INTERNATIONAL WEBINAR SERIES

INFORMAL/FORMAL URBANISM

The Challenges of Co-Production

Informal urbanism is widely understood to encompass a range of practices from informal settlement, street vending and informal transport to tactical urbanism, street art and urban commoning. Each of these overlapping practices represent self-organized modes of urban production that open complex challenges for citizen-based urban planning in both the global North and South. Yet formal/informal relations are never binary – such practices always involve intersections, contestations and synergies between formal structures of state control and self-organized tactics of citizens. While informal and formal can be construed as different modes of production, the challenge is to find better ways of co-producing cities. This webinar series will explore the many ways in which informal and formal urban practices intersect across the fields of 'informal urbanism'.

Webinar Dates: Oct 7 / Oct 14 / Oct 21 / Oct 28 / Nov 6 / Nov 11 / Nov 18

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Program Details

Week # 1 / Keynote

KURT IVESON, University of Sydney OCT 7 (1 pm) Elite informality in action: the governance of graffiti in Sydney

Discussions of urban informality have increasingly drawn attention to various ways in which it is deployed by elite, as well as marginalised, urban actors. This presentation will give an account of elite informality in action, drawing on research into the governance of graffiti in Sydney. While attempts to either erase graffiti or give it a proper place could be seen as efforts to assert a formal order against the informal appropriation of space by graffiti artists, in fact the authority of urban authorities is frequently enacted through informal practices that themselves seek to evade or work around the rules and the law.

Week # 2 / Panel

RETHINKING INFORMALITY OCT 14 (11 am) Chair: Kim Dovey

Elite Informality and Formal-Informal Relations in the Making of Islamabad Faiza Moatasim, University of Southern California

To demonstrate the entwined relationship between the formal and the informal, this paper will present the history of Bani Gala, an elite village that has emerged within a protected nature reserve in Islamabad. In Bani Gala a handful of elite homebuilders began building their lavish mansions in the 1980s, and eventually initiated a process of revision of the city’s official zoning regulations. By mobilizing their networks of monetary resources and political connections, developing unlikely alliances and mimicking bureaucratic procedures, these wealthy homebuilders were able to transform the undeveloped village of Bani Gala into an elite informal neighborhood. The paper highlights how the influential residents of Bani Gala resisted anti-encroachment campaigns and legitimized their illegal building activities through legal proceedings. The revision of the master plan and zoning regulations of Islamabad as a result of favorable court decisions thus challenges the notion of informal urban developments as hybrid and extra-legal phenomena or official exemptions. Spaces that are initially developed in breach of the official master plan eventually institute major structural changes in the official master plan and planning regulations – a form of formal planning firmly rooted in distinctly informal practices.

On the Supportive Tolerance of Loose Ends and Back Doors Ryan Devlin, Pratt Institute

This presentation makes two propositions regarding the interplay between informal practices of low-income immigrants and formal policy and planning in cities of the global North. First, planners and policy makers should view informal practices of the urban poor—things like street vending, irregular housing arrangements, and informal public transit—as a form of communication by doing. Second, if we accept informal practice as a valid form of dialogue, planners and policy makers must build a response that treats these actions as such. Such a response should be radically open ended—not simply geared towards compliance, upgrading or formalization, but to building and maintaining ongoing dialogue about the use and form of urban space. I suggest an approach that I call “supportive tolerance”. This calls for the development of policy back doors that work through conceptualizing the space between laws as written and laws as enforced as a potential space of radical practice. Supportive tolerance asks planners and policy makers to use tools available to them like variances and exceptions, to think creatively about pilot programs and temporary use. It also encourages the reduction of fines, and general loosening of punitive screws in ways that allows space for informal use to develop, grow, and adapt. Supportive tolerance eschews binaries of formal/informal. And it asks planners and policy makers to listen, as low-income immigrant communities show us through practice what they need the city to be and to become.

Transient Common Infrastructure: The political spaces of assembly Ari Jerrems, Monash University Patricio Landaeta Mardones, Universidad de Playa Ancha

Infrastructure is often associated with formal government funded projects transforming the lived environment and the everyday trajectories of inhabitants of urban spaces. In this presentation, I instead interrogate the informal, transient infrastructures constructed through grassroots political action. In order to do so, I engage with the infrastructures constituted by recent ‘assembly’ movements via informal occupations, camps and assemblies. Drawing on Simone’s notion of people as infrastructure, I explore the emerging physical-social practices and collective spaces created by assembly movements. I do this by asking several key questions: what infrastructural arrangements condition and make these transient common spaces possible? What material, affective and rhythmical infrastructures emerge from distinct instances of assembly politics? How do these infrastructures travel and reverberate beyond their original location? I ground discussion in recent instances of assembly politics in Chile, Lebanon and Hong Kong. Engagement with these cases serves to highlight both the specific conditions from which they emerge, the peculiar refrains they create as well as draw connections between them. The connections and disjunctures studied serve to unsettle distinctions between the global/local, transient/durable and formal/informal in conventional accounts.

Week #3 / Keynote

ALISON BROWN, Cardiff University OCT 21 (4 pm) The Informal Economy in Urban Crises Recovery

Political upheaval or violent conflict is often characterised by a fundamental failure of governance and the destruction of local economies, and yet in the aftermath of conflict, through informal mechanisms of survival and support, people reconstruct their livelihoods and rebuild urban services. In fragile and conflict-affected situations, the informal economy provides a dynamic and systemic response to the challenges and opportunities of conflict and urban violence. For many informal workers – fruit sellers, waste pickers, or labourers – work continues in a volatile context when violence disrupts transport, supplies or markets, while others find new markets replacing disrupted urban services. The critical issue is how to bridge the gap between economic humanitarian relief and development, which this presentation explores. Increasing economic and political stability means rebuilding the complex networks which sustain informal workers – suppliers, transport, communications or credit relationships – with support from humanitarian actors in the aftermath of disaster and local government and development workers through the transition to stability.

Week # 4 / Panel

PUBLIC SPACE OCT 28 (2 pm) Chair: Redento Recio

‘Formal’ and ‘Informal’ Modes of Urban Agriculture in Kunming Yuan Wei, University of Sydney

The exponential growth of China’s urban sprawl has transformed the once arable land into cities with former rural villages. Several types of urban agriculture (UA) have emerged in urban areas due to the transformation of arable land. This presentation focusses on the case of Kunming in Yunnan Province where significant numbers of Village in the City - the non-formally developed former rural villages - and peri-urban residents continue to practice UA. Existing and new UA practices respond to urban pressures and bring into play innovative urban governance thinking, effectively integrating UA into local development and enriching alternative ways of revitalising and managing cities. UA in Kunming presents itself in different ways and at different scales in the private and public domain. On the one hand, the residents initiate ‘informal’ UA practices and adaptive planting in private and public spaces: household planting gardens on verandas, rooftops and window ledges. On the other hand, the Kunming Municipal Government has issued a series of policies since 2010 to promote and encourage the ‘formal’ UA practices that integrate the agricultural experience, entertainment, trading, and education. These UA practices represent divergent modes of production and different ways of governance in meeting diverse needs of city stakeholders. This presentation explores the changing role and nature of these UA practices in the urbanisation process including discussing opportunities for co-production.

The Ordinary City and the Extraordinary City Kiran Keswani Everyday City Lab, Bangalore Suresh Bhagavatula, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore

Recent work on informal urbanism argues that informality shapes how global South cities grow, and needs to be a part of emergent urban theory. This paper builds upon this work, investigating how people informally shape the city through their everyday and periodic activities in public spaces. The research uses spatial ethnography to examine urban informality as an outcome of spatial and economic changes in a market precinct in Bangalore. The presentation will show that everyday practices within certain urban spaces have a temporal dimension. The ordinary city encapsulates how people use urban spaces on an everyday basis and the extraordinary city reflects how urban spaces are transformed during a periodic, religious and cultural festival. The paper derives relational measures of locational choice, tactics of informal vendors, and the economics of the space through an unpacking of the two situations. It draws upon the construct of the ‘common denominator’ and applies it to the everyday practices within these situations to develop an ordinary-extraordinary framework. The paper makes two key contributions: to show how developing this theoretical framework might add to our understanding of informal urbanism and to propose that it may be useful to have intermediate levels of planning that incorporate the conditions of the ordinary city and the extraordinary city.

Co-producing street vending in Malang Adnya Sarasmita, University of Washington

This research on street vending in Malang, Indonesia offers an insight into the ways in which the nexus of informal/formal urbanism is manifested in everyday urban spaces. A formal regulatory framework exists on the municipal level, outlining where and when vending activities are not allowed to occur. Street vending, however, continues to operate informally within, or adjacent to, the formal spaces. Several cases suggest that the formal framework often has limited bearing on the everyday vending practices across the city. In instances where the formal framework intersects with everyday informality, several scenarios transpire. Whenever possible, street vendors will try to avoid contact. If that fails, direct confrontation with rule enforcement may ensue, in which the vendors are typically quelled – albeit temporarily. A less aggressive approach has been attempted through the co-production of a formalised street market. Although the formal-informal intersection in such approach may be seen as less hostile, it is still shaped by power imbalance, with street vendors expected to alter their practices and comply with formally imposed rules of conduct. To pursue a genuine co-production, the formal needs to engage the street vendors in a manner that preserves their agency, which may include informally occupying their everyday spaces, even in a formal framework.

Week # 5 / Keynote

GAUTAM BHAN, IIHS, Delhi NOV 6 (2 pm) Informality and the Pandemic: Thinking about our conceptual vocabularies

This year has been, in some senses, another marker of the limits of current urban practices and theoretical frameworks to understand as well as anticipate urban realities. This talk will reflect on what the current pandemic has shown us about the lifeworlds that the conceptual diad of formal/informal urbanism has sought to describe, understand and engage with. Drawing from the Indian experience of what happened in these lifewords, the talk will think through what stands, and what stands challenged, in the conceptual work that “informality” helps us do, across both spatial and economic informality in cities of the global south.

Week # 6 / Panel

SETTLEMENTS NOV 11 (12 noon) Chair: Kim Dovey

Informal morphology as cultural artefact David Week, University of Melbourne

In the modern era, informal urban settlements have been considered an aberration in the idealized conception of the planned city. Increasingly, however, pragmatic and human rights considerations have led to a widening acceptance that such settlements constitute the homes of hundreds of millions of people and must be accepted into the city. One form of this acceptance would have settlers acquire the same rights and benefits as any other resident. A more ambitious form of acceptance is co-production, in which the parties engage in city-making on the basis of the knowledge and capacities that each brings to the table, without falling back on pre-existing, problematic and inequitable power relationships. What’s at stake here is whether urban professionals, themselves imbued by their education and position with the values and biases of modernity, can deal with informal settlers on an equitable basis.

This presentation frames both the “formal” city and “informal” settlements as cultural artefacts: the first shaped by the culture of modernity, disseminated through mechanisms of colonialism; the second shaped by local cultures through their encounter with modernity. City officials and informal settlers create, evolve and maintain these artefacts as agents of those respective cultures. The paper will deploy concepts of positionality, perspectivism, and historicity in order to reconceive “formal” and “informal” as no different in essence, just in history: “formality” largely European, and informality (like Said’s “Orient”) as highly diverse.

Rules of Production, Co-Production and Transformation: Informal Settlements in Indonesia Ninik Suhartini, ITB, Indonesia Paul Jones, University of Sydney

This paper explores the rules and protocols by which built form in informal settlements is produced, co-produced and transformed. Typically, this production of space is incremental and of micro-morphological scale. There is a clear sequence of physical activities by which built form evolves, with adaptation and transformation occurring through local rules and protocols sanctioned and accepted by residents as normal urbanism or produced together with the government and/or other stakeholders such as NGOs. This is a dynamic interplay between formal urban rules, regulations, plans and codes, and the emergent informal rules and protocols which modulate and facilitate adaptation, incrementalism and transformation in informal settlements. This presentation unpacks the rules of production, co-production and transformation of built form and space in Kampung Lebak Siliwangi in Bandung, Indonesia, by profiling examples of two main rule types: explicit rules and understood rules. Rules of co-production work where there are mutual benefits to stakeholders, social capital can be leveraged, and existing political bases underpinning local governance arrangements are negotiated, not challenged. The presentation highlights the complexity of the formal/informal nexus, including the adverse impact of self-governed rules on issues of public interest and wider settlement functionality.

Competition, Cooptation or Coproduction: Architects and Builders in Self-build Housing in Delhi Manas Murthy and Howard Davis, University of Oregon

Self-build housing is a key aspect of informal urban production, yet there is little research into the nature of professional assistance that owners receive in producing it. This paper critically examines professional politics between builders and architects as they compete for popular recognition and market share, co-opt business models, styles and modes of operation, and ultimately coproduce self-build housing. It brings attention to the divergence in outcomes that follow from formalized/informal labor practices in this field. The professionalization of architecture has sought to distinguish architecture from craftsmen and builders by touting universal ideals of modernism and a scientific approach, against traditional embodied practices of vernacular production. The history of professional politics between architects and builders, in this sense, is at the root of the bifurcation between informal and formal production of housing. In this presentation a cross-cultural comparison of the role of architects and builders in the UK and India will help reveal a critical professional framework for the linked practices of informal and formal urbanism.

Week # 7 / Concluding Panel

CO-PRODUCTION AND GOVERNANCE NOV 18 (4 pm) Chair: Crystal Legacy

Co-Production of Social Justice: Resettlement Planning in Jakarta Karina Putri, University of Melbourne

Despite gaining significant currency in the recent urban planning and urban geography literature, urban informality remains understudied. While considerable research has explored urban informality as the property of cities in the Global South, and the relationship between formality and informality as hierarchical and binary (i.e. Roy, 2005; Yiftachel, 2009; Devlin, 2011; McFarlane, 2012; McFarlane and Waibel, 2012; Iveson 2019; Banks, Lombard and Mitlin, 2020), more research is needed to examine urban informality as a marginal enterprise, a mode of production undertaken specifically by underprivileged groups in society. This paper aims to address this gap by exploring the often-overlooked range of actors and processes involved in the creation and maintenance of urban informality. It will do so by highlighting the logic of informality beyond poverty and linking the informal practice to the contrasting modes of accumulation and survival. Using the recent resettlement case in Jakarta, Indonesia, this paper seeks to draw closer attention the role of formal, prominent, and elite actors in establishing and maintaining informal negotiation processes with the pre-relocated residents. In this context, this paper argues a state-initiated co-production of just resettlement was at play. However, the potential to engage further with and expand social justice in the resettlement processes was undermined by the involvement of actors with accumulation, instead of a survival network.

Banks, N., Lombard, M., & Mitlin, D. (2020). Urban informality as a site of critical analysis. The Journal of Development Studies, 56(2), 223-238.

McFarlane, C., & Waibel, M. (2016). Introduction: The informal-formal divide in context. In Urban informalities (pp. 15-26). Routledge.

Yiftachel, O. (2009). Theoretical Notes OnGray Cities': the coming of urban apartheid?. Planning theory, 8(1), 88-100.

Co-producing urban waterscapes in Brazil Alexandre da Silva Faustino, RMIT

Research on urban informality understands the formal/informal nexus to be where distinct modes of city production and practices of power intersect. The examination of power asymmetries is central to the political ecological analysis of the urbanization process, for which the assemblage of relations within society and with the physical environment shapes the creation of socio-natural hybrid things as cities, water and waterscapes. The unequal and unjust contours that give shape to these processes is highlighted in hydrosocial research grounded in political ecology insights. In this paper, I critically explore how grassroots initiatives on urban informality challenge the dominant - or formal - practices of power and seek to reconfigure urban waterscapes through co-production arrangements in Sao Paulo city, Brazil. I draw from the literature on urban informality, urban political ecology and critical geography to analyse current actions and strategies of grassroots water activists working at, with or from urban informality. The findings of the research help to conceptualize the formal/informal nexus from a hydrosocial lens and generate possibilities for co-producing Sao Paulo’s urban waterscapes through grassroots water activism in informal settlements. The conclusions from this research address how informal urban production interplays with grassroots actions to challenge the dominant urbanization through practices of power realignment and self-organization. This paper emphasises how grassroots initiatives and the mobilization of excluded groups and communities, as the dwellers of informal settlements, are avenues for social empowerment and emancipation.

Staging Dubai: Mapping the ‘in-between’ of urban governance Michele Acuto, University of Melbourne Maryam Karimi, Politecnico di Milano

Informality has often been located as ‘outside’ of the realm of official politics. In urban studies, it has regularly been associated with practices of dwelling and partly separated from the formalized control of the state and the government. Yet, informal urbanism might be far more visceral to government that its more popular manifestations might give away. Building on a conceptualization of the “staging” (van Tatenhove et al. 2006) of the formal-informal relation, the paper argues for a re-integration of informality as a critical part of “statecraft” (Hilbrandt, Neves Alves, and Tuvikene 2017). It does so by looking at the case of how the contemporary landscape of urban governance in Dubai has been constructed ‘in-between’ formal authority and the backstage of everyday politics, preventing contestation and circumvention. Drawing on the possibilities of this heuristic for mapping informality, it argues for an appreciation of the grey space in which informality takes place, and for opening up more systematically comparative discussions to unpack this ‘in-between’ of urban governance.

Van Tatenhove, J., Mak, J., & Liefferink, D. (2006). The inter-play between formal and informal practices. Perspectives on European Politics and Society, 7(1), 8-24.

Hilbrandt, H., Alves, S. N., & Tuvikene, T. (2017). Writing across contexts: Urban informality and the state in Tallinn, Bafatá and Berlin. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 41(6), 946-961.

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