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Informality is a critical theme in urban studies. In recent years, ‘the everyday’ has become a focus of studies on informality in African cities. These studies focus on particularity and place. They offer a useful corrective to top-down and universalising readings which exclude the daily experiences and practices of people from analysis. As we show in this article, everyday studies surface valuable insights, highlighting the agency and precarity which operates at the street level. However, a fuller understanding of informality’s (re)production requires drawing together particularist accounts with wider and more structural tracings. These tracings offer insights into the ways in which state and financial processes influence and interface with the everyday. In this article, we use the case of housing in Delft, a township in Cape Town, to demonstrate this approach and argue for a multi-scalar and relational reading of the production of informality.

Through the lens of South Africa's informal settlements, this paper explores the intersections between plans, practices, and materiality. These three arenas are each presented as uniquely agentic, contributing to plural configurations. In doing so, this work questions a prevalent tendency to frame governance/government solely as relationships between state and non-state actors. By reintroducing the agency and power of matter and materiality, not as adjunct or background, but as a critical technology of government and/in place, this work contributes to a growing debate within the (emerging) urban socio-technical systems literature.