Chapter 2
Negotiating Formalities
Informality and the Everyday State

This chapter unpicks the relation between informality and the state. The thesis that guides this inquiry is that explicating the ontological assumptions about the state that undergird conceptions of informality can explain some of the limits of the latter concept for an analysis of housing in Berlin's allotments. My related proposition is that specifying these assumptions can help to better grasp and qualify informality's utility in an analysis of state enactment and urban governance. The chapter thus explores the implications of understanding informality through the particular aspect of the state I work with in this book, where the focus lies on how everyday actors negotiate the implementation of regulations in the urban everyday.

The relation of informality to the state has been understood in widely varying ways that are clearly shaped by different ontologies of the state. These underpinnings have rarely been made explicit in research on informality. Yet the ways in which informality is researched and defined are conditioned by how the analytical relations between imaginaries of informality and the state are cast. While informality has long been described as the "other" of states, twenty-first-century scholarship has seen a new generation of urban research advance critical investigations into the multiple interrelations between both concepts, offering more differentiated accounts of the role of the state in the production of urban exclusion. This work has discussed informality as a tool of governance, a negotiable value, a form of state speculation, a means of enacting citizenship, and a mode of resistance (Roy, 2005; Yiftachel, 2009a; Goldman, 2011; Davis, 2018). These perspectives have proven critical in flagging up the forms of exclusion driven by the state, the arbitrary exercise of political power, and the consequential insecurities that those inhabiting irregular housing are prone to face. However, these conceptions do not travel well into Berlin's allotment gardens. More generally put, they pose difficulties for operationalizing the ways in which everyday transgressions are accommodated in the institutional work of relatively functioning regulatory processes. My objective is thus not to argue against these diverse approaches. Rather, I aim to extend these debates, grappling with their existing boundaries by analyzing processes that lie beyond their current attention.

Explaining how informality works within or parallel to bureaucracies that are largely accountable, present, and capable requires a more "intimate" analysis of regulatory processes at the level of everyday implementation. Thus, in order to understand the negotiation of transgression and regulation, I take my cue from perspectives on state enactment that stress its agentic, situated, and relational dimensions. Such perspectives examine the state up-close in order to better comprehend the agency of all parties concerned, foster an understanding of their negotiations from a situated perspective, and analyze how these practices relationally shape and are shaped by how state and urban governance become enacted.

My argument is that this reading of how people negotiate irregular housing conditions in everyday situations is not only more in tune with the ways in which informality is governed in Berlin's allotment gardens than accounts of informality that focus on "states 'with muscles'" are (Boudreau et al., 2016: 2397), but permits us to grasp the normalcy of these negotiations as well. The explanatory promise of a focus on these "quieter registers of power" (Allen, 2016: 11) is that it pinpoints modalities of inclusion and exclusion that play out at the everyday scale. Such an analysis not only shows what is up for negotiation and the degree of latitude that is tolerated, but also demonstrates the small-scale mechanisms through which power relations work to privilege certain practices and declare others as untypical. In this reading, informality becomes a lens to view the everyday production and reproduction of urban inequalities. Translating the concept in this way may allow us to overcome assumptions of unbridgeable differences between Northern and Southern states. Moreover, it moves us beyond the confines of informality research on the global South, the poor, and the agency of a predatory state.

This chapter continues in three parts. First, a review of informality scholarship serves to explicate the approaches to the state and urban governance that undergird this work. In the next section, my aim to think of informality "differently" involves the mobilization of a repertoire of conceptual angles that deal especially with state enactment at the everyday level of urban regulation. The final section concludes by exploring possible conceptual gains of this perspective for an understanding of urban informality and the negotiation of regulations in the urban everyday.

Research on Informality and Its Accounts of the State

The concepts of informality and the state are inextricably intertwined, although research has defined these links in shifting and fundamentally different ways. A genealogical perspective on the epistemological history of the term "informality" readily explains some of these shifts. While its conceptualization is frequently associated with anthropologist Keith Hart (1973; see also Hann and Hart, 2011) and the work of the ILO (1972; cf. Steenberg, 2016), its first appearance in scholarship has been contested (Rakowski, 1994).1 Yet, in these earlier conceptual formulations, informality was undoubtedly a (by)product of reading states and state governance in that particular place and particular time (generally meaning research sites in the global South in the 1970s). As it has frequently been noted, earlier, more "structuralist" understandings (Rakowski, 1994) focused on the exclusion of practices of, for instance, any trading, building, dwelling, or transport provisioning from the formal economy. They defined informal practices through their presumed "location" beyond the reach of state bureaucracies, as well as through their small scale, and the idea that they were carried out by so-called "ordinary" people. Thus, despite controversial voices (e.g. Portes, 1983), major parts of this early, more policy-oriented literature framed the concept as a problem of regulatory capacity or administrative oversight that merely concerned under-resourced populations in Southern cities. Similarly, more "legalist" perspectives (cf. Rakowski, 1994) that emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century (de Soto, 2000, 2002) focused on the "entrepreneurial dynamism" (Bromley, 1990: 330) of the "informals" but continued to hold informality to be a sphere outside of the law and, by way of equating both concepts, of the state.

These approaches also forged unhelpful analytical relations between imaginaries of informality and state modernity. Consider geographer Jennifer Robinson's (2006: 4) understanding of modernity "as simply the West's self-characterization of itself in opposition to "others" and "elsewhere" that are imagined not to be modern." In this reading, the early definitions of informality I previously discussed can be seen to have strengthened the idea of Western state modernity while reinforcing assumptions about the difference of the "Southern state." To be sure, the notion of informality as the "'other' of states" was derived from the idea of a "well-developed state" with modern, rational institutions - and imagined to be located in "the Northwestern quadrant of the world" (O'Donnell, 2001: 7). Yet somewhat contradictorily, researchers aligned informality with the supposedly "dis-functioning" and "traditional" states of the global South, despite these states appearing to lack all the previously named definitional characteristics of the Western state. Rather than questioning imaginaries of "Western state rationality" or aiming to understand geographical varieties in the workings of state practices, the use of the term informality in these cases thus reinforced the "othering" of what was cast as "the Southern state."

Critiques of such teleological conceptions of informality and development have since become ubiquitous. I refer to a set of ideas that specifically address the urban dimensions of a wider postcolonial critique that prominent thinkers, such as Dipesh Chakrabarty, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak, have advanced since the 1980s. Based on the epistemological contributions of postcolonial theory and led by Robinson's influential contribution, Ordinary Cities (2006), urbanists began to debate the essentially parochial nature of urban theory (see e.g. Watson, 2009; Edensor, 2011; Sheppard et al., 2013). Above all, this "Southern urban critique" (Lawhon and Truelove, 2019) challenges the idea of Europe as a signifier of modernity (Escobar, 1995), in relation to which all else is "coming late, lagging behind, and lacking in originality" (Mufti, 2005: 474).2 In the study of cities, this "teleological imperative" (Krishnaswamy, 2005: 70) had led to a profound imbalance in the production of theory and the pretension of theoretical claims. Consequently, postcolonial urbanists have highlighted the tensions between a wider recognition of...