Abstract
Informality-of-need and informality-of-desire
In a recently published paper on Planning Theory, entitled ‘Asking “Third World questions” of First World informality: Using Southern theory to parse needs from desires in an analysis of informal urbanism of the global North’, Ryan Thomas Devlin develops inspiring reasoning about informal urbanism in the so-called ‘global North’. The author argues convincingly that the majority of academic literature on this topic is characterised by the failure ‘to critically assess the different purposes and consequences of disparate informal actions and the different political subjectivities of various informal actors. I am specifically speaking here of the differences between acts undertaken by the urban poor to meet basic needs and those engaged in by more well-off residents for convenience, efficiency, or creative expression’ (Devlin, 2018: 570). It is from this perspective that Devlin (2018) suggests identifying two categories, informality-of-desire and informality-of-need, whereby the former refers to informal practices originating from the ‘desires of middle- and upper-class urban residents, and the latter represent[s] strategies to meet [the] needs of the urban poor’ (ibid.: 570).
The difference between informality-of-need and informality-of-desire that emerges from Devlin’s analysis is both analytical-descriptive and political-normative. From an analytical-descriptive viewpoint, informality-of-need and informality-of-desire are factually different, primarily in terms of the players involved (the urban poor in the first case, and middle- and upper-income urban residents in the latter) and the underlying reasons (need vs desire). However, the difference between these two categories is also political-normative in nature. According to the author, in fact, ‘while informality born of need has the potential to challenge dominant, exclusionary regimes of spatial management, informality born of desire can serve as a back door for neoliberal ideologies that uncritically champion individualism, self-help, and privatization’ (Devlin, 2018: 580).
The conceptualisation proposed by Devlin (2018) is extremely relevant for academic research on informal urbanism for a variety of reasons. These include the fact that it constitutes a fundamental and timely attempt to posit a broad and comprehensive view of informality in the global North (and beyond), which transcends a sort of myth of marginality with an orientalist flavour (Angotti, 2013) which tends to interpret informality as necessarily embedded in a specific social condition (i.e. deprivation and marginalisation) and, therefore, related to a specific social segment (i.e. the poor). From this viewpoint, Devlin (2018) is in tune with a growing number of studies that, in recent years, have demonstrated that informal urbanism surpasses the action of poor and marginalised groups – in the global North (Banks et al., 2020; Chiodelli, 2019; Mukhija and Loukaitou-Sideris, 2014) as well as in the global South (Ghertner, 2015; Moatasim, 2019; Müller and Segura, 2017) – also being practised by middle-income and wealthy urbanites, as well as by players who are not socially or politically marginal (e.g. public administrators, politicians, entrepreneurs, criminal organisations, ethnically dominant groups). All of these studies have clarified that informality is an extremely diversified phenomenon in terms of forms, players, motivations, causes, meanings and implications, which rejects any overly simplistic reductionism.
Beyond a dichotomic view, for a more sophisticated understanding of informal urbanism
The commendable conceptual reflection initiated by Devlin (2018) can (and should) be continued, to make more sophisticated and detailed the somewhat simplistic picture that, unintentionally and indirectly, might emerge from the ‘informality-of-need/informality-of-desire’ dichotomy. There are two main directions in which such a theoretical development should take place.
First direction: towards a more sophisticated conceptualisation of informal urbanism in terms of empirical breadth and depth. From Devlin’s (2018) perspective, the distinction between informality-of-need and informality-of-desire seems to correspond almost automatically to a demarcation concerning the social status of the players involved in informal urbanism – as if the basic motivation that drives informality derives univocally from wealth (i.e. the poor practice informality essentially out of need, others out of desire). This characterisation certainly captures a portion of the reality of informal urbanism, both in the global North and the global South, that is, the fact that the decision to opt for a certain informal practice is, in the case of the poor, almost always a necessity linked to their condition of marginality and deprivation (i.e. it is a sort of forced choice), whereas in middle- and upper-income urbanites it often originates from the sphere of preferences (and it is, therefore, just one of the many options available to them). Such an interpretation, however, risks obscuring the multiplicity of reasons that leads to a certain informal practice. This is particularly evident when analysing housing informality in southern European countries, where informal practices are extremely widespread in various urban fields, are phenomenologically varied, and are employed by a large number of heterogeneous subjects (Chiodelli et al., 2021). As comparative housing studies have convincingly argued (see, for instance: Allen et al., 2004; Arbaci 2007, 2019), housing informality in several southern European countries must be interpreted within the framework of the features and functioning of their welfare and housing systems. Therefore, the roots of informal housing cannot be dissociated from the complex entanglement of different elements, including cultural features (e.g. a certain extended conception of the family), historical aspects (e.g. a late industrialisation and urbanisation process), institutional characteristics (e.g. weaknesses in civil administration, which is deeply marked by clientelism) and policy elements (e.g. regularity of amnesty initiatives for illegal development). Against this background, the binary conceptualisation proposed by Ryan Devlin risks not only leading to a simplistic and reductive understanding of informal urbanism in southern European countries, but also being analytically ineffective – in many cases, in fact, informal urban practices indissolubly mix together desire and need. Similar shortcomings may also emerge in the interpretation of informal urbanism in other parts of the world. Hence, it seems worth moving towards more nuanced understanding and categorisation.
It should be noted that the call to go beyond the informality-of-need/informality-of-desire dualism does not involve dismissing completely the epistemological value of such a dual conceptualisation. It suggests that, in order to foster a deeper and more accurate understanding of the profound roots and forms of informal urbanism in the global North (and also, perhaps, elsewhere), this conceptual dichotomy is insufficient both for analytical purposes and in order to help design and implement more effective planning actions and urban policies in this regard.
Second direction: towards a more nuanced conceptualisation of informal urbanism in normative terms. As mentioned, the distinction between informality-of-need and informality-of-desire corresponds, from Devlin’s (2018) perspective, to somewhat univocal political-normative connotations. However, can it be true that informality-of-need always has counter-hegemonic potential, capable of creating new spaces of citizenship, while informality-of-desire is always a back door for neoliberal ideologies that uncritically champion individualism, self-help and privatisation? The answer to this question is no. In fact, once again, while Devlin’s conceptual dichotomy describes the dominant features of a portion of informal urbanism, it fails to capture fully the rich political-normative facets of the variety of informal practices in the global North. For example, in some instances, informality-of-need does not seem to have any counter-hegemonic potential (e.g. in the case of so-called ‘survival squatting’ 1 in the U.S., analysed by Herbert, 2018). In other instances, informality-of-need can even be seen as a practice that (unintentionally) fosters processes of individual appropriation and commodification of public assets (sometimes within a framework of exploitation of the poor by criminal groups), such as in the case of the illegal occupation of public housing units in Italy (see Belotti, 2017; Esposito and Chiodelli, 2020). At the same time, just to give an example, informality-of-desire is not a back door for neoliberal processes and ideologies in the vast majority of cases of political squatting which, although arising essentially from (political and countercultural) desires, has an explicitly and avowedly anti-neoliberal stance (see, for instance, Martínez, 2018; Vasudevan, 2015).
Interpreting informal urbanism from a southern (European) perspective
In conclusion, the analytical categories proposed by Devlin (2018), despite being inspiring, carry within them the risks typical of many binary conceptualisations, such as unintended reductionism. This does not preclude that these categories are extremely valuable if one interprets them as a stimulus to trigger a theoretical reflection, rather than as immediately operational analytical tools. It is against this backdrop that Ryan Devlin’s conceptual effort must be pushed ahead, in the direction of developing a more sophisticated and articulated (both in breadth and in depth) conceptual matrix. On the one hand, this matrix must be able to account for the multiple constitutive elements of informal urbanism practices beyond the motivations of the players and their social status, in order to grasp the phenomenological complexity of urban informalities in the global North. On the other hand, this matrix must account for the many threads connecting informal urban practices which, on the surface, appear to be extremely diverse (from political squatting to illegal construction of second homes by middle-income people, from informal Roma camps and precarious settlements by temporary migrants to the illegal sale of public housing units); this would allow a better understanding of the overall normative and epistemic implications of informal urbanism (see Chiodelli and Grazioli, 2021 for a development of this reasoning).
Against this background, I would like to conclude with a geographically biased note. With a view to developing an interpretation of informal urbanism in the global North which is, at the same time, comprehensive but attentive to the internal heterogeneity of the phenomenon, we cannot avoid considering carefully a ‘southern European perspective’. In many southern European countries, in fact, informal urbanism has been a structural component of urban development for decades, being widespread and taking extremely varied forms (Chiodelli et al., 2021). Furthermore, academic and public reflection on this topic is quite robust here, having been started well before the ‘Southern turn’ in urban studies and planning – although it has struggled to enter the international debate due to language constraints. This is why it is urgent to overcome the dichotomy of ‘Southern theory versus Northern theory’ – whereby the ‘north’ corresponds mostly to the Anglo-Saxon world, while, on the contrary, significant internal diversity also characterises the ‘global North’ contexts, as testified by the specificity of southern European countries. 2