Harare. The in-depth interviews and two focus groups were conducted in December 2010. ² Twelve planners from local government, central government, the private sector and academia agreed to participate in the in-depth interviews and focus group (see Table 1). The research centred on urban informality with special emphasis on planners’ perceptions, understanding, attitude and interpretation regarding such aspects as legality and order. The focus was on the categorisation and assignment of urban informal livelihoods, where and why. ³

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Table 1.

Details of participants and interviews.

Planner ID	Location	Date interviewed
Principal Planner W	Central government	22 January 2008
Mr B	Central government	21 December 2010
Mr D	Private sector	13 December 2010
Mr L	Central government	16 December 2010
Mr R	Private sector/academia	13 December 2010
Mr T	Local government	16 December 2010
Mr V	Local government	17 December 2010
Mr X	Private sector	14 December 2010
Mr Y	Local government	20 December 2010
Mrs G	Local government	14 December 2010
Mrs Q	Central government	19 December 2010
Ms S	Local government	15 December 2010
Ms Z	Central government	22 December 2010

This is a study of professional planners in the state-directed statutory planning system in contemporary Zimbabwe during a time of political and economic crises (Kamete, 2009). Although non-formal/non-statutory forms of planning exist, statutory planning is the planning that is authorised and empowered by the state. In contrast to non-statutory forms of planning, statutory planning is about public control over private interests. Particularly in authoritarian states like Zimbabwe, statutory planning has a dark side (Yiftachel, 2000). It is this planning that informality encounters. The study is located within a particular historical, political, economic and social setting with an authoritarian state obsessed with order. It is about the perspectives of professional planners in a context where the regulatory and statutory framework reflects entrenched prejudice and resentment towards informality. Obviously, the perspectives of planners in the study are not necessarily all that shapes the governing of urban space. Other political and professional players are involved (Kamete, 2009). The article is about planners’ views, not actual acts of inclusion/exclusion. It illuminates standpoints that explain the status and handling of urban informality.

On urban informality as strangerhood

The study yields refreshing insights into the status of informality vis-à-vis urban planning. Zimbabwe’s planning system is steeped in modernity. The system, which initially closely modelled itself on planning in the metropole, has never wavered from modernist preoccupations with order and normalisation. Its naming and classifying function, as instantiated in forward planning and development control, remains a potent tool for establishing order, maintaining it, and quelling contravention. Typical of modern culture, the system is ‘desperate for order, quick to stifle transgression, uncomfortable with difference’ (Hughes, 2002: 571).

To what extent is Bauman’s notion of the stranger applicable to planning in Zimbabwe? Bauman’s theorisation is a sociological formulation focusing on modern culture in western societies (Rumford, 2015). This raises questions about context, discipline and intellectual heritage. Bauman’s modernity refers to the period that started in Western Europe in the 17th century (Månsson, 2008). In matters of applicability, where modernity started is not the issue, but what it implies. Though modernity can be traced back to Western European society and culture, it became a global trend (Berman, 1988). It implies ‘a series of profound cultural, economic and administrative rationalizations and differentiations of the social world’ (Månsson, 2008: 160). Zimbabwe’s planning system models itself on these ‘rationalizations and differentiations’ (Kamete, 2013). It also espouses modernism, which operates within but is distinct from modernity. Intellectually (and culturally), if we take modernism as referring to the visions and values that emphasise the power of humans to change the world by creating, improving and reshaping their environment using scientific knowledge (Berman, 1988: 16), then it snugly fits Zimbabwe’s planning system (Kamete, 2013).

Can ‘the stranger’ and ‘the informal’ be so neatly equated? Bauman consistently deploys the notion of stranger to unpack the thinking behind estrangement, marginalisation and exclusion (Månsson, 2008). Several scholars have productively expanded the notion to encompass ‘social undecidables’ based on various themes such as sexuality (Moran and Skeggs, 2004), disability (Hughes, 2010), citizenship (Rundell, 2004) and leisure (Blackshaw, 2003). This demonstrates the notion’s malleability. This article extends this formulation to informality. Bauman has never referred to informality when writing about strangers. However, the undecidability associated with strangerhood is applicable to informality. Although Bauman’s work has no explicit connection to informality, ‘his sensitivity to modern patterns of exclusion and ‘othering’ provides … a useful template’ (Hughes, 2002: 571) that helps us productively (re)conceptualise the relationship between planning, modernity and informality. To the extent that they threaten the ‘stability and coherence of the social order’ (Marotta, 2002: 38), and are liminal outcasts ‘constantly kept at bay’ by the statutory planning system (Månsson, 2008: 155), informals count as ‘strangers’.

In governing space, planning’s dualistic division of entities and activities has created categories that correspond to the friend/enemy binarism (Bauman, 1990; 1991). However, like elsewhere, this naming and classifying function has been exposed as not being able to contain the whole world (Phelan, 2001). It has spawned ambivalence in the form of informals – ‘spatial undecidables’ inevitably (re)produced in the interstices between the dualistic oppositions.

These ‘spatial undecidables’ are people for whom informality is a way of life. Neither criminal nor – from the standpoint of state-directed planning – respectable citizens, they are strangers who have rebelled ‘against the cosy antagonism … of friends and enemies’ (Bauman, 1991: 55). They have ‘open[ed] up the politics of representation to the poetics of transgression’ (Pickering, 2001: 217). What informality opposes is ‘opposition itself’ (Bauman, 1990: 53), in particular, the opposition between legitimate/illegitimate and inside/outside. By bringing the outside into the inside, they have disrupted ‘seemingly natural boundaries and boarders’ (Phelan, 2001: 29), thereby inducing anxiety, uncertainty and ontological insecurity in planners. Where there should be clear oppositions that enable knowledge and action, the undecidables threaten to bring paralysis (Bauman, 1991: 56).

By their very existence, these strangers have done the unforgivable: questioning ‘one of the fundamental binary oppositions of social interaction, that between friends and enemies’ (Järvinen, 2003: 217). Whereas friends and enemies (formal businesses and the criminal underworld, for example) stand in direct opposition to each other, informals rebel against this dual system. They have brought ‘the outside into the inside, the negative into the positive, the alien into the well-known’ (Järvinen, 2003: 217). The planners’ uneasiness and hostility are perhaps understandable. By their ‘sheer presence, which does not fit easily into any of the established categories’, informals

deny the very validity of the accepted oppositions. They belie the oppositions’ ‘natural’ character, expose their arbitrariness, lay bare their fragility. They show the divisions for what they indeed are: imaginary lines which can be crossed or redrawn (Bauman, 1990: 54).

And redrawn the imaginary lines they have, thus bringing ‘the outside into the inside, and poison[ing] the comfort of order with suspicion of chaos’ (Bauman, 1991: 56). These neither/nor beings have doggedly wreaked havoc on planning’s cherished either/or constructions (Bauman, 1991: 56). It is this underdetermination that is the potency of these undecidables. Their being nothing carries the horrifying possibility of them being all: the ultimate ambivalence that generates paralysis. Unsurprisingly, planners are not amused by such ambiguous labels as ‘semi-legal’ and ‘extralegal’. If recognised, these ambivalent terms would bring chaos to planning’s hegemonic order. In modernist planning, ‘chaos is the arch-enemy of a rationalising order that demands homogeneity, clarity and perspective’ (Hughes, 2002: 572). Most chillingly, the resultant ambivalence would compromise the basis for rational action.

From the standpoint of the rationalist modernity cherished by planners, as ‘bearer and embodiment of incongruity’ (Bauman, 1991: 61), informality ‘resist[s] the triumph of reason’. So, it is rejected or forgotten (Touraine, 1995: 201). This powerful rejection has found expression in anthropoemic and anthropophagic strategies (Bauman, 1995: 179-80). These represent an attempt to restore order, to banish ‘impurity’, to put everything back in its proper place, in order to avoid the spectre of dirt or filth (Cresswell, 1996; Douglas, 2002). Order demands the suppression of the middle ground – the troublesome and dangerous no-man’s-land – that is the source and breeding ground of ambivalence.

What accounts for the prevalence and persistence of antagonism towards the stranger among planners? This can be partly attributed to the colonial legacy and planning education. The dualisms in planning law, planning schemes and development plans were inherited from the modernist colonial planning system (Njoh, 2006). Planning education has contributed to the perpetuation of the antagonism by continuing to espouse and reflect the dualisms. Be that as it may, to hastily attribute everything to planning education and the colonial legacy is to miss a crucial point: planners are comfortable with the dualisms. Planners are located within a given historical, political, social and economic setting. Their relationships to the situated political and economic dynamics in which they are entrenched is important. ⁵ Their horror of multiplying ‘spatial undecidables’ should also be seen in the context of the wider national crisis in which planning functions. Through this crisis, ‘friends’ (formality) have dwindled and ‘strangers’ (informality) have become the norm. The expansion of strangerhood – interpreted by planners as defiance – is largely a reflection of a lack of alternatives.

While education, colonial legacy and context explain planners’ hostility, it seems this animosity is useful to planning. It enables planners ‘to evaluate and judge with certainty and to respond decisively to every phenomena [sic] in urban space’ (Ms Z). Further, the potency of the binarisms in reproducing existing power configurations serves elite interests and promotes their modernist aspirations (Kamete, 2016). This convergence of bureaucratic operational convenience with elite interests has contributed to the entrenchment of dualistic antagonisms.

Is the hostility exhibited by planners born of malice? I contend that the sentiments of planners betray not malice, but anxiety, fear, discomfort and horror. The strangers’ central problem is ambivalence: a threat to planning’s drive for order (Rumford, 2016). This induces fear of losing control and paralysis of action. What the planners betray is discomfort and anxiety resulting from the inability ‘to read the situation properly and choose between alternative actions’ (Bauman, 1991: 1). It is the horror of being rendered impotent, of seeing cherished knowledge invalidated by the underdetermined stranger who stubbornly self-defines and eludes official definitions (Bauman, 1991: 2).

Theoretical and empirical contributions

The article makes several key theoretical and empirical contributions. First, by connecting informality to strangerhood and ambivalence, the paper deploys Bauman’s thought-provoking sociological formulation in a new context (global South) and field (informality and urban planning). Second, when it has become fashionable to view cities and informality from the standpoint of informals, activists and politicians, the article makes empirical contributions by presenting and dissecting the uncoloured perspectives of planners. In so doing, it exposes their trepidation and hostility towards informality, uniquely recasting it as fear of the stranger and arguing that this is not antagonism to informality per se, but to its resistance to pigeonholing. The article proposes a refreshing explanation for the handling of informality by going beyond simplistic notions of modernism and order. It singles out naming and classifying as the bedrock of planners’ uneasiness and antipathy.

Third, theoretically and empirically, the article complements Yiftachel’s concept of ‘gray spacing’ (Yiftachel, 2009a). Gray spaces can be equated to the middle ground occupied by the spatial undecidables – ‘the non-position that exists in the space between given categories’ (Månsson, 2005: 160). As noted earlier, Yiftachel and others who have deployed his formulation do not explicitly engage the modernistic obsession with binarisms, but rather its consequences (Yiftachel, 2009a, 2009b; Sanyal, 2014; Jongh, 2015; Lutzoni, 2016). This article suggests that ‘gray spaces’ are a consequence of planning’s naming/classifying function. Writings on ‘gray spaces’ emphasise their being ‘regarded as unrecognized’ (Yiftachel, 2015: 730). This article provides deeper theoretical and empirical insights that could explain this ‘un-recognition’. It suggests the stranger can never be recognised; doing so would be tantamount to bringing the outside into the inside (Bauman, 1991: 56). The article posits that for planners, acknowledging informality – the embodiment of strangerhood – would be tantamount to embracing ambivalence. It would disrupt and invalidate the cherished binarisms, the knowledge on which they are based and the ontological security they provide.

Avni and Yiftachel (2014: 487) argue that state authorities are involved in producing and maintaining ‘gray spaces’ (cf. Roy, 2009). The planners’ aversion to the existence of ‘the most vexing and disturbing middle ground’ (Bauman 1995: 180) between legality and illegality confirms this assertion, but with an important clarification. The palpable repugnance towards spatial undecidables suggests that the (re)production and persistence of ‘gray spaces’ is not intentional. Rather, this spawning of spatial undecidables is a consequence of naming and classifying. Further, Yiftachel (2009b: 243; my emphasis) asserts that ‘in the urban policy sphere, “gray spaces” are usually quietly tolerated, while subject to derogatory discourses about their putative “contamination”, “criminality” and “danger” to the desired “order of things”’. The sentiments of planners confirm the existence of these derogatory discourses. However, this article questions whether what we see is urban policy quietly tolerating strangerhood (‘gray spaces’). It suggests that the quiet toleration might not be what it seems; this might be paralysis of action generated by what planners see as a horrifying situation: ambivalence (Bauman 1991: 244-245). This ambivalence-induced paralysis of techno-legal instruments explains why decisions on handling informality are frequently taken in the political sphere (Kamete, 2009).

Conclusion

Categorisation is key to the execution of planning’s mandate in the governance of space. Given that planning’s commitment to order is characterised by an attachment to dualistic oppositions, there is a case for deploying Bauman’s formulations of strangerhood, ambivalence and the friend/enemy binary antagonism. This reframing of the obsession with naming/classifying yields helpful insights into hostility to urban informality. Seeing informality through the lens of strangerhood and ambivalence (re)produced by the friend/enemy binarism, provides a productive way to recast not only the emergence and persistence of ‘gray spaces’ of informality, but also crucially, the uneasiness of planners.

The voices of planners demonstrate that binarisms are instrumental to the conception, imposition and maintenance of order and the forestalling of chaos, ‘the other of order and its pure negativity’ (Bauman, 1991: 7). Strangers that they are, informals defy this binarism, thereby opposing the ‘opposition itself’ (Bauman, 1990: 54). As spatial undecidables, informals resist and disorganise the neatness of binary oppositions (Rumford, 2015: 25). Their existence is a challenge to planning’s drive for order. This explains the planners’ unbridled animosity.

As revealed in the planners’ sentiments, at the heart of modernist planning is a strong commitment to ‘a dream of purity’ (Bauman, 1997: 5), hence the persistence of ‘a vision of order, a world clean and hygienic’ (Hughes, 2002: 573). In this schema, informality constitutes an impurity that needs to be banished, hence the ceaseless attempts to obliterate the troublesome middle ground. This explains the authorities’ refusal to recognise informality as a category sui generis.

In its bid to sever, correct, exile and normalise difference, planning has constituted out of its artificial order, a bothersome stranger. The problem with a single-minded pursuit of purity is that it becomes a never-ending routine because of failure to keep up with changes in the world that planning seeks to order. Accordingly, as noted by Hughes (2002: 573), ‘purity must be continuously redefined and new purifying projects continuously invented’. This, asserts Bauman (1997: 11), triggers a ‘state of perpetual beginning [which] generates ever new “improved” targets of purity and with each new target cuts out new categories of “dirt” – an unheard-of dirt and an unprecedented dirt’. Consequently, as reflected in the voices of planners, ‘order making now becomes indistinguishable from announcing ever new abnormalities, drawing ever new dividing lines, identifying and setting apart ever new strangers’ (Bauman, 1997: 11).

This might explain why the informal sector continues to be an unresolved issue in planning in the global South. It is evident in the endless (re)conceptualisation of informality: from dualist, to structuralist, to legalist, to illegalist approaches (Potts, 2008). All these approaches prescribe anthropophagic responses in the form of ‘inclusion’ or ‘integration’ as the panacea to the ‘problem’ of informality (Kamete, 2017). Planning’s role as the custodian of space gives it a prominent position in these endless quests. That there has never been a conclusive resolution to this problem is symptomatic of the absence of a way to conceptualise, name, classify and respond to the stranger that is informality. On the part of planners, it is partly a symptom of the inability or refusal to become more reflexive about the stranger as a product of the modernist fixation with the creation, imposition and maintenance of an artificial order (Clegg, 2008: 445) and of the inadequacy of the dualistic antagonisms to contain everything.

The only way to break this endless labour of naming and classifying is to recognise the inadequacy of binary antagonisms and take the ‘strangers’ for what they really are: neither ‘friends’ in the sense of being ‘like us’ nor enemies in the sense of being ‘against us’ (Bauman, 1991). This entails a willingness to embrace informality as a representation of itself ‘instead of treating … [it] as an unwanted peculiarity constantly out of place’ (Månsson, 2008: 170). This would end attempts to forcibly fit this stranger into binarisms. This could enable planners to reinterpret strangerhood and the ambivalence of informality not as an existential threat, but as mere difference. It might lead to a realisation that ‘the anxiety of strangers’ should not be mistaken for or converted to ‘the fear of enemies’ (Segal, 1998: 271). While it is not unusual to feel a certain ‘discomfort of strangers’ (Noble, 2005), this should not be taken to mean the permanent loss of ontological security. Rather, for reflective practitioners, this should, as Segal (1998: 271) suggests, be ‘an occasion for an existential philosophical education … in which the resolute acceptance of strangerhood allows us to reflect on our taken-for-granted about the everyday’.