Of Market Vendors and Waste Collectors: Labour,Informality, and Aesthetics in the Era of World-Class City Making

A growing literature demonstrates the significance of aesthetics within processes of world-class city making, as decisions about who gets to live and work in the city are increasingly made on the basis of codes of appearance. However, less attention has been paid to how such codes are (re)produced and (re)directed by informal workers and their organisations in everyday practice. Drawing upon a multisided ethnography in Kampala and Delhi, this paper explores the ways in which market vendors and waste collectors have responded to the proliferation of three aesthetic technologies: the identity card, the uniform, and the code of conduct. We show that workers have appropriated these technologies in creative ways in order to defend their livelihoods against the threat of displacement. However, this act of appropriation has come at the cost of the exclusion of the more vulnerable workers, who now find their activities policed not only by the state but also by a range of non-state organisations. These findings contribute to debates on labour organisation and world-class city making by demonstrating the ways in which aesthetic rationalities emerge through an encounter with the tactics of everyday life.     

Frontiers of Urban Control: Lawlessness on the City Edge and Forms of Clientalist Statecraft in Zimbabwe

This article develops the concept of “urban frontier” to explore conflicts over state regularisation of city edge informal settlements in Zimbabwe’s capital Harare. It conceptualises the presence of “lawless” urban frontiers and “illegal” territorial authorities in capital cities as expressions of a permissive form of central statecraft. In so doing, the article takes forward debates over the politics shaping the margins of Africa’s rapidly expanding cities, redressing scholars’ tendency to neglect central party‐state strategic calculations and party politics in their analyses of unregulated settlements. Dominant interpretations generally hinge on state absence or weakness and emphasise localised influences. The case of Harare’s highly politicised city‐edge informal settlements reveals the inadequacy of apolitical approaches particularly clearly, as all were controlled by the ruling ZANUPF party. The conflicts provoked by regularisation provide a lens on disputes within the ruling party, which we interpret as disputes over different forms of clientalist statecraft. Analyses of urban frontiers can thus help move away from generic one‐size‐fits‐all explanations of informality and patronage politics in Africa’s expanding cities.     

论我国妇女的非正规就业

非正规就业已成为下岗失业职工寻求再就业的主要渠道,在缓解就业压力方面发挥着越来越重要的作用。加强对非正规就业问题的研究,积极促进我国妇女就业,具有重大的战略意义。     

Narratives of Modernity,Masculinity, and Citizenship Amid Crisis in Abidjan's Sorbonne

In this article I relate prominent depictions of the African urban crisis, particularly informality, and its implications for masculine subjectivity in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. Drawing on five months of ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in 2008 and 2009, I consider the Sorbonne, a nationalist space in Abidjan, where partisans of former President Laurent Gbagbo contested the crisis narrative and their place in it. Literally and ideologically, Sorbonne orators and spectators moved themselves and their country from the periphery to the urban and global core.     

Plot by Plot: Plotting Urbanism as an Ordinary Process of Urbanisation

With this paper, we analyse an ordinary urban process, which has received little attention so far, and propose a new concept to take account of it: plotting urbanism. It is usually subsumed under terms like “urban informality” or “incremental urbanism” and not studied as a distinct process. In comparing Lagos, Istanbul and Shenzhen we captured four defining features of plotting urbanism: first, it unfolds in a piecemeal fashion with limited comprehensive planning. Second, it emerges from specific territorial compromises often resulting from conflicts between overlapping modes of territorial regulation, land tenure and property rights. Third, plotting is based on commodification of housing and land, which might accentuate socio-economic differentiations between property-owners, who often live in the same area, and their tenants. The term “plotting” highlights the key role of the plot in the process. It also alludes to strategic acts of collaboration for individual and collective benefit.     

Rome's ‘legal’ camps for Roma: the construction of new spaces of informality

This article examines the ways in which Italian legislation and local policy in Rome since 2007 have aimed at containing and controlling the Roma population, but have resulted instead in the Italian state's own violations of national and international human rights standards. Roma have been relocated to isolated mega-camps subjected to regulations, surveillance and ‘workfare’, which, rather than reducing crime and increasing formal employment, leave residents few alternatives to illegal or semi-legal income generation. These camps also appear to generate ambiguous relationships between local officials, police officers and powerful individuals within the communities. They are thus loci in which various dimensions of illegality and power intersect and merge. The analysis explores the grey areas created by contradictory and hyper-bureaucratic regulations and attempts to shed light on the strategies of survival through informality that emerge within the interstices of the law.     

Evo's jumper: identity and the used clothes trade in ‘post-neoliberal’ and ‘pluri-cultural’ Bolivia

Since the election of Latin America's first indigenous president, Evo Morales, in 2005, Bolivia's ruling party, the ‘Movement Towards Socialism’, has nationalised resources and instituted a ‘post-neoliberal’ and ‘pluri-cultural’ constitution that emphasises the importance of recognising cultural, linguistic and economic plurality. This article explores gendered economic identities in this context via the case study of an informal trade that is explicitly excluded from this vision of development: the globally controversial used clothes trade (UCT). In Bolivia, political debate on the trade demonstrates gendered tensions inherent in the government's ‘post-neoliberal’ agenda of nationalisation, protection of cultural identity and the well-being of the poor in an increasingly liberalised and globalised market place. Working with women in the city of El Alto, this article examines how women's involvement in the UCT challenges understandings of identity and development in post-neoliberal Latin America and the dynamics involved in women's continued marginalisation from global economic and political processes.     

国外城市非正规性研究进展及启示

21世纪以来,西方城市研究界认为大部分城市发展将发生在发展中国家,新的城市理论也将产生在这些新的地理空间,而城市非正规性是其主要特征。本文首先对城市非正规性的演变进行了梳理,认为城市非正规性的研究具有对"二元主义"的超越,"传统"非正规研究的超越和认识论上的转变3个特征,并明晰了城市非正规性的理论内涵是一种管治模式;其次,认为制度变迁和城市非正规性研究之间的焦距在于国家、地方政府、企业和个体等行动者之间的相互作用,在此基础上总结出了城市非正规性互补式、补充式和让步式3种主要类型;最后,从政治、社会和文化三个维度总结了非正规性在中国形成的根源,并提出非正规性可以理解成为中国城市发展的一种模式,非正规实践及非正规制度蕴含制度创新的启示。     

ON HANDLING URBAN INFORMALITY IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

In this article I reconsider the handling of urban informality by urban planning and management systems in southern Africa. I argue that authorities have a fetish about formality and that this is fuelled by an obsession with urban modernity. I stress that the desired city, largely inspired by Western notions of modernity, has not been and cannot be realized. Using illustrative cases of top–down interventions, I highlight and interrogate three strategies that authorities have deployed to handle informality in an effort to create or defend the modern city. I suggest that the fetish is built upon a desire for an urban modernity based on a concept of formal order that the authorities believe cannot coexist with the “disorder” and spatial “unruliness” of informality. I question the authorities' conviction that informality is an abomination that needs to be “converted”, dislocated or annihilated. I conclude that the very configuration of urban governance and socio‐economic systems in the region, like the rest of sub‐Saharan Africa, renders informality inevitable and its eradication impossible.     

Informality Materialised: Long‐term Temporariness as a Mode of Informal Urbanism

This paper establishes an important link between the architectural strategies and long‐term sustenance of “ordinary” informal spaces in the planned modernist city of Islamabad. By focusing on the modalities of street hawking in Islamabad, this paper demonstrates that the architecture of ordinary informality follows an aesthetic and materiality of temporariness, and invokes design criteria based on the rituals of daily assembly and disassembly, and shared customs involving “temporary” claims to immediate public space. The paper uses the concept of “long‐term temporariness” to argue that the sustained existence of street hawking depends upon the routine maintenance of the relationship between its temporality and materiality, evident in both the everyday spatial practices and official procedures concerning informal street commerce. The paper thus situates street hawking within the realms of both formal and informal processes, and highlights the role of provisionality in urban transformations in the global South.