Informal Work and Sustainable Cities: From Formalization to Reparation

Abstract

Informal workers produce economic, social, and environmental value for cities. Too often, policy elites, including those promoting sustainable cities, overlook this value, proposing formalization and relying on deficit-based framings of informal work. In this perspective piece, we bring critical research and community-produced knowledge about informal work to sustainability scholarship. We challenge the dominant, deficit-based frame of informal work, which can dispossess workers, reduce their collective power, and undercut the social and environmental value their work generates. Instead, thinking historically, relationally, and spatially clarifies the essential role of informal work for urban economies and highlights their potential for promoting sustainable cities. It also reveals how growth-oriented economies reproduce environmental destruction, income inequality, and poverty, the very conditions impelling many to informal work. Rather than formalization, we propose reparation, an ethic and practice promoting ecological regeneration, while redressing historic wrongs and redistributing resources and social power to workers and grassroots social movements.

Problematizing the “informal sector”: 50 years of critique, clarification, qualification, and more critique

“…Also, informal workers provided cheap goods and services to formal workers, thereby increasing the yield of wages. More recent scholarship in this tradition has called attention to processes through which capitalists and state officials forcibly remove informal workers from their means of livelihood in order to ROSALDO -7 of create new spheres of accumulation (Rosaldo, 2019;Samson, 2015;Tucker & Anantharaman, 2020)-an example of what Harvey (2003) terms "accumulation by dispossession. "…”

“…While definitions of "formalization" vary across economic and political contexts, generally they refer to efforts to align economic practices and the laws that govern them through decriminalization, regulation, registration, taxation, or extension of social protections (Tucker & Anantharaman, 2020). In some cases, such legal shifts are also accompanied by financial, spatial, and technological reorganizations of worksites and industries.…”

“…Imposing the existing narrow set of formal economic institutions on the large diverse set of informal economic activities may be neither desirable nor feasible" (215)" This provocation by one of the world's foremost champions of informal worker rights defies deep-seated beliefs of her field, but is supported by recent scholarship. Although formal jobs on average provide superior incomes and conditions than do informal ones, this is far from universally true (Tucker & Anantharaman, 2020). Consequently, many workers either combine formal and informal income opportunities, or choose the latter over the former (Hunt, 2009;Purser, 2009).…”

“…Other authors have proposed decentering the framing of "formalization" altogether. For example, Tucker and Anantharaman (2020) propose shifting to an ethic and practice of "reparations," which acknowledges legacies of injustice, redistributes resources and power to workers and grassroots movements, promotes supportive regulatory environments, and buttresses urban commons built by informal workers. Meanwhile, Agarwala (2013Agarwala ( , 2016 highlights cases of Indian informal workers who fight to improve their livelihood conditions without formalizing employment relations by appealing to the state for welfare benefits, citizenship rights, and support for cooperative enterprises.…”

Street vendors in Lima in the time of COVID‐19: Guilty or oppressed?

“…Since the beginning of this century, an increasing number of empirical studies have paid greater attention both to the differences of various kinds of informal street vending, and to the consequences of these differences in terms of policy interventions and their effectiveness (Coletto 2013 ; Schindler 2014 ; Crossa 2016 ; Tucker and Anantharaman 2020 ). Specifically, growing attention has been paid to the so‐called “politics of informality” (Roy 2005 ).…”