Writing Across Contexts: Urban Informality and the State in Tallinn, Bafatá and Berlin

Abstract

Urban research has long related informality to a lack of state capacity or a failure of institutions. This assumption not only fails to account for the heterogeneous institutional relations in which informality is embedded, but has also created a dividing line between states. Whereas some states are understood to manage urban development through functioning institutions, others, in this view, fail to regulate. To deconstruct such understandings, this article explores informal practices through a multi-sited individualizing comparison between three case studies of water governance, parking regulation and dwelling regimes in Bafatá (Guinea-Bissau), Tallinn (Estonia) and Berlin (Germany), respectively. Our approach to understanding informality starts from the negotiation and contestation of order between differently positioned actors in the continuous making of states. From this point of view, informality is inherent in the architecture of states--emerging through legal systems, embedded in negotiations between and within institutions, and based on conflicts between state regulations and prevailing norms. Tracing how order takes shape though negotiation, improvisation, co-production and translation not only highlights how informality constitutes a modus operandi in the everyday workings of the state in all three cases, but also provides a way to talk across these cases, i.e. to bring them together in one frame of analysis and overcome their presumed incommensurability.

Uncertainty and the Governance of Street Vending: A Critical Comparison Across the North/South Divide

“…Thus, we offer our collaboration as one model capable of producing useful theory without claims of universality . A small number of other studies produce critical comparison through academic collaboration (Rosen and Grant, ; Hilbrandt et al , ; Rodgers and Young, ). Rather than presenting cases sequentially, we integrate our arguments and findings by themes: producing uncertainty, experiencing uncertainty and claiming rights.…”

Everyday states and water infrastructure: Insights from a small secondary city in Africa, Bafatá in Guinea-Bissau

“…If the state emerges through the imbricated practices and relations of state and non-state organisations, then understandings of the state should entail detailed investigations of such practices. Crucially, such a focus on everyday practices brings to the fore the experiences, subjectivities and emotions of individuals involved, including state bureaucrats, which become a necessary part of the ways in which (for example) policies and legislation are enacted (Hilbrandt et al., 2017; Mountz, 2003; Painter, 2006). Painter employs the notion of prosaic geographies of stateness to refer to the ‘unsystematic, the indeterminate and the unintended’, that is the myriad of actions and actors involved in state processes, such as the writing and passing of legislation, that fundamentally affect outcomes in ways that should be accounted in theorisations of the state.…”

Urban Informality and the State: Geographical Translations and Conceptual Alliances

“…Second, filling this empirical gap allows us to inform and refine the concept of informality; thus rather than seeing the North as a counterpoint to the South, focusing on research beyond the South aims at theorizing the concept in ways that allow for speaking to multiple cities in diverse national contexts. In picking up on recent contributions to comparative urbanism in this journal (Robinson and Roy, ; Hilbrandt et al ., ), we suggest that the challenge here lies neither in the expansion of urban analysis into an all‐encompassing theory, nor in advocating for ‘localized complexity and unpatterned diversity’ (Peck, : 161). Rather we seek to follow an approach that captures all cities within the same field of analysis because and in spite of their differences, permitting through these differences a global spread of cases to contribute to this theory.…”

“…To ‘shake free’ of the hegemony of metropolitan knowledge, scholars have strived to interrogate cities formerly deemed ‘off the map’ (Robinson, ), to rethink these cities on their own terms and to move the centre of theorizing to the global South (Roy, : 820) in order to advance ‘a complex re‐imagination of international scholarly practices’ (Robinson, : 281). This engagement has triggered a methodological debate about comparisons as ways to de‐ and re‐centre theory, and reverse ideas between the North and South (Jacobs, ; Myers, ; Ghertner, ; Hilbrandt et al ., ). In this vein, this forum attempts to enter into dialogue with ideas produced in and by the postcolonial world, by changing the sites and angles of comparison: it relocates informality—a concept developed predominantly in the global South—to widen its geography, pluralize conceptual imaginations and challenge knowledge asymmetries.…”