Panel 89:The Politics of Urban Informality

The panel addresses the politics that ensues from the expanding informality of urban living and the varied modalities of power and influence at work. Political elites are seldom indifferent to these developments. They may have economic and political stakes in the informal economy and nurture clientelist relations with actors within it. The state may attempt to render informal actors governable through the deployment of various forms of governmentality. It may also use of violence for example through forced removals and militarized clean-up campaigns, in the name of a modern city image. These interventions are often legitimized by criminalizing and pathologizing discourses that represent informal actors as a threat to public order, health and security. The arbitrariness of state practices whereby it can both enforce and revoke the law contributes to a situation of legal uncertainty for many. Informal grassroots actors, far from passive, engage in a wide range of political practices. These range from everyday ‘insurgent practices’ through which they gradually conquer urban space to collective mobilizations that enable them to articulate counter-discourses and alternative visions for the city. Sometimes informal actors make use of strategies of avoidance and invisibility as a means of making themselves illegible to the state. Other times they engage with the state in multiple and often contradictory ways or opt for highly visible forms of contestation. The political subjectivities of urban informal actors and their relations with state and other powerful actors are thus complex, varied and temporal. This session attempts to go beyond polarizing or essentializing views of these issues and welcomes situated analyses of different dimensions of the actual politics of urban informality as shaped by particular contexts.