Urban Informality as a Site of Critical Analysis

Abstract

Across the Global South, the realities of urban informality are changing, with implications for how we understand this phenomenon across economic, spatial, and political domains. Recent accounts have attempted to recognise the diversity of informality across contexts and dimensions, as well as its everyday lived realities.Reviewing key debates in the sector, and drawing upon the new empirical studies in the papers presented here, we argue for a shift away from seeing urban informality narrowly as a setting, sector, or outcome. We suggest that reconsidering informality as a site of critical analysis offers a new perspective that draws on and extends political economy approaches, and helps us to understand processes of stratification and disadvantage. We seek to highlight the significance of the informal-formal continuum at the same time as challenging this dichotomy, and to explore emerging theoretical and empirical developments, including changing attitudes to informality; the increasing salience of agency; and informality as strategy both for elite and subaltern groups.

Waste, Social Order, and Physical Disorder in Small-Town India

“…This informal WE combines forms of livelihood consistent with the three major theories of informality reviewed in this special issue (Banks et al, 2019): dualist marginalisation, legalist preemptive development, and structuralist exploitation. But these forms of informality do not always reflect the processes theorised.…”

“…This shapes their paupers' returns (typically at Rs 5-6,000 per month, 7 a third less than the average for unskilled workers and the national minimum wage, and very far from being a family wage). As activity undergoing a non-spatial type of 'consolidation' (Banks et al, 2019) the informal WE is the labour-absorber of last resort. People who have lost the entitlement to be dependent upon others through crime, addiction, elopement, household failure, disability, or disease and whose citizenship rights are exiguous find livelihoods here.…”

“…1 In India, while technically termed 'unorganised', it is far from disorganised. 2 Theorised variously in ways critically reviewed by Banks, Lombard, and Mitlin (2019), and surviving criticism of the crudity of the formal-informal binary (Meagher, 2010;Raj & Sen, 2016;Roy, 2009;Sundaresan, 2013), the concept of informality is widely understood and used in India for two principal reasons. First 'informality' draws attention to the roles of social authority in creating, legitimating, and maintaining order in a capitalist economy where both before and soon after Independence it was established that State regulative laws were to be enforced in a highly exclusive and discretionary manner (Basile, 2010;Das Gupta, 2016;Dietrich Wielenga, 2019).…”

“…The dissipative process of 'wasting' (Gidwani, 2013;O'Brien, 1999) is a moment of variable duration in the natural cycles of matter and energy, of which the commodity form is a relatively brief manifestation. Some waste gains economic value through sale for re-use or recyclingwhat Marx (1971) evoked as the kinds of economic informality usually theorised as contextually embedded and mutually exclusive (Banks et al, 2019;Chen, 2012). Third, the bureaucratic architecture and governance practices through which public-sector waste management is itself informalised are analysed with concern for their consequences for the informal waste economy (IWE) and the state.…”

Informal Work and Sustainable Cities: From Formalization to Reparation

“…24 Scholarship over the last 50 years has offered changing perspectives on the nature and value of informal work. 25,26 Early dualist frameworks proposed that modernization would expand formal employment and starve the informal sector. 27 Since then, researchers have documented intense linkages across supply chains that crisscross sectors designated as formal and informal.…”