Contenu du sommaire : Informalité, pouvoir et envers des espaces urbains

In 2010, a collective of 8 geographers and sociologists launched the research program “Informality, Power and the Other Side of Urban Spaces - Inverses”. This text is a description of the process and different stages followed by the research group, as well as the approaches used to develop a shared analytical framework, and the positioning of its thesis and findings in relation to contemporary questions on urban power. It furthermore presents how political informality has emerged as a key notion to understanding modes of urban government, taking into account the different forms of arrangement in presence in the cities studied.

Cet article propose d'analyser les interactions informelles entre citoyens et représentants locaux de l'autorité (police, conseils d'anciens, chefs administratifs) dans un vaste quartier d'habitat informel de Nairobi (Kenya). Une enquête de terrain empruntant aux méthodes anthropologiques a permis d'identifier la notion de « pacte mensonger » comme clé de lecture pertinente pour qualifier ces jeux d'interaction. Le pacte mensonger se définit comme la capacité des acteurs à mentir et à accepter le mensonge d'autrui, à condition que celui-ci participe d'une logique d'intérêts communs. En d'autres termes, les places, les droits et les prérogatives de chacun dans le jeu politique de la communauté se fondent sur un équilibre négocié, procédant de la construction d'un récit vraisemblable commun. Partant de cette clé de lecture, l'enjeu de l'analyse est alors de souligner l'importance de l'espace dans le processus de négociation/renégociation du pacte. Cette attention portée à l'espace permet d'entrevoir, au terme de la réflexion, les logiques de ritualisation à l'œuvre dans le jeu politique, permettant l'exclusion puis la réintégration des citoyens fautifs au sein du pacte communautaire. This article aims at analyzing informal interactions between citizens and local representatives of the authority (police, senior councils, administrative chiefs) in a slum of Nairobi (Kenya). A fieldwork relying on anthropological methodologies has led to identify the notion of “delusionary pact” as a pertinent analytical grid for qualifying such interactions. The delusionary pact can be understood as the capacity of the actors to lie and to accept lies from others, provided that such a pact serves a common interest. In other words, places, rights and prerogatives of community members in the political game are based on a negotiated balance, which derives from the construction of a plausible common story. Relying on this analytical grid, the stake of the analysis is to bring forward the importance of space in the negotiation/renegotiation process of the pact. This attention to space highlights the logics of ritualization at work in the political game, allowing both exclusion and reincorporation of deviant citizens within the community pact.

Since the economic reforms of the 1990's, street vending plays an important part in everyday life and urban economy in many cities all over India. In Mumbai, street trading allows a large part of urban dwellers to earn a living and provide some essential and affordable goods to the population. However, this activity seems to be “unwanted”, according to urban planning and governance policies and according to a part of “civil society” discourses. Consequently, street vendors are central in the conflicts about public space, which represent a working and living place, a vital spatial resource but also a place for fluent traffic, leisure activities, flânerie or consumption. Moreover, for a large part of official and non-official urban actors, public spaces are a source of informal income through corruption and clientelism practices. Indeed, hawkers, considered as illegal, are victims of a huge extortion process by the municipality and police but also by some informal actors. A new law for the defence of street vendors' rights (Street vendors Act) has been voted in March 2014 at central level, and recognizes the legitimacy and the legality of these activities through a regularization process. In this context, this article tries to analyse the use of law in public spaces conflicts, as well as concrete practices of law through transgressions and negotiations. Analysing informality seems to be a relevant case to understand the tensions between the normative aspect of public spaces and the diversity of their modalities of appropriation, and the plurality of powers which are ruling public spaces occupation.

The municipalities of Lima (capital of Peru) are involved in many disputes due to the lack of clear political and administrative boundaries between them. This lack of clear boundaries is the result of local legislators' usage of layperson's markers which are no longer adequate to define these boundaries today. Consequently, new territories take form from the fringes, where municipalities develop strategies of control and where various forms of informal arrangements between inhabitants and authorities come together to build a particular citadinity. We make the hypothesis that these fringes are a particular spatial manifestation of political informality. 

This paper explores the informal processes by which local governments manage the uses of the city. By doing so, we study the relationship between governance, informality and power. The analysis relies on fieldwork conducted during three years on Romanian “Roma” migrants in a large city of the South of France. Firstly, through newspapers articles, we examine how this social matter has become a political issue in the city, which actors are dealing with it and what it challenges in its political environment. Secondly, we investigate how the public forces address Roma through informal practices, intimidations and discrete agreements, in order to minimize their visibility and confine them to certain urban margins. Finally, addressing the movement of resistance supported by NGOs and a “Roma leader”, we analyse interpersonal relations and political configurations that lead actors who are devoid of formal resources to play a role in local governance. The conclusion deals with the prospects offered by informality in terms of participation in decision-making and its limitations for weak actors.

Formality and informality, Global North and Global South as well as globalization from above and globalization on below are enduring dichotomies informing greatly our representations of cities. This paper envisions the overcoming of such oppositions by focusing on the power dynamics engaged by informality in the very city centre of a so called Global North metropolis. The study of the spatial and social arrangements contracted between (in)formal stakeholders of several Parisian tourist attractions highlights the multiple ways in which the urban official order is infringed by the stakeholders of the informal economy on an everyday basis. Despite the strong apparatus of security, these stakeholders manage to assert themselves in the power relationships at stake in the public spaces and to build an alternative power geometry, allowing to grasp new forms of urban order at play. They turn out to be co-producers of the metropolis by reshaping tourist representations and practices as well as urban landscapes.

This paper analyses different forms of “shadow urbanism” in Phnom Penh, the capital city of Cambodia. I mainly argue that planning actions and urban spaces productions “from above” depend on multiple informal strategies structured by power relationships between public and private stakeholders. I show that current debates about urban planning logic in Global South cities oppose too sharply urban spaces productions from above and from below, as well as formal and informal practices. These dialogical approaches reduce our capacity of understanding the political nature of the relationships between public and private stakeholders, and the fact that their actions also depend on “actually existing urbanism” that condition their strategies. Firstly, the paper examines how official planners are trying to change the production of a large scale urban project in the city centre. Secondly, the paper analysis how a private developer who is building a condominium project in the periphery failed to impose his will to local authorities. Finally, the article shows that instead of the notion of informality, the notion of opacity is a key concept in the understanding of shadow urbanism practices in Phnom Penh.

This article explores the dimensions of informality behind the scenes of Rímac's local government, a central district of the Peruvian capital, Lima. The municipality's capacity to oversee urban development is challenged by the magnitude of its problems and constraints, and has therefore developed strategies so as to ensure its own autonomy. The organisation and practices of the local government maneuver between formality and informality in order to access funds and to implement urban policies in the district. The exercise of local power, whether it bypasses or substitutes the normative framework, relies on opportunistic and clientelistic strategies that allow room for maneuver. This results in specific forms of action on the territory and the conservation of power relations.

Informed by the ‘right to the city' literature a large body of research on urban transformation in India and other developing countries had shown how Global city aspirations of the urban elites have increasingly come about through commoditisation of urban space and inter alia dispossession of the poor. Taking-off from the above conceptualisation as the point of departure, this paper provides an alternative perspective of political consolidation of the urban informal sector and its implications. Looking through the lens of political mobilization of the street vendors in Kolkata, India, this paper shows that how the labour unions has enabled informal vendors to not only resist the designs of the hegemonic state successfully but to become a part of the city's governance framework. The paper argues that class binaries provide only a partial picture about what it is an evolving and layered relationship in which at the neighbourhood scale, often there is high degree co-existence and interdependence between formal and informal economies and the people associated with it. Power relations and engagement patterns between the street vendors and the state authorities had changed over years, impacting quality of life within the core city and its long term sustainability. A new, fragmented spatial structure has started emerging, with the middle classes and the globalizing segments of the economy, moving away to gated enclaves at the urban fringe. These changes are not isolated phenomenon, but rather symptomatic with the larger process of urban transformation and entwined with the political-economic change in the state level.

In the context of the renewal of the concept of the informal sector in social science, this contribution proposes to address the question of the relationship between informality and politics, from the creation of new places of culture, their uses and management in Naples' historic center. Although much has been published on cultural policies in connection with the revival of the cities, the field of informal practices in this area has been relatively overlooked. The manifold meanings of culture generate a wide range of narratives in counterpoint to illegality. This sphere is not yet codified and gives rises to unprecedented situations and emergence of a various foci of power, thus combining formal and informal logic circuits on different scales. For all these reasons, the analysis of cultural actions opens up promising paths to capture some of the facets of the political informality. The case of Naples, beyond its peculiarities, is in this perspective a privileged observatory.

Participatory urban governance, with its focus on citizen representation and the equitable distribution of resources, has been implemented globally to deepen democracy. Some individuals position themselves as voluntary representatives, or brokers, between the state and their fellow citizens. In this article I analyse the increasingly important and largely informal roles of such brokers in participatory urban governance. Informed by my research in Brazil and the Netherlands, this article explores how brokers position themselves in administrative schemes and how they operate both in and out of officially sanctioned channels and institutions. In general, the scholarly debate on brokerage within participatory governance is divided into two arguments: first, an argument about neoliberal deregulation, which encourages the practices of active citizen-mediators, and second, an argument about modernization, which sees brokers as remnants of a clientelist political system. The first argument, mostly based on research in the global North, sees brokers as formal mediators, while the second, mostly based on studies in the global South, sees them as engaged in highly informal and personalized transactions. In this article, to bridge the existing divide between these arguments, I present an approach of brokers as ‘assemblers', connective agents who actively bring together different government and citizen actors, institutions and resources while combining formal and informal politics.