and community mobilizer in the informal neighbourhood of Mukuru in Nairobi, Kenya, reflecting on processes of community mobilization to raise awareness of poor services and infrastructure 1 Existing debates on urban informality tend to focus mainly on the dimensions of living and working informally, with less attention paid towards political elements. This chapter addresses this gap. It offers a conceptualization of governing informally and advances debates on urban informality as a tripartite concept associated with living, working and governing informally
, ‘Governing Informally’). Meanwhile, informality does not simply appear out of nowhere but is often the result of politics. States may deliberately declare certain things (for example, types of housing, modes of infrastructure and service delivery) or practices (for example, patterns of production, trade or employment) as legal, illegal, irregular, or indeed informal. Any articulation of urban informality must therefore be considered inherently political. Building on these insights, our book develops an agenda for studying urban informality that is based upon the
This book is the first to provide an introductory overview to the concept of ‘urban informality’, taking an international perspective across the global North and South. It explores theoretical understandings of the term, and looks at how it affects ways of living, such as land use, housing and basic services, working lives and politics.
Using a broad range of material to bring the topic to life, including non-conventional sources – such as fiction, poetry, photography, interviews and other media – the book helps students, practitioners and scholars develop learning and research on this topic. The book also includes interjections from diverse voices of practitioners, community activists and regional experts.
Overarching arguments and conceptual framework We hope that the preceding chapters have deepened your understanding of urban informality, enabling you to think critically about the underlying reasons for why much of the global urban population lives and works informally and engages in and/or is affected by informal politics (referred to here as governing informally), as well as what can and should be done about this. While this book has covered a wide range of ideas and discussed diverse academic, policy and alternative representations, we have made four
and conceptual currents, in order to set the scene for discussions throughout this book. While it discusses diverse conceptualizations of urban informality, it also highlights the definition complexity of this term, and controversies relating to this. The chapter structure shows how debates on urban informality, and specific articulations of living, working and governing informally, have evolved over time. It opens with a brief review of the history of informality debates, exploring the idea’s roots in colonial planning practices in the global South as well as in
between processes relating to living, working and governing informally. Yet from the outset, in Chapter 1 , we have acknowledged that while these categories may be helpful for ordering our knowledge, they do not always map neatly onto reality. Current and emerging approaches and alternatives to urban informality have sought to complicate and supersede the demarcations between what we have called living, working and governing informally, in this sense returning to our starting point in Chapter 1 . Recent academic work in this field highlights the usefulness of
recognition from government officials and police officers in the area ( Vargas Falla and Valencia, 2019 ). This case study demonstrates that understanding governance and representation around informal work often requires looking at multiple tactics and at intersections with other articulations of urban informality, in this case governing informally. Many informal workers are also affiliated with membership-based organizations (with some formally registered and others operating informally) including sector- or place-specific workers’ associations, trade guilds or unions
gathered evidence leading to quite different policy implications. The article argues that working out how to handle divergent evidence is at least as important a task as gathering more evidence. Governing informally: the role of the Eurogroup in EMU and the Stability and Growth Pact Uwe Puetter Journal of European Public Policy, vol 11, no 5, 2004: 854–70 Comprising the finance ministers of the euro area, the informal Eurogroup plays a central role in the economic governance set-up, albeit one widely unnoticed in the literature on economic and monetary union (EMU). The
