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Rethinking Informality: Politics, Crisis, andthe CityColin McFarlane aa Department of Geography, Durham University, Durham, UKVersion of record first published: 22 Mar 2012.

To cite this article: Colin McFarlane (2012): Rethinking Informality: Politics, Crisis, and the City, PlanningTheory & Practice, 13:1, 89-108

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Rethinking Informality: Politics, Crisis,and the CityCOLIN MCFARLANE

Department of Geography, Durham University, Durham, UK

ABSTRACT If informality has been conventionally understood as a territorial formation or as alabour categorisation, this paper offers an alternative conceptualisation that conceives informalityand formality as forms of practice. The paper examines how different relations of informal andformal practice enable urban planning, development and politics, and explores the changingrelationship between informality and formality over time. To illustrate the political potential ofconceiving informality and formality as practices, it highlights the fall-out from a particular urbancrisis: the 2005 Mumbai monsoon floods. In the final section, the paper offers three conceptualframes for charting the changing relations of informal and formal practices: speculation,composition, and bricolage.

Keywords: Crisis; formality; informality; Mumbai; practice; urbanism

Introduction

The distinction between “informal” and “formal” is one of the most enduring in urban andplanning theory, and their descriptive and proscriptive potential have often been criticallydebated. This is a debate not just about the work done by different conceptualisations ofinformality and formality in different contexts—planning, policy, regulation, or asanalytical categories—but about how we come to know and intervene in contemporaryurbanism. Ostensibly, the distinction between formality and informality appears simply asa descriptor, a way of expressing something about the broad arrangement of urban space,a short-hand device for dividing different areas of a city, or a means of making particularforms of urban practice show up, such as casualised labour. In practice, however, itsfunction goes far beyond this.

The formal–informal distinction is a multifaceted resource for naming, managing,governing, producing, and even critiquing contemporary cities. The distinction is put towork in relation to urban territory (slum and non-slum), groups (labour), andgovernmentality (monitoring, naming and intervening). In the face of the depth,complexity, changeability and variation of cities, the informal–formal relation is both aseemingly modest descriptor and a powerful distinction that has an active effect on urbanimagination and practice, and that even plays a fundamental role in constituting the urban(especially in the “global south”). If urban theory is, in part, a response to theunknowability of urbanism, it also problematises that which appears to be known, thatwhich is taken-for-granted.

Correspondence Address: Colin McFarlane, Department of Geography, Durham University, South Road, Durham DH13LE, UK. Email: colin.mcfarlane@durham.ac.uk

Planning Theory & Practice, Vol. 13, No. 1, 89–108, March 2012

1464-9357 Print/1470-000X On-line/12/010089-20 q 2012 Taylor & Francis

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I offer an alternative conceptualisation of the distinction between formality andinformality, exploring both as particular forms of practice. I build on recent debates thatconceive of informality as a type of negotiation and valuation, and I seek to extend thesedebates by thinking through what this might mean both for how informality and formalityfold into one another, and for the politics and geographies of the city. In order to highlightsome of the ways in which informality and formality as practices might facilitate a politicsof the city, I briefly discuss the response to monsoon floods in Mumbai.

Moments of large-scale urban crisis like the 2005 Mumbai floods can act to dramatiseand thereby make starkly visible forms of informal politics that characterise seemingly“formal” spaces such as those of urban planning and development. One of the effects ofthe monsoon was to generate a debate in Mumbai about what caused the floods, a debatethat shifted the rhetorical terrain away from “slums”—if only temporarily—towards theactivities of the state and private developers operating informally to bypass formalregulations. In other words, the debate that ensued did not just attribute “blame” toinformality in terms of slum spaces, but also to informality as a more generalised practice.I have chosen to focus on this moment because it afforded an opportunity for a critical andwide-ranging debate about the nature and trajectory of the politics of both formal andinformal urban development practices in the city.

And yet, in and of themselves, the categories of informal and formal can only take us sofar. I argue that there is a need for further exploration of the ways in which differentregimes of informal and formal practices take shape and impact on urbanism. A centralquestion, I argue, is how informal and formal practices relate to one another in differentcontexts, for example whether they are co-constitutive, mutually enabling or delimiting, orincreasingly asymmetrical and non-antonymic. My aim is not to provide an exhaustive listhere of the different possible ways in which informal and formal practices relate in urbanlife, but to argue that it is important to specify the different ways in which they relate toone another in the production and contestation of cities. In the final part of the paper,I highlight three regimes of informal–formal practices: speculation, composition, andbricolage. I am not, to be clear, arguing against accounts that use the terms informality orformality to describe territories or labour categorisations, which have their own strengthsand shortcomings.

The Mumbai discussion draws on fieldwork conducted in the city following the floodsin 2005–2006. The data used in the paper emerges from interviews with residents inseveral affected informal settlements in the city, as well as with individuals from non-governmental organisations (NGOs), municipal officials involved in responding to thecrisis, and municipal officials charged with managing relevant infrastructures includingstorm water drainage, sewage and sanitation, and water. I have also drawn on greyliterature—reports and working papers on the crisis produced in and beyond India—andon online sources, including newspaper and magazine reports, the websites ofcampaigning organisations, and online discussion forums that recorded some of theexperiences and perceptions of people in the days following the floods.

Rethinking Informality

Informality occupies a contradictory but never fully externalised space, in that it is oftenviewed as a product of urban modernity and economic liberalisation—assumed tobe domains of the “formal”—but at the same time appears to lack the products of thoseprojects. Formality and informality are often conceived as territorial formations (e.g. the“slum” as informal), categories of particular groups (e.g. “informal labour”), or forms of

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organisation (e.g. structured versus unstructured; rule-based versus unruly; predictableversus unpredictable). The formal–informal urban relation is an epistemologicaldemarcation put to work in different ways and contexts, but there are four generalways in which it manifests in urban debates. The first three conceptualisations are oftenfound together, while the fourth marks an alternative conceptualisation that has emergedmore recently.

The first of these is the conception of the informal–formal divide as a spatialcategorisation. Informality is often assumed to be territorialised within “slum” settlementson the legal, political, economic, social and environmental margins of the city. Morerecently, there have been moves away from this logic, as writers have emphasised themore generalised spatiality of the “informal”. For instance, Dicken (2005) argues that Rio’sfavelas, far from being marginal spaces to the city, are central to its urban logic becausethey enable and constitute debates on urban “civilisation” and law.

Second, the informal–formal divide is often conceived of as an organisational form.The central idea is often that informality is represented by unorganised, unregulated labour,although in practice such labour is often highly organised and disciplined. For example,Hoffman (2007) conceptualises the “nomos”, or general organising principle, of labour inurban West Africa through the conceptual category of the barracks. Taking Agamben’scamp as his point of departure, he argues that the barracks concentrate (especially male)bodies and subjects into “formations that can be deployed quickly and efficiently to anycorner of the empire. They may be called up at any moment as labourers on the battlefield,workers on the plantation, or diggers in the mine” (Hoffman, 2007, p. 402).

Others have argued that the informal–formal labour categorisations have been partiallybroken down, for example through an increase of informalised labour globally asmunicipalities increasingly privatise public services. For instance, Miraftab (2004, p. 874)argued that in the late 1990s, Cape Town’s municipal government “mobilized patriarchalgender ideologies as well as the rhetoric of voluntarism and skill acquisition to justify thecheap or unpaid labor of women as casual laborers or volunteers in waste collection.”Here, outsourcing strategies by the municipality enabled private firms to exploitminimally paid labour—often women from black townships—hired under precariousshort-term contracts to service local areas. The informalisation, or casualisation, of labourin cities in the global north and south has been well documented (see, for example,Benerıa & Roldan’s (1987) The Crossroads of Class and Gender, on the iniquitous relationsbetween economic change, subcontracting and gender in Mexico City, and Devlin (2011),on street vendors in New York). Devlin (2011) argues that labour informality is a growingissue across cities in the USA, particularly in low-income immigrant communities whereplanners tend to see informal practice as a product of culture, and to focus onmulticulturalist rhetoric rather than structural inequalities. As Oren Yiftachel (2009)remarks in relation to what he calls urban “gray spaces”, marginalised lives “are neitherintegrated nor eliminated, forming pseudo-permanent margins of today’s urban regions”;they experience a “permanent temporariness” (Yiftachel, 2009, pp. 89, 90).

Third, the informal–formal divide often materialises as a governmental tool. Versions offormal and informal are deployed by states as an organisational device that allowsparticular domains and forms of intervention (e.g. around resource allocation, serviceprovision, or statistical monitoring). One example of this in Mumbai is the notorious“cut-off” date that the city and state governments use as a qualifier for infrastructure,services, and housing to poor neighbourhoods. Eligibility for services depends on howlong people have lived in a settlement, with the cut-off often set at 1995 (sometimes 2000depending on the project and the funder). People who cannot provide documented proof

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that they lived in a settlement before 1995 are denied access to programmes.This governmental framing of the formal–informal divide contributes to the lingeringrepresentation of informal settlements, and labour within urban and planning debates as a“developmental problem.”

This constitution of the informal by the governmental as a tool varies across cities, butthere are similarities and common causes that can be identified. For example, Fairbanks(2011, p. 2558) uses an example from Philadelphia as an indicator of a much widerproliferation of “informal poverty survival” and “make-do welfarism” across cities in theUSA and elsewhere, driven by political economic transformation, welfare removal, socialhousing reduction, and privatisation. Writing about Philadelphia’s Recovery HouseMovement, Fairbanks (2011, p. 2556) describes how particular groups “locked outside thezones of downtown remodelling and pushed to the outer periphery of formalpublic/private partnerships” have been condemned to an “informal poverty politics inthe shadow of the welfare state.” In the area of Kensington where he conducted hisresearch, more than half of the population is detached from the labour force. Recoveryhouse operators, enacting a kind of entrepreneurial, self-help, “make-do” welfarism,informally facilitate access to housing for addicts and alcoholics alongside and beyond themechanisms of state welfare. Here, formal state and political economic shifts setthe conditions of possibility for informal practices, and the formal and the informal areinextricably co-constituted.

In contrast, Guha-Khasnobis et al. (2006) conceive informality as organisational formsbeyond the reach of official governance mechanisms. The informal emerges here as thatupon which government has little or no impact (their examples include the Indian softwareindustry, as well as precarious labour). However, the idea of activities beyond the reach ofgovernment depends on the assumption that the impact of government can only beunderstood in terms of a visible or overt presence; yet in practice, governmental reach canalso operate as a context that enables or delimits the range of possibilities. As Ananya Roy(2009a, p. 10) has written, informality does not “lie beyond planning; rather it is planningthat inscribes the informal by designating some activities as authorized and others asunauthorized, by demolishing slums while granting legal status to equally illegal suburbandevelopments.” MacLeod and Jones (2011, p. 2452) add that “the fundamental analytical,and indeed political, question is why some instances of informality are designated as illegaland their inhabitants criminalised while other land transformations appear to be protectedand formalised to enjoy state sanction or even endorsed as practices of the state.”

What this opens up is a crucial politics of formalisation, one that interrogates theteleological notion that the city is “en route from informality to high-end services”(Pieterse, 2008, p. 127). This politics has been shaped in particular by the influentialarguments by Hernando De Soto (2001) that informal housing represents a largelyuntapped pool of “dead capital” that will be realised through economic and legal security,housing markets and surplus generation, potential future exchange and investment(including in new businesses), and the social capital associated with formalised status.While De Soto’s arguments have had significant influence on organisations like the WorldBank, a great deal of scholarship has highlighted the dangers of formalisation.As Neuwirth (2006) cautions, legal title deeds—individual or collective—are far fromstraightforward goods, and can have the consequence of raising land and housing pricesto the point where the poor are priced out (Porter, 2011). In Cairo (Payne, 2001, cited inBriggs, 2011), for instance, land titling led to the displacement of 21% of low-incometenants who could not afford higher rents, and it is often wealthier groups that benefitfrom land titling schemes, thereby increasing rather than reducing inequality. In addition,

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as Briggs (2011) argues in relation to formalisation processes in peri-urban areas of Dar esSalaam, many residents, especially poorer groups, are content with existing de factosecurity of tenure (e.g. registered purchases with local wards) and see no benefit inparticipating in the expensive and legally complex world of formalisation, or ofpotentially making their homes vulnerable to defaulted bank payments. Nor is there anyguarantee that having a formal land title will enable individuals to unlock credit to startnew businesses, particularly as many banks are suspicious of lending money to the urbanpoor (Briggs, 2011).

Fourth, more recently, informality has been conceived of as a negotiable value. Whilethis view retains a critical perspective on the politics of formalisation, it nonetheless offersan alternative to the three readings of informal–formal above. Here, as Roy and AlSayyad(2004, p. 5) write, the distinctions between formal and informal emerge in practice: “Ifformality operates through the fixing of value, including the mapping of spatial value,then informality operates through the constant negotiability of value” (emphasis in the original)(see also Porter, 2011). Informality and formality “constitute the rules of the game,determining the nature of transactions between individuals and institutions and withininstitutions” (AlSayyad & Roy, 2006, p. 5). The negotiability of value operates through theshifting designation of informality itself. For example, as Asher Ghertner (2008) hasshown, the discourse of “illegal encroachment” in relation to slums in Indiancities is relatively new, and is closely linked to a shift in court rulings that positionslums as nuisances that pollute public spaces rather than as neighbourhoods where thestate has failed to provide adequate services (such as water, sanitation, drainage andrubbish collection). The new value accorded to the notion of “nuisance” reflects the effortsby the politico-corporate elite of cities like Delhi and Mumbai to become “world-classcities”—i.e. clean and nuisance-free, and therefore slum-free (Ghertner, 2008).As Ghertner’s (2008) research on petitions for slum demolitions filed by resident welfareassociations in Delhi shows, nuisance in this context becomes spuriously linked to the ideaof illegality itself: the declaration of slums as a nuisance “performs their illegality”, andconversely, declaring slums illegal presumes their “ontological status as a nuisance.”This new nuisance discourse recalls older colonial descriptions of the urban poor in whichinformality is cast as polluting and contaminating, but brings a new valuation ofcommodified, sanitised, aestheticised formal urban space in the form of what AmitaBaviskar (2002) calls “bourgeois environmentalism.” The informal is devalued as not onlylegally illegitimate, but visually, socially, and spatially illegitimate.

Closely related to this, is a conception of informality as an idiom of urbanisation.Strands of Ananya Roy’s work (2004, 2009a, 2009b, 2011) usefully depict informality as astate of deregulation maintained by the negotiability of value. The political, economic, andlegal elite can use or suspend the law to enable violation of, for example, planning orbuilding controls in order to allow new developments. Drawing on Holston’s (2008) workon Brazilian cities, Roy (2009b, p. 80) asks: “Who is authorised to (mis)use the law in suchways to declare property ownership, zones of exception, and enclaves of value”? “Thestate, ”she goes on, “can use informality as an instrument of accumulation and authority”by placing itself outside the law in order to enable a particular form of elite urbandevelopment. Informality, in this perspective, becomes central to the urban planningregime: “By informality I mean a state of deregulation, one where the ownership, use, andpurpose of land cannot be fixed and mapped according to any prescribed set ofregulations or the law. Indeed, here the law itself is rendered open-ended and subject tomultiple interpretations and interests, the “law as social process” is as idiosyncratic andarbitrary as that which is illegal” (Roy, 2009b, p. 80). Informal governance practices have

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been reported in, for instance, deals for land acquisition by corporate actors or criminalgangs in Tokyo and Mumbai (e.g. Sassen, 2001; Weinstein, 2008).

In advancing these arguments, Roy (2011a, p. 233) shifts the focus beyond an ontologyof the megacity as formal/informal—the idea that informality is the “habitus ofthe dispossessed”—towards a view of informality as “a heuristic device that uncovers theever-shifting urban relationship between the legal and illegal, legitimate and illegitimate,authorized and unauthorized... that serves to deconstruct the very basis of state legitimacyand its various instruments: maps, surveys, property, zoning and, most importantly, thelaw.” “The Indian city”, writes Roy (2009b, p. 81), “is made possible through an idiom ofplanning whose key feature is informality.” The consequence is an ontology of the city thatis always already formal and informal, and that is fundamentally constituted byfragmentation: “The splintering of urbanism does not take place at the fissure betweenformality and informality but rather, in fractal fashion, within the informalized productionof space” (p. 82; emphasis in the original).

Crucially, it is the combination of informal practices and formal revanchism throughlaw, policy and regulation that renders this sort of urban development possible andpowerful. For example, the 2010 Delhi Commonwealth Games Village was built upon landthat the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) had shown to be ecologically sensitivefloodplains for the Yamuna River, but by the time the DDA had sought approval to stop thedevelopment, its construction was already under way. This informal practice requiredformal facilitation using the law as social tool—for instance, in 2004 the Supreme Court ofIndia issued an order to demolish the homes of more than 150,000 slum residents whowere occupying the land for the Games Village (Ghertner, 2010).

In the next section, I consider how the reconceptualisation of informality and formalityas practice sheds light on a particular moment in Mumbai’s contemporary history: the2005 monsoon floods. The floods had a significant impact on the city’s physical andimaginative worlds. The crisis prompted a wide-ranging public debate about informality,defined not merely in territorial terms (the slums) but as a set of extra-legal practiceswhich, in conjunction with formal practices of policy and regulation, had been used by thestate and developers in a manner that detrimentally affected the capacity of the city’snatural resources to defend it from floods.

Crisis and the Figure of the Informal: Mumbai Floods

On 26 July 2005, 944 mm of rain fell in a five-hour period in Mumbai, leading to floods thatcovered one third of the city’s surface. The water reached almost 5 m in depth in low-lyingareas. This was the heaviest rainfall since records began in 1846, but there was no weatherwarning. Over one thousand people are estimated to have been killed in the destruction,predominantly in low-income neighbourhoods where they were drowned, electrocuted,or buried in landslides. Electricity supplies were cut, mobile phone networks faltered,public transport ground to a halt, and the city’s suburban rail system—key to the economyand social fabric—was out of service for 18 hours. The drainage system was overwhelmed,and in some places floodwaters did not recede for days, leading to localised outbreaks ofmalaria, dengue and leptospirosis. Many people spent up to two days away from home,trapped on roofs or in schools with little or no food, water, or medicines. Manywere separated from their family, including children who were at schools or playgroups.In one settlement in Govandi, north Mumbai, a toilet block, as the highest structure in thearea, provided refuge for local people as floodwaters washed away or destroyed fragilehousing and infrastructure (see map of Mumbai, Figure 1).

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Interviews conducted in a “slum” in Khar, Bandra revealed that local people, having lostproperty and suffered housing and infrastructure damage, did receive promised governmenthelp. Each family was given INR5000 through central government relief, as well as quantitiesof rice, wheat, dahl (lentils), and cooking oil. However, they had to wait a month for thishelp. One resident, Vasin-al-Hassan Qureshi, lamented: “We lost everything. Our furniture,clothes. Nothing is remaining here.” He had walked from Govandi to his house, having spentthe first night stranded on a flyover at Kurla. In a nearby settlement in Santa Cruz, a westernsuburb that suffered high levels of flooding, one woman whose house was inundated with 2m of water waited three months for the INR5000 compensation. Many others complained that

Figure 1. Map of Mumbai. Source: Colin McFarlane.

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many families received nothing and that donations were often dependent on informalgovernment connections rather than actual need.

One man said people had given up trying to obtain compensation: “Why go fight withthe government? We cannot go fight with the government for not doing things they shouldhave done.” In Shivaji Nagar, Govandi, a sewer line running through the centre of theneighbourhood blocked during the flooding and spilt onto the lanes. With parts of thesettlement practically washed away by rubbish, people were left living on piles ofnewspaper or under plastic sheets supported with a bamboo stick on a nearby citydumping ground. Apnalaya, a local NGO working in the area, distributed kerosene tabletsand medication for jaundice, but complained that compensation payments, grain, andkerosene were not forthcoming from the state, partly because the settlement isunauthorised and partly because of a high Muslim population in the area, who havehistorically suffered state prejudice.

As many commentators have shown, the state authorities were in disarray following thefloods and all but a few clusters of committed officials abdicated responsibility. But, asAnjaria (2006, p. 81) points out, although the police and municipal government were non-functional, there was no looting, theft, or violence:

The public did not simply refrain from committing crimes; they demonstrated anoutpouring of spontaneous acts of kindness and generosity. Throughout the nightand the next day, people came out of their homes to hand out biscuits, bananas,bottled water, and cooked rice and lentils to those stranded in buses. Restaurantsand street vendors gave out free food to people who had walked hungry throughthe night. Slum residents handed out food and water to drivers trapped in theirBMWs; middle-class families opened their two-room apartments to groups ofstrangers for days; one rickshaw driver who found a lost, mentally challengedboy fed him for two days and finally located his parents’ home; and countlessanonymous strangers handed out medicine to the elderly.

Media reports, and here I am focusing on English-speaking media in the city, werereplete with stories of “slum dwellers” rescuing those stranded in cars, offering chai (tea)and biscuits and, in many cases, space to sleep in. In contrast to discourses of socialcollapse and malaise—so often the dominant narrative of megacities in the “globalsouth”—the city’s “slum” settlements were seen to demonstrate an infrastructure ofgenerosity and hospitality in the face of severe and multiple network infrastructurecollapse. There was a sense in which the crisis had not only revealed something of theresilience of Mumbaikars, but that people had come together. Rediff, a popular Indian webportal that includes blogging and social networking, asked Mumbai residents to sharetheir experiences on the days after the event. In the online discussion, one localbusinessperson wrote on 27 July:

What was interesting to observe through this period of abnormality spanningfour and a half hours, was the attitude of the people. Whilst the younger lot wasenjoying the water at Marine Drive and revelling in the downpour; the older loton the streets; appeared to have resigned themselves to their fate and weretrying to make the best out of the catastrophe. Even the cars which werebumper to bumper and inching along at a snail’s pace, were disciplined andI did not get to see the usual uncouth behaviour. (Bapat, 2005, no pp.)1

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Groups of residents, workers and students distributed food and water to peoplestranded in buses, cars and workplaces. Another contributor to the Rediff discussionwrote:

The water level was so high that we could reach out and touch it. But the floodof people walking eclipsed the floods. They were laughing, singing, dancingand no one was complaining. This is what makes Mumbai the commercialcapital of the country. Not the money, but the spirit of its people. There wereyoung men on the streets keeping people away from potholes and gutters. Theywere dripping wet but looking after strangers. A few men directed us into thefishermen colony on the Causeway. They told us it would be better thanthe main road. So we followed the crowd. (Dossal, 2005, no pp.)

In the immediate aftermath of the flooding, Mumbai’s “slum” population was insertedinto a narrative of a collective, resilient Mumbaikar spirit. Writing about “slum”community activist organisations such as the National Slum Dwellers Federation based inthe city, Stecko and Barber (2007, p. 12) wrote:

Groups such as these have worked for years to band the poor communities ofMumbai together and increase the cohesion in order to become a legitimatevoice in the arena of Mumbai’s politics. Many believe that these alliances andfunctions helped support the resiliency of the community to the July 2005flooding. Communities were used to utilizing their own coping strategies andhad previously formed collectives without the help of the government.

The media, so often hostile to “slum” settlements as “illegal encroachments” that haveno place in an aspiring “global city”, indulged in a temporary romanticisation of the city’sinformal poor. The critical magazine Frontline captured some of the mood of these reports:

The spirit and resilience of the people of Mumbai also came out. Ordinarycitizens opened their homes to strangers. People provided food and water tothose stranded... A pregnant woman was accommodated by slum-dwellers.(Katakam et al., 2005)

The event led to a wide-ranging debate amongst various populations in the city aboutthe relations between “slum” settlements, state responsibility, and the possibilities of amodern city protected from these sorts of catastrophes (McFarlane, 2009). For example, theConcerned Citizens’ Commission (CCC, 2005), a network of environmental activists andjournalists, argued that a key cause of the floods was uncontrolled development overwetland areas—including the destruction of mangroves to make way for new propertydevelopment, construction along the city’s Mithi River, and illegal dumping and “slumencroachment” on storm water drains—exacerbated by a lack of government planningfor disasters, and the simple combination of unprecedented rainfall and high tide in alow-lying city (see also Prabhu, 2005a, 2005b). According to the CCC report, two large-scale development projects were particularly problematic, namely the expansion of arunway for the international airport, and massive land reclamation for the Bandra-Kurlacomplex (a relatively new business district). These narrowed the width of the city’s river,as well as radically altering its course. As Anjaria (2006) and Katakam et al. (2005) relate,the worse incident occurred in Saki Naka nearby Bandra-Kurla, where a section of a hillcollapsed, killing over a hundred people.

The media sought explanations for the extent of flooding, but only rarely mentioned theimportant Brihanmumbai Storm Water Drainage (Brimstowad) report, which was

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produced in response to flooding from the 1985 monsoon. It outlined the need for majorinfrastructural improvements to the storm water drainage network, but these stalledthrough a combination of a lack of state investment, delayed projects, and the state’sinability to satisfy World Bank loan conditions. Instead, media focus was on disasterplanning and the implementation of laws, particularly the legal frameworks thatregulated where development projects could take place. For example, the CoastalRegulation Zone rules prevent construction on the city’s coast. However, development cantake place in the non-coastal side of coastal roads, and development plans often identifycoastal roads that never exist in reality in order to allow construction (Prabhu, 2005b;similar arguments have been aired following floods in other Indian cities, such as themonsoon floods in Ahmedabad in the summer of 2000—see Ray, 2000). Here, formaldevelopment processes are suspended and substituted by informal agreements betweenstate bureaucrat and developer. In these moments, the media strayed from a reflexposition of assigning blame to slums for “blocking” and “encroaching” into storm drainsto a broader debate about the complicity of the state in illegal developments that concretedover natural drainage, narrowed the width of the Mithi river, and damaged natural coastalprotection (especially mangroves). In this widening of the debate, there was a temporaryshift in focus from informality as a site of “slum” failure and blame, to a practice thatreveals state–developer complicity in the causes of the flooding.

As journalist Kalpana Sharma (2005, no pp.) wrote:

To satisfy the greed of builders and developers, successive governments haveturned a blind eye to the natural checks and balances that cities need. Thus, thecoastal regulation rules are violated, thereby changing the pattern of the tides.Green and no-development zones have been thrown open for development.Areas marked for parks and open-spaces have been built upon... the realtragedy is Mumbai’s development model.

Here, the “development model” is interrogated both for its informal and formalpractices—its particular alignment of regulation and policy in the context of thesuspension and bypassing of existing rules. One journalist at the time wrote provocativelyof the “rape of infrastructure” by developers and the state, and reflected on how the floodsencouraged debate on the relationship between builders, developers, and the state on theone hand, and sustainability on the other. Even if such debate ultimately led to littlechange in those relations, residents nonetheless discussed the causes of the disaster andparticularly the role of the state in the events. One contributor to an online Rediff debatecomplained the day after the flood:

Thanks to the reclamation, greedy takeover of salt pans, garbage (thanks BMC[BrihanMumbai Municipal Corporation]). But who cares in Mumbai.Politicians, government officials all want their pockets to be filled, make asmuch money as possible. Thanks to that the situation in Mumbai is this and wewill blame it on the weather and high tide tomorrow. (Mehta, 2005)

Blame for the flooding was assigned to a variety of causes: the blocking of drains byslums and by construction debris from developers; lack of state investment in drainage;rampant, uncontrolled development resulting in loss of mangroves, river space, and thenatural drainage of green spaces; a freak episode of rainfall; rising sea levels and climatechange; poor state planning for disaster management, and inability and lack ofcommitment to respond to the crisis; and flouting of construction regulations.The attachment of blame oscillated in public debates between the state, developers,

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“slums”, and “nature” (broadly conceived), and clearly identification of a particular causeentailed a particular politics of blame (for example, the state blamed unprecedentedrainfall and pleaded that it could not possibly have prepared for the event (e. g. seeD’Monte, 2007)). In interviews I conducted with engineers at the city’s Storm WaterDrainage Department, they consistently defended themselves by claiming that themonsoon had been a “once in 1000 years” event. One engineer claimed: “When high-tideis there, no one can prevent flooding”, and when asked who should be accountable, helaughed: “see, flooding is inevitable.”

At times the state became more desperate, and even blamed plastic bags for the floods.Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh defiantly stated following the event:“Discarded plastic bags choked the drains and the sewerage and were mainly responsiblefor the unprecedented waterlogging” (Times of India, 2005). The state’s Public WorksDepartment began construction of a new sea wall stretching from Colaba in the southerntip of the city to Gorai in its north-west extremity. Some elements within the state, andmore conservative city environmental groups, such as Citispace, blamed the poor forblocking up storm drains with “illegal encroachment”, and called for renewed efforts fordemolition (e. g. see CCC, 2005, which was endorsed by Citispace). One engineer claimedin interview that the “success of our project depends on these [slum] hutments” beingremoved, and complained—rather bizarrely considering the frequency of demolition ofslum settlements in the city and the media’s general tacit support thereof—that the citywas pervaded by a liberal culture in favour of slums, which meant that such settlementswere not held properly responsible for infrastructure blockages. A key element in thepolitics of this debate was the sorts of informality that were identified—slum territory orstate practice, as different groups tried to blame one another for the crisis.

While the levels of rainfall were indeed unprecedented, the state was exercising simplepolitical expediency in blaming “nature” or plastic bags for the event, and familiarbourgeois prejudice in blaming the poor. The floods were an indirect result of decades oflow investment in drainage, a formal development infrastructure geared towards rampantreal estate markets and the desires of builders, the informal flouting of formal buildingregulations in uncontrolled construction (not by the poor, but by developers incollaboration with state officials), and a lack of disaster planning and co-ordination.However, given that “nature” is an unwieldy target, it was the poor that shouldered muchof the state’s blame for the floods as they were accused of blocking storm drainageinfrastructure. The Chitale Commission, a state investigation into the floods, focused onthe part of Mumbai around the airport and the Mithi River, published its findings in 2006and within days the state announced a new three-year deadline for slum clearance aroundthe international airport (Times of India, 2006). A similar rationale has been given fordemolition in other parts of the city. While the broader public debate focused on theinformal and formal state–developer practices of speculative urbanism, the state soughtto narrow the debate and return to a more familiar site of blame and conception ofinformality: the informal settlement.

But the debate had got away from the state. The fantasy of the politico-corporate elite ofMumbai of transforming the city into the “new Shanghai” with “world-class”infrastructure fell apart amid the scenes of devastation and the anger that resulted fromthem (see, for example, Bombay First, 2003). One of India’s leading business dailies, theBBC, wrote: “Any aspirations, illusions or fine daydreams for standing up to some of thebiggest and best global cities have now been crashed into smithereens” (Majumdar, 2005).As Ananya Roy (2011b) has argued, world-class city making is a phantasmagoria that

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functions dialectically as development dream-world and as latent potential fordisenchantment.

The monsoon debate continues. For example, a 2009 book and art gallery exhibition—Soak: Mumbai in an Estuary—garnered attention in the city, from both populace and media(Mathur & da Cunha, 2009). The work of a small group of artists and residents, Soak arguesthat monsoon flooding has become normal in Mumbai. Rather than seeing the urban pooras “encroachers” responsible for blocking storm drains, Soak criticises the destruction ofthe city’s mangroves and the blocking of water courses due to the illegal dumping of wasteby industry, as well as the informal complicity of the authorities in suspending formalregulations. In contrast to the state’s emphasis on slum demolition and on “engineeringout” monsoon flooding by building flood defence walls along the city’s Mithi river, Soakargues that the city needs to find more adaptive ways of living with flooding, for instanceby working with gradients. At the same time, however, the BMC has promoted many post-2005 proposals for widening drains and constructing more pumping stations (e.g. seeplans for Mumbai infrastructure improvement laid out by both the BMC and theGovernment of Maharashtra: http://mdmu.maharashtra.gov.in/pages/Mumbai/mum-baiplanShow.php). Here, blame is once again attributed to the “slum” settlements: one ofthe explanations the BMC frequently offers for flooding is the “slow” and “complicated”process of demolishing and rehabilitating slum dwellers living alongside storm drainsand water courses.

The 2005 crisis offered an opportunity to develop a critique of Mumbai’s developmenttrajectory that shifted attention—if only momentarily—away from informality-as-slumsand onto informal and formal state–developer practices. Rather than accuse the urbanpoor of “illegality”, this shift recognises that illegality is a central constitutive part of howthe city is produced. There is political potential in this move, both as a mode of critiqueand as a platform for activism, which stretches beyond responses to the monsoon crisis.For example, activist groups such as the city’s Ghar Bachao Ghar Banao Andolan(GBGBO) (a housing rights movement) linked to the National Alliance of People’sMovements, have been attempting to bring cases of encroachments by informal state–developer partnerships to court, for instance by demanding answers to questions abouthow developers were able to bypass regulations in the construction of shopping malls onland reserved for other purposes, or through Right to Information appeals. Simpreet Singhof GBGBO described how the organisation has compiled data on the encroachment of theurban elite through shopping malls and illegal land seizure, and has filed Public InterestLitigations (PIL) at the Mumbai High Court. For instance, following the 2006 slumdemolitions in Ulhasnagar (just north of Mumbai), a PIL was successful in securing a stayof further demolition for 18 months. Here, the politics of informality–formality areinverted, as a group of activists seeks to render visible the hidden informal developmentpractices of the state–corporate world using the formal realm of law and regulation.“What is legal and illegal is very superficial,” added Singh.

Politically, such campaigns are arguing for greater compliance with formal regulatoryprocesses that prevent, for example, demolition (especially without due consultation orcompensation) and construction on ecologically sensitive land. But they also go beyondthis. The monsoon crisis served to illustrate the importance of campaigning not justagainst informal urban practices, but against a combination of informal practices, formalurban trajectories, and governance regulatory structures in the city. The accountability ofthe state and the private sector, and the task of promoting urban social justice, require analternative regime of informal–formal practice that emphasises the value of genuinecritical dialogue between different urban constituencies, and works towards a socially just

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urbanism. As Stecko and Barber (2005) argued in a report on the floods, the example ofhow different Mumbaikars worked together to cope in the face of the crisis could grounda new emphasis on urban collaboration in the planning of the city, where marginalisedand vulnerable groups of slum dwellers enter into both disaster planning and theplanning of the city more generally, in a genuinely dialogic and critical way.

If we are to think of informality and formality as practices, it is important to open out thedifferent ways in which the two interrelate and change over time. The monsoon crisisprovides a particular window here, but there is much more to say about the differentdomains and forms through which informal–formal practices relate to one another andact in cities. The final section of this paper develops the discussion by highlighting threepractical examples, building on the preceding discussion and considering both how wemight differentiate between different regimes of informal and formal practice, and howwe might conceptualise the relationship between informal and formal practice.

Three Regimes of Informal–Formal Practice

As practices, informality and formality exist as a kind of “meshwork” (Ingold, 2011), anentanglement between different “bundles of lines”, representing the different flows andpractices of the urban world. The meshwork stresses the fact that the urban is not ready-made, but always in formation. From this perspective, rather than viewing informalityand formality as fixed categories, or as mutually exclusive, the two appear as lines ofchanging practice and movement, taking place not above or in advance of urban life, butwithin its unfolding.

There is, for example, a temporal aspect to informal–formal relations, as people(officials, residents, activists, etc.) move between formal and informal activities andarrangements, not just over the course of their lives, but also over a single day. In thissection, I will highlight three particular combinations of informal and formal urbanpractices that impact on cities and urban life: first, speculation; second, composition; andthird, bricolage. The point is not to try to provide an exhaustive list of informal–formalrelations, but to explore three particular conceptual frames for thinking about thechanging interrelationships of the two over time.

First, one important meshwork of informal–formal practices is Michael Goldman’s(2011) characterisation of the making of the “next world-class city” through what he calls“speculative urbanism”. Goldman (2011, p. 570) highlights various ways in which differentgroups in Bangalore, including residents, government agents, land brokers, andinternational financial institutions, “become speculators of one sort or another, takingextreme risks and gambling on when government agents or land brokers (or violent nativistorganizations) will tag their possessions next for acquisition.” Goldman’s work (2011, p. 563)traces increasingly corporatised practices of accumulation-by-dispossession, for examplethrough “the trend of placing elite corporate and citizen leaders in positions of power tocircumvent existing forms of government decision-making.” Echoing Roy’s (2009a, 2009b)interventions, Goldman (2011, p. 575) argues that the “worlding” of Indian cities has entailednew technologies of government in India that have given rise to “a new mode of spatialproduction, one which transcends the problematic informal/formal dyad: so much of whathappens on the ground in Bangalore today is over the question of land, fuelled by formal(yet opaque pastoral) state bodies working informally to change land tenure.”

A number of key interactions between informal and formal practices are at work here.Firstly, there is the demolition of, and/or offer of petty compensation for, rural householdsto make way for the construction of new townships outside Bangalore or Mumbai that

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are owned, developed, and built by overseas real estate and construction firms based inDubai, Singapore, or the USA. Secondly, there is the privatisation of infrastructure—“thelatest instrument for foreign speculative capital in India” (Goldman, 2011, p. 571)—throughurban infrastructural funds set up by corporations such as Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs,and Citigroup. Thirdly, there are more mundane forms of urban and rural land acquisitionfor the widening of roads, the construction of elite housing complexes, the extension ofurban metro systems, or the carving out of special export zones. For Goldman (2011), all ofthese practices of speculative urbanism involve the suspension of basic human and civilrights, producing changes that fracture the metropolitan landscape via a tangled andconfused web of informal and formal actions (of states, of forms of rule and reason,of judicial practices, of regulatory and legal suspensions, of corporate power). But how doboth informal and formal forms of dominant power and political economy obtain thisrelentless capacity to invade and capture urban lifeworlds? And how can urban life resisttheir grip? This takes me to a second meshwork of informal and formal practices: urbancomposition.

AbdouMaliq Simone (2005, 2008, 2010) has conceptualised urban life beyond the rubricof inclusion/exclusion or of civil society participation, instead focusing on the work thatpeople do in urban environments. He shows that people collaborate, using each other asinfrastructure, in ways that may be unstable, tentative, and temporary, but that also build adegree of economic security or opportunity, and a sense of the city. His work has uncoveredvital forms of social architecture that are often invisible in academic accounts of urban life,such as the non-institutional economic encounters amongst migrants, the socialities ofmarket trading, and the importance of routine, improvisation, and everyday practice increating “the gestured, contingent, and shorthand annotation instead of the memorial;exchanged glances and murmurs rather than documents.” For Simone, such contingenciesconstitute the “governing composites” of associational life, an attempt by urban dwellersto anticipate and respond to the unexpected (Simone, 2008, p. 30).

Formal and informal practices emerge here as relations of urban composition inparticular spaces. Close description is needed to capture the ways in which different andsometimes unexpected openings and closures form and unfold over time. Importantly, inthe governing composites of everyday life, “formal” and “informal” can themselvesfeature as useful resources that individuals can use to perform a particular kind ofsubjectivity. Ajay Gandhi’s (forthcoming) work on the sociality of urban bazaars in Delhireveals some of the ways in which informality and formality as practices feature asresources. For Gandhi, the task for urban researchers is to try to understand not just whatinformality and formality are and how they operate in practice, but what they feel like andwhat they demand of urbanites invested in them. For example, Gandhi charts the ways inwhich notions of sincerity and irreverence, transparency and dissembling, loyalty andselfishness are performed through self-conscious ideas about what constitutes “formal”practice and what does not. “After all”, Gandhi writes, “what distinguishes people andclasses is not their implication in, but rather pretence at obeying rules, following the law,and dutifully paying their taxes. Informality is, in this sense, a deviant, canny opposite to astraight man, the wily doppelganger of an institutionally sober formality.” The “straightman”, the “self-disciplined and productive member of society valorised in countlessIndian school charts and textbooks”, is “less a class-bound privilege, or the teleologicalend-point of modernist reform, than a disposition that one can do and shake off as suits thepurpose. In other words, informality and formality are not neutral social conditions asmuch as they are coeval dispositions in anyone.” This emphasis on the changing relations

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of the formal and the informal over time leads to the third meshwork of informal andformal practice: urban bricolage.

There is now a large literature on post-institutionalism that has both criticallyinterrogated the idea that institutions are simply “formal”, and advanced an important setof questions about how institutions can work to reinforce unequal power relations andincrease the role of dominant groups (Cooke & Kothari, 2001; Hickey & Mohan, 2004).For example, Frances Cleaver’s (2002, 2008) work on natural resource management inUsanga, Tanzania, shows how a variety of social institutions become embedded, so thatthey can operate for collective action. These are cooperative networks emergent ineveryday relations, networks of reciprocity that constantly negotiate cultural norms.Cleaver (2002, p. 15) uses the concept of “bricolage” to describe how these cooperativenetworks “combine with or replace contracts, legal rights and formal sanctions.” Indeed,she goes further to suggest that “without such bricolage and the social embedding of newarrangements, bureaucratic institutions are unlikely to be effective” (p. 15). Cleaver’semphasis on institutional bricolage points to particular instantiations of how theinformal–formal relation changes over time (Lombard & Huxley, 2011).

Cleaver (2002, p. 17) uses institutional bricolage to highlight “the ‘fit’ betweeninstitutions and the web of livelihood networks and practices in which they areembedded.” This approach reveals how people move through different contexts and howthey embody different agencies and identities over time (for instance the ways in whichsome Usangu people move from pastoralism to migrating in search of work, or working inmines). People’s relations—in their economic, political, and social dimensions—arenegotiated not just through formal institutions, but through households, networks, culturalnorms, and practices, through conflict, trust and cooperation, modes of power andauthority, and exclusion, and through relations of gender, age, and religion. Existingdecision-making arrangements and cooperative relations “may be co-opted for newpurposes”, for instance where evangelical church choirs become structures for maintainingcredit and collective labour groups across ethnic and religious divides (Cleaver, 2002, p. 21).These institutional relations are often improvisatory and intermittent, and can respond tochange, for example in the introduction of new formal practices of regulation for managingwater pumps (Cleaver, 2002). Sometimes new bureaucratic institutions do not embed intoinformality because they are seen as cumbersome, time-intensive, and out-of-touch withpeople’s everyday worlds, perhaps because they bypass forms of authority andcooperation that people already use. Equally, new formalised institutions can becomeembedded through bricolage, effectively shifting the dividing line between informal andformal relations, and assembling a new kind of institution.

Urban speculation, composition and bricolage show that the relationship betweeninformality and formality can shift over time, in a way that is complex, multiple andcontingent. But this does not mean that we should replace a binary view of informalitywith a conceptualisation of their relationship as a continuum or spectrum. Instead, the twoshould be seen as inextricably related but distinct practices.

Across different cities, and within cities, the informality–formality regime varies.Notions of “formal” and “informal” are rarely neutral, and reflect dominant forms of state,corporate, legal, residential, and activist power, and debates about the sorts of urbanismthat should be valued, promoted, avoided, or removed. The practices of informalvaluation and calculation that are common to real-estate speculators or currency tradersare likely to be different from informal practices of housing construction in Rio orMumbai. Yet there are also forms of informal practice that are held in common acrossradically distinct urban domains. Speculation, as Goldman (2011) describes it, is one

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example, of a practice shared but expressed in different ways by state actors as well as

residents. Similarly, we can trace particular instances of bricolage-type relationships

between the informal and formal domains across a range of institutions, from community

groups to state bodies.

It is partly for this reason that we cannot assume a priori that cities in the global south are

“more” informal than cities in the global north. Attending to meshworks of speculation,

composition, and bricolage over time would entail a rejection of any sense that informal

and formal practices exist as a “quantity” that can be measured. We cannot assume that

the inhabitants of slums in Mumbai or Mexico City practice more informality than

low-income housing residents in New York or London—it is more likely that the forms of

urban composition involve a different sort of informality. In other words, informality is

performed: it names a way of doing things. Residents in Mumbai and Mexico City often

have to go through various kinds of “middle men” to get access to infrastructures,

a practice often seen as indicative of informality; but just because residents of London do

less of this specific sort of informal negotiation does not mean that their lives are less

informal overall.

One key example here would be the explosion of so-called “participatory” forms of

planning in cities internationally. Faranak Miraftab (2011, p. 861) argues that informal

politics has moved to the centre stage of planning practice and scholarship, that there has

been an expansion in recent decades of conceptualisations of planning practice that

“include informal practices of urban dwellers and poor citizens in constructing their

neighbourhoods, cities and livelihoods.” There has been a greater emphasis, for example,

on the participation of community groups and neighbourhood organisations,

accompanying a shift in formal urban planning towards a more neoliberal and

entrepreneurial mode, which has led to calls for more informal dialogue, meetings,

working relationships, and networking. There is plenty of evidence that these forms of

participatory planning structures are actually sutured forms of bricolage that fail to

embed: they are top-down in practice, they tend to exclude more radical positions and

groups, and they essentially perform a softer version of neoliberalism (e.g. Cooke and

Kothari, 2001). They constitute one important example of the informalisation of urban

planning that occurs not just alongside, but as a key constitutive element of, formal urban

planning practices in the global north as well as in the south.

But it is not just in the realm of planning that we can point to changing relations between

formal and informal practices in the north as well as the south. We might think, for

instance, of the growing popularity of informal urban markets in British cities. For

example, as Watson (2009, p. 1582) has shown through her research on trading and

shopping in the UK, markets—diverse and often fleeting spaces of encounter and

association that differ significantly from more curtailed shopping malls—are made

through a particular valuation of the informal over the formal: “the openness of market

spaces, the proximity of stalls to one another, the lack of restraint on entering and leaving

market sites clearly gave rise to a multitude of easy encounters and informal connections”

(see also Gregson & Crewe, 1997, on car boot sales). Formal transactions function to

differing extents through informal encounters. While these forms of urban composition

are often structured by socioeconomic and sociocultural relations, they also often exceed

these through jokes, chats, and “a sense of a buzz permeating the site” (Watson, 2009,

p. 1589; see also Simone, 2008, on markets and associational life).

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Conclusion

Informality and formality are as nomadic as cities themselves. They have no pre-givengeography or political content, progressive or otherwise. They co-constitute and dissolvespaces, becoming politicised or depoliticised at different moments, and they both enableand restrict urban life. In closing, I want to highlight three implications of thinking aboutinformality and formality as practices for researching the politics and geographies of cities.

First, moments of urban crisis can throw the politics of informality and formality intosharp relief in the collective consciousness of a city, and, in doing so, can serve to contestthose practices. The 2005 monsoon floods thus served as an occasion to air and to contest anumber of critical claims about Mumbai’s formal and informal development trajectory,placing them centrally, if temporarily, at the forefront of debates in the city’s mainstreammedia. The crisis shifted attention away from a concept of informality focused on slums, toone of urban practices of valuation and negotiation that suspended or disrupted formalregulations. The floods thus led to calls for a greater focus on formal regulations, and to arecognition that responding to the social and ecological inequities of Mumbai’surbanisation required an exploration of the ways in which formal and informal practicescombine. The debate was short-lived—it did not alter the articulation of informal andformal in the long term—but it created space for a range of groups who seek to build analternative urbanism based around a powerful critique of both the formal and informalurban practices of state–corporate speculative urbanism.

Second, the politics of informality and formality as practices are often provisional andcan shift in nature. The wide-ranging debate around the Mumbai monsoon entailed apoliticisation of debates about the role played by informal practice in the development ofthe city. Other forms of informal practice can also enact politics: we might think of themultiple momentary and small acts that politicise infrastructure, such as a local, informal,spontaneous protest around rising water costs or dysfunctional toilet blocks. Whethermoments like this lead to a politicisation of informal and formal practices, or whethermoments of informal practice enact a particular politics, the relations between informaland formal are shown to be negotiable and changeable, rather than fixed. The causes of thepoliticisation of informality and formality as practices are contingent and cannotnecessarily be predicted in advance, suggesting that there is an important temporality tohow we understand informal–formal relations—they are interwoven lines that form ameshwork.

Third, framing informality and formality as practices means dispensing with both theidea that informality belongs to the poor and formality to the better off, and the associatedidea that informality and formality necessarily belong to different kinds of urban spaces.Thinking of informality and formality as practices rather than as pre-existing geographiesallows us to understand the ways in which geography helps to determine the particularpoliticisation of these practices. At the same time, it requires a shift in how we registerinformal and formal spatialities: they no longer exist in specific territories within the city(whether offices of state and investment companies or markets and community resourcecentres), but instead are involved in the production of space. In other words, thesepractices do not just take place in particular places, but are productive of particular spaces.

This geography is fundamentally relational. The shifting divide between informalityand formality does not only occur in particular places, but in the movement of practicesthrough different places. Here, for example, there is an important set of geographicalquestions about how relations of informality and formality travel, and the politics of thatmovement, from models of formal development that are put to work through informal

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practices within and between cities (e.g. in forms of urban bricolage), or travelling forms ofinformal urbanism that move with tacit knowledges (e.g. activist awareness about how tobuild housing and infrastructure or lobby the state; both forms of urban composition).

Conceiving of informality as a set of practices rather than as a territorial formationchallenges the supposed “illegality” of slums, set against the apparent “legality” of formalurban development. It functions, then, as a form of urban critique, in that it seeks to exposeboth the double-standards of state claims about slums, and the forms of clientelismthat facilitate so-called “formal” planning. Informality as practice can, then, potentiallyserve as a basis for rethinking not just informality, but planning itself, in cities across theglobal south.

In doing so, however, commentators must avoid a conceptualisation of informality-as-practice that becomes yet another trope for deriding the city in the global south as corrupt.The claim here is a familiar one: that cities in the south experience planning as a form offraudulent deal-making, where officials take a slice of developmental profits in return forcontracts, or for exempting new developments from existing regulations. That thispractice does occur is not evidence that cities in the global south are somehow morecorrupt than cities in the global north. Indeed, part of the problem here is the verydistinction of global south–global north. As Alexandroni, 2007 has demonstrated, forinstance, there is nowhere else in the world that deals with more corrupt money than theCity of London, which handles and invests trillions of dollars of cross-border profits fromcriminal activities and tax evasion every year (Alexandroni, 2007). Indeed, the UK’srefusal to bring prosecutions on this has led to warnings from the Organisation forEconomic Co-operation and Development that it might be in breach of its statedcommitment to the anti-bribery convention (Alexandroni, 2007). More generally, informalagreements and forms of valuation and negotiation drive urban development and urbanlife in the north as much as they do in the south. Speculation and calculation propelfinancial markets, and negotiation, valuation and cultural aesthetics prop up urbanreal-estate markets, and assist in the informalisation and casualisation of labour as muchas they promote everyday informal modes of urban sociality such as street markets. Ratherthan reinforcing epistemic divisions of global north and south, the diverse, complex, andcontingent interactions between informality and formality should unsettle thiscategorisation, leading to a new, and more nuanced appreciation of the production ofurban space across the globe.

Note

1. All names from online discussions have been changed.

References

Alexandroni, S. (2007) London tops the poll, New Statesman, 4 October. Available at http://www.newstatesman.com/society/2007/10/corruption-london-money-saudi (last accessed November 2010).

Alsayyad, N. and Roy, A. (2006) Medieval Modernity: On Citizenship and Urbanism in a Global Era. Space andPolity, 10:1, 1–20.

Anjaria, J.S. (2006) Urban calamities: A view from Mumbai, Space and Culture, 9(1), pp. 80–82.Bapat, T.R. (2005) Worst rains Mumbai has ever seen, Rediff.com, 27 July. Available at http://in.rediff.com/news/

2005/jul/27rain5.htm (accessed August 2011).Baviskar, A. (2002) The politics of the city. Seminar 516. Available at http://www.india-seminar.com.Benerıa, L. & Roldan, M. (1987) The Crossroads of Class and Gender: Industrial Homework, Subcontracting, andHousehold Dynamics in Mexico City (Chicago, University of Chicago Press).

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