In this Issue...

Articles
The study of informality has become a prominent feature of debates in urban studies. This collection of articles expands and deepens the scope of study, specifically in three ways. First, as many of us have previously argued, urban informality must be understood in relation to the state, not merely as an effect of state practices but indeed as a key logic of state power. Such state power is often evident, as in the case of the formalization of street vending in Guangzhou, China, described by Huang et al., through the ordering of space. Tucker and Devlin foreground ‘negotiated legalities’ in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, and New York City, USA, as an important example of this logic, while Nogueira emphasizes differentiated legitimacy of claims to space based on constitutional rights in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Needless to say, we must also ask what functions as a state in any given context. Thus, Chiodelli’s essay, located in a town close to Milan in northern Italy, analyzes the production and governance of illegal housing by ‘a mafia-type criminal organization’. Second, several of the articles reinscribe urban informality by making evident practices of belonging and care. Lancione’s ethnography of underground Bucharest centers the ‘politics of life’ and ‘making of home’. Boudreau draws our attention to muscular forms of power as well as to forms of fidelity and redress. Of particular interest is the embodied nature of the politics of life, be it the socially embedded work relations, as in the account by Rodgers et al. of informal work practices in a Pakistani community in the UK, or Ogunyankin’s exposition of the ethico-politics of gendered resistance in Ibadan, Nigeria. Finally, these essays provoke important questions about the methodologies through which the study of urban informality can be undertaken. What are the ethnographic and archival methods that can uncover what Boudreau calls ‘traces of the state’? How do we, as she asks, build ‘state theory from the street altar’? What epistemologies and methodologies are needed to recognize and research what Lancione calls ‘the propositional politics’ of the underground city or the assembling of protection that constitutes ‘weird exoskeletons’? Such questions point to the after-lives of urban informality, new lines of inquiry that depart from the conceptualization of informality but that take us to uncharted spaces of humanity and inquiry.

— Ananya Roy

Interventions
This issue’s Interventions pieces help deepen the thematic focus on informality and the state. The seven brief pieces, which include an introduction by Christian Haid and Hanna Hildebrandt and concluding reflections by Julie-Anne Boudreau, utilize the five concepts of governance, agency, sovereignty, legitimacy and legality to reveal the ways that informal practices are implicated in the exercise of formal state authority. And while acknowledging and crediting the scholarship that has earlier demonstrated informality as a key logic of state power, the authors contributing to this collection maintain that this insight has largely remained confined to the postcolonial contexts in which it originated. In order to further transcend and help dismantle unproductive geographic divides, the selected cases highlight the state-informality nexus in urban areas in France, Poland, the UK, the Netherlands, and Hong Kong, contexts typically understood to have the capacity to regulate their populations and eliminate informality. But rather than simply applying the study of urban informality to cases in the North, the authors reflect on the work of translation required for communicating across contexts. This reflection, while present across the individual cases, is addressed most directly in Boudreau’s concluding essay, in which she commends the authors for undertaking the ambitious task of rethinking the boundaries, functions, and activities of state through rich, empirically grounded cases of the city, or what she has earlier referred to as ‘transurban language of urbanization’.

— Liza Weinstein