Informal practices in politics and society in Brazil

Urban orientalism and the informal city in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

“…Our decision to examine informality through an orientalist lens is informed by recent work in postcolonial urban studies. New research has highlighted informality’s significance to processes of governance and development in contexts like Brazil (de Souza Santos, 2021; Fischer, 2021), including the state’s role in producing and maintaining the in/formal divide (Benmergui, 2012; Novaes, 2014). For those working in critical urban theory, what draws particular attention is the work that informality does: as a mode of capitalist urban development (Roy, 2009); as an aesthetic that enables urban displacement (Garmany and Richmond, 2020; Ghertner, 2015); and as an “imaginative geography” (Jazeel, 2019: 42) distinguishing Southern cities from Northern ones.…”

“…What remains overlooked, however, is what we might call the genealogy of the concept, tracing its lineage as an orientalist epistemology, and reasons for why the term continues to have such salience today. Though ideas of informality have increasingly drawn critical analysis (Banks et al., 2020) – with researchers exploring, for example, histories of urban informality (De Antuñano, 2020), its diversities and different scales (e.g., Harriss-White, 2020), and its material and discursive effects (e.g., de Souza Santos, 2021) – still lacking is historical perspective of the term, including the ways it helped change and preserve understandings of urban space in the late 20th century. We explore these processes in this article, focusing our analysis on informal housing (viz, favelas) in the city of Rio de Janeiro.…”

Doing the work: Locating labour in infrastructural geography

“…This is particularly salient at this moment, as political projects worldwide have only intensified their interest in so-called essential and infrastructural work in response to the Covid-19 global pandemic, and intensifying climate, economic, and care crises. Having witnessed previously invisibilised forms of so-called ‘essential’ or ‘key’ work become briefly visiblised and, at times, revered during the Covid-19 global pandemic, scholarly interventions have already taken note of the shifts in public and political discourse, and surrounding labour relations (Brickell et al, 2022; De Souza Santos, 2022; Lin, 2022; Rogaly and Schling 2020; Rose-Redwood et al, 2020). These discussions highlight the need for more critical discussion of what work (infrastructural or otherwise) is considered essential for collective life, and what expectations and conditions surround its performance and governance.…”