Postcolonializing Berlin and The Fabrication of The Urban

Postcolonializing Berlin is an experiment in rethinking (Western) cities from the South. It embraces conceptual innovations from thinkers in African, Latin American and Asian urban studies to complicate the stories we tell about contemporary Berlin. My argument proceeds in four steps. I begin by asking what makes the North–South division in urban studies so problematic, and what needs to happen to shake up those categories. Then I share some of my own trials and errors in looking at Berlin‐Neukölln through the lens of ‘the South', before offering an alternative frame, which I call ‘urban fabricating', as a way of inquiring into and perceiving changing urban settings. In the final part, gambling parlours in Berlin‐Neukölln move into focus, where different forms of fabrication are at work: the regeneration officials' vision for the future of the neighbourhood, the inspectors' improvisations on the casino law, and the casino owners' ways of muddling through at the edges of the law. Rather than searching for the one new theory to shake up urban studies, fabricating is, I suggest, an unagitated approach to the actual processes through which cities are made.     

Sovereignty Beyond the State: Exception and Informality in a Western European City

Bridging debates on urban sovereignty and urban informality, this paper argues that relationships between sovereignty and informality may not reside exclusively in the way the sovereign state decides to allow or forbid informality, but also in the way sovereignty is distributed among a range of state and non‐state actors. Drawing upon fieldwork on the early‐2010s management of displaced Romanian Romani families in two emergency camps in the city of Montreuil (France), the paper shows how the NGO responsible for managing one camp acted as sovereign power, allowing a number of informal activities to thrive within its confines. By contrast, inside the other camp, managed by another NGO that resolutely implemented state directives, only formal activities took place. Building on Dean's (2010) concept of ‘disaggregated sovereignty’, the paper mobilizes this disjuncture as a case for critically examining how the ‘state of exception’ takes shape beyond the state's grip. A subtext running throughout is the parallel between the very first camps for civilians in nineteenth‐century colonized territories and these twenty‐first‐century camps for Roma in Europe—both elicited a state of exception partially predicated on camp dwellers’ perceived ethnic/racial homogeneity.     

The Born‐Again Favela: The Urban Informality of Pentecostalism in Rio de Janeiro

Since the 1980s, the metropolitan spaces of Brazil have seen a significant upsurge of the Christian Pentecostal movement, which today dominates the religious landscape of the favelas. In Rio de Janeiro, the rise of Pentecostalism coincided with the establishment of drug gangs as actors controlling favela territories. Based on an ethnographic field study conducted in a favela complex in the city's Zona Norte, this article examines the role and significance of the Pentecostal churches in Rio's favelas, both in everyday urban life and in the ways these areas are governed. One of my focal points of analysis is the increasing entanglement of actors in the drug industry and church actors. The article posits that the Pentecostal churches' role and significance, their institutional shape and their followers' practices are inextricably intertwined with the favela's social, spatial and political structural patterns. It shows the ways in which the evolving Pentecostal movement has permeated all aspects of the favela's informal way of urban life and government and has produced a new urban religious configuration in which the Pentecostal movement and the favela are intertwined and transform each other.     

Understanding Urban Processes in Flint,Michigan: Approaching ‘Subaltern Urbanism’ Inductively

Ananya Roy introduces the concept ‘subaltern urbanism’ in her 2011 article ‘Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism’. She challenges researchers to move beyond existing epistemological and methodological limits, and offers four concepts which, taken together, serve as a useful starting point for understanding and representing subaltern urban space. In this article I argue that instead of a deductive approach that begins with an a priori identification of slums as subaltern urban space, an inductive approach of identifying subaltern urban space would expand the concept and show that subaltern urbanism exists in the global North. I present original research to show that Flint, Michigan, can be considered subaltern urban space. In the final section of the article I argue that this inductive approach to subaltern urbanism can foster comparative research across the North‐South divide, and generate the transfer of knowledge from South to North.     

Urban Informality and the State: Geographical Translations and Conceptual Alliances

Understandings of informality commonly derive from research undertaken in states perceived as lacking the capacity to regulate the practices of their populations. This Interventions forum aims to expand the geographical parameters of empirical research on urban informality. A more global approach, we argue, also necessitates questioning assumptions that undergird this concept—in particular the underlying conception of the state. In this vein, this collection of papers aims to rethink theories of the state through the lens of informality, and vice versa, to inform and refine the concept of informality through a more thorough understanding of states. In so doing, the contributions engage with concepts that have been central both to theories of the state and to the study of informality, namely governance, agency, legitimacy, sovereignty and legality. Following this introduction setting out our theoretical approach, the Interventions forum unites five empirical studies that discuss the nexus of informality and states in contexts that have been researched less extensively from this perspective, each tackling one of the above‐mentioned concepts. Based on these different entry points, the papers provide novel angles on a state‐theoretical understanding of informality. A concluding essay brings these approaches together, reflecting on the possibilities of translating concepts to different sites.     

Urban Commoning as a Vehicle Between Government Institutions and Informality: Collective Gardening Practices in Tampere and Narva

This article examines the processes of urban commoning and its co-produced features of urbanity, making the claim that, through these processes, informality becomes translated into institutionalized city planning. Commoning is analysed through a comparative study that utilizes contingent features of urbanity and three modalities accommodating the informality–formality meshwork during urban change. The article contributes to research on urban transformations by integrating commons, informality dynamics and the constitution of state institutions. This focus is elaborated with reference to collective gardening practices in the context of two of the less studied European cities, Narva in Estonia and Tampere in Finland. The results of the study indicate that urban commoning takes place through delegating a public mandate and enacting uncertainty, two processes that informalize city government practices. Particular differences appeared in regard to the institutional porosity that enables unregulated spaces of collective gardening to be mobilized as part of urban politics. We argue that networked movements appear as an essential part of the urban logic of action producing meaningful connections in an informal–formal meshwork and bringing together multiple sites in the commoning process.     

The Dark Side of Urban Informality in the Global North: Housing Illegality and Organized Crime in Northern Italy

This article deals with housing illegality/informality in Italy, where it represents an established aspect of urban development. It presents a case study focused on Desio, a town close to Milan in northern Italy. Here housing illegality occurs by virtue of the well‐established presence of a mafia‐type criminal organization (the ‘Ndrangheta). Three examples of illegal construction in Desio are analysed, forming the basis for a discussion on the distinctive features of illegal house‐building in Italy. In particular, institutional incentives encouraging illegal housing are investigated, with reference to both formal institutions (e.g. planning laws, rules preventing unauthorized housing and building amnesties) and informal institutions (e.g. organized crime). The case of illegal housing in Italy contributes significantly to the wider international debate on urban informality, highlighting the critical need for research along avenues as yet only partially explored (e.g. informal housing in Western countries and the role of criminal activities and actors in the spread of informality) and challenging some common assumptions such as the geographical dualism (‘global North’ versus ‘global South’) which, implicitly, results from the international literature.     

The Regime of Informality in Neoliberal Times in Turkey: The Case of the Kadifekale Urban Transformation Project

Juxtaposing the empirical findings of a qualitative research study of an urban transformation project in the Kadifekale squatter district of Izmir with the changed nature of urban politics in a neoliberal context, this article aims to trace the manifestations of the regime of informality in Turkey. Ethnographic consideration of the motives behind these projects, the way they have been carried out and their consequences for the lives of the inhabitants points to an extended space for informal politics tactically manoeuvred by state officials of various ranks. Particularly during the last two decades, neoliberal urban policies have triggered an intensification of power discrepancies in both the vertical and horizontal dimensions and a fragmentation of community structure in the localities — mainly along socioeconomic divides. This research reveals a transition from positive/passive to negative/active uses of informality in the disposition of the state towards the urban poor when the fast and efficient conduct of urban transformation projects is in question. The characteristics of the locality as a landslide zone, the already fragmented socioeconomic structure in the neighbourhood and the dense presence of Kurdish immigrants facilitate the putting into practice of informal strategies. The immigrants who cannot define a place for themselves in the simultaneously formal and informal context of the project have been seriously disadvantaged.     

Silence and Voice in Nigeria's Hybrid Urban Water Markets: Implications for Local Governance of Public Goods

This article highlights how the governance of the water sector affects the strategies and tactics urban residents use to gain improved access to water for household consumption in cities with limited networked infrastructure. A framework of exit, voice and loyalty (EVL) is used to characterize the actions household decision makers take in neighborhoods across metropolitan areas. In Nigeria, Lagos and Benin City are rapidly growing metropolitan regions with urban water markets competing with a state‐run utility. Scholars have documented informality and hybridity between state and non‐state actors, but there is less understanding of variables associated with citizen behavior in urban water markets across different types of households and communities. This article places Nigeria in the context of African mobilization around water provision, using interviews, observation and findings from fieldwork, household interviews and surveys undertaken between 2008 and 2015 to show how access to water is shaped by the interplay between state and non‐state sources of water. This access is filtered through differently regulated service providers and the perceived authority of each actor involved in water delivery, which can lead to what I call structural silence. Findings show the need for a grounded understanding of factors influencing voice and participation in local governance.     

Urban Segregation and Metropolitics in Latin America: The Case of Bogotá, Colombia

The patterns of spatial socioeconomic segregation in Latin American cities are changing rapidly as a result of suburbanization and metropolization. However, the political consequences of these urban spatial processes are not well understood. This article uses Orfield's framework of analysis to test the hypothesis that spatial segregation at the metropolitan level is driving political polarization between Latin American cities and their suburbs. With Bogotá as a testing ground, we look for evidence that the mechanisms described by Orfield are at play. We conclude that metropolitan spatial segregation does not drive metropolitan politics in Bogotá and explore some of the theoretical implications thereof.     

Lively Lands: The Spatial Reproduction Squeeze and the Failure of the Urban Imaginary

This article argues that the theoretical invisibility of non-privatized land tenures constitutes a failure of the urban imaginary, which restricts the ability to forge less commodified urban futures. The article explicates two attributes of non-privatized land—fungibility and combinatoriality—that produce an urban land nexus capable of fostering pro-poor agglomeration economies and generating socialities that exceed the model of the separative self that is hegemonic in more propertied settings. Fungibility, it shows, externalizes supportive economies of production and reproduction into surrounding neighborhoods by shifting the boundaries and terms of usufruct without cadastral oversight or regulation. Combinatoriality—a hybrid formulation of combined territories and combined territorialities—describes overlapping forms of access to land or demarcations of legitimate land use, either competitive or reciprocal. Together, these two attributes of non-privatized land systems produce a propinquity requirement for economic production, or a social density and liveliness more limited in privatized land markets. Through a diagnostic analogy with the simple reproduction squeeze characteristic of subsistence agrarian settings, it charts how an urban spatial reproduction squeeze—felt globally in dense, rising-rent environments across the global North and South—generates subsistence needs that mixed-tenure environments are uniquely capable of fulfilling and that can provide inspiration for radical housing struggles elsewhere.     

Beautifying the Slum: Cable Car Fetishism in Cazucá, Colombia

The installation of cable cars as part of slum beautification projects has begun to circulate among politicians, planners and residents as a magical solution that offers social and economic integration to historically marginalized urban areas. This paper analyzes the way in which a cable car project became a fetish for the inhabitants, politicians and planners of Cazucá, a very deprived, abandoned and stigmatized area on the outskirts of Bogotá, Colombia. The highly positive value given to the cable car project must be understood within the specific local context without judging its ‘false promises’ a priori. The promise of the cable car in Cazucá reveals at least two crucial political reasons for the current potency of such projects: a complex history of political failures and the political value cable cars have acquired nationally and internationally. We analyze how, for both residents and politicians, the mere possibility of a cable car awakened long neglected desires for visibility and created new ones, such as those related to tourism. They see the cable car as an ‘engine for social change’, a way to ensure the commitment of national and international funds, and a venue to brand the city on a global scale.     

Paying for Pipes,Claiming Citizenship: Political Agency and Water Reforms at the Urban Periphery

This article interrogates the nature of political agency deployed at sites of market‐oriented water reforms. It presents a case study from Bangalore, India of a water project mandating significant ‘beneficiary’ cash contributions from lower‐middle‐class dwellers for the capital cost of extending piped water to the city's peripheries. Drawing on quantitative and ethnographic data, it illustrates why property owners who lack formal water access and land tenure — groups referred to in this article as the ‘peripheralized middle class’ — consent to paying for pipes rather than resist all together despite the high cost involved. It argues that far from reflecting an internalization of a ‘willingness to pay’ or ‘stakeholder’ ethos celebrated by development practitioners today, payment for water provides an insurgent means to bargain for greater symbolic recognition, respectability and material benefits from the state. In particular, payment for pipes enables peripheral dwellers to strengthen their claims to secure land tenure in an era of exclusionary and punitive spatial policies. Payment thus comprises a terrain of contested meaning making and political struggle, at the heart of which lie the stakes of urban citizenship. In documenting the process by which property related interests and tenure claims are advanced under a scenario of reforms, this article contributes to Gramscian political‐ecological conversations on subaltern political agency and the lived character of hegemony in urban environments.     

Contextual Urban Theory and the ‘Appeal’ of Gentrification: Lost in Transposition?

The significance of practising theory in context reflects current debates in urban studies as well as the history of poststructural thought whose scholarship, informed by postcolonial critique and understandings of ethics and responsibility in international research collaboration, continues to give evident substance to the nature of epistemological violence. This essay takes up the challenge of contextual theory and empirical research through a critical comparative approach that ultimately finds how the expansive gentrification balloon pops as a consequence of assumptions and misassumptions that leave consequential data hiding in plain sight. The contributions of this essay include treatment of the transposition of ideas as a theoretical, methodological and ethical problem, and an original comparative summary of the frequency of ‘gentrification’ in the news media of ten major cities in addition to the print and online media of Hong Kong. The analysis demonstrates not only how context matters in research design, but also how distinction in the articulation of theoretical argument will be upheld or deflated by knowledge of, and acquired in, context. The essay summarizes the arguments for the larger Interventions forum, and concludes that a critical‐theoretical comparative international urban studies generates and builds through refinement of theory in iterative dialogue with historical processes.     

Uncertainty and the Governance of Street Vending: A Critical Comparison Across the North/South Divide

Through a critical comparison of the spatial management of street vending in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay and New York City, USA, we show how uncertainty enables the management of vending and urban space. By uncertainty, we mean a condition characterized by legal complexity and negotiable enforcement of laws and regulations. Putting New York and Ciudad del Este in dialogue, we demonstrate that these negotiated legalities are not limited to Southern urbanisms, nor are they remnants of unmodern social forms. We find similarities in how vendors experience and negotiate uncertainty, even as divergent mechanisms link uncertainty and inequality. By claiming streets as sites of work, vendors challenge dominant notions of global urbanism which conceive of sidewalks as sites of circulation, rather than livelihood. Especially in Ciudad del Este, vendors know the biases of law, and ground their claims to livelihood in ethics rather than legal compliance. Yet vendors’ claims can also reinscribe hierarchical relationships with frontline enforcers and reinforce exclusionary notions of rights based in productive citizenship. Understanding how uncertainty works as a logic of governing helps expose these unavoidable tensions and therefore to imagine and construct pathways toward more just urban economies.     

‘Social Mixing' or ‘Gentrification'? Contradictory Perspectives on Urban Change in the Berlin District of Neukölln

In the past two decades, the Berlin district of Neukölln has received considerable attention from politicians, planners, urban scholars and the media. This article discusses the role that the academic concepts of ‘social mixing' and ‘gentrification' play in the overlapping and partly contradictory narratives that have been employed to interpret transformations in one particular part of the district, Nord‐Neukölln. While the area is still characterized as a place of poverty and decline, it has more recently come to be known as a ‘hip place to be' among young (creative) urbanites, students and artists. Various urban players such as politicians, planners, urban sociologists, activists, interest groups and the media participate in the construction of these narratives and, in the process, adopt the concepts of social mixing and gentrification according to their respective rationales and preferences. Both concepts play a pivotal role in justifying contradictory claims and interventions. As a consequence, ‘social mixing' and ‘gentrification' are more than just analytical concepts for interpreting urban transformations; they have themselves become part of these transformations and have an impact on local developments. We conclude that urban scholarship must reflect more on its own role and positioning in the arena of urban transformation.     

Squatting and urban renewal: the interaction of squatter movements and strategies of urban restructuring in Berlin

Squatting as a housing strategy and as a tool of urban social movements accompanies the development of capitalist cities worldwide. We argue that the dynamics of squatter movements are directly connected to strategies of urban renewal in that movement conjunctures occur when urban regimes are in crisis. An analysis of the history of Berlin squatter movements, their political context and their effects on urban policies since the 1970s, clearly shows how massive mobilizations at the beginning of the 1980s and in the early 1990s developed in a context of transition in regimes of urban renewal. The crisis of Fordist city planning at the end of the 1970s provoked a movement of "rehab squatting" ('Instandbesetzung'), which contributed to the institutionalization of "cautious urban renewal" ('behutsame Stadterneuerung') in an important way. The second rupture in Berlin's urban renewal became apparent in 1989 and 1990, when the necessity of restoring whole inner-city districts constituted a new, budget-straining challenge for urban policymaking. Whilst in the 1980s the squatter movement became a central condition for and a political factor of the transition to "cautious urban renewal," in the 1990s large-scale squatting — mainly in the eastern parts of the city — is better understood as an alien element in times of neoliberal urban restructuring.     

Urban Ecological Enclosures: Conservation Planning,Peri-urban Displacement,and Local State Formations in China

Across contemporary China, city governments are unevenly territorializing peri-urban villagers’ land and housing by creating new urban ecological conservation sites. I analyze this emerging form of what I call ‘ecological territorialization’ through three interrelated spatial practices: comprehensive urban–rural planning, peri-urban ‘ecological migration’, and the distribution of institutional responsibility for conservation site financing, construction and management. Detailing this triad of territorializing practices renews attention to the relationship between conservation classifications that justify state intervention, uneven displacements of people from rural land and housing, and site-specific capitalizations that collectively consolidate urban government control over rural spaces. These practices emerge stochastically as state, private, and semi-state institutions capitalize on conservation projects in the context of legally and constitutionally underdefined land use rights and ecological land designations. In the current post-socialist moment of urban ‘greening’, these practices are key to producing frontiers of land-based accumulation and extending local state control across the peri-urban fringe. Urban ecological enclosures not only remake city-level state power but also shape rural people's relationships to land, labor and housing.     

BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE: Heterogeneous Governance,Claims Making and Forced Eviction in a Megacity

Residents of informal settlements worldwide face challenges defending their land tenure. In contexts with overlapping systems of governance these challenges are even more complex and claims to land tenure more precarious. How do heterogeneous systems of governance, a characteristic of some global South megacities, affect evictions? This article presents an in-depth case study of the informal Otodo Gbame waterfront settlement's struggle to defend its customary land tenure through multiple authorities in Lagos, Nigeria. The analysis reveals how a heterogeneous system of governance disempowers citizens by obscuring the locus of power and creating confusion when communities make claims on the state. Communities find themselves claiming rights to the city that receive varying degrees of recognition from the many authorities within the heterogeneous system. In Lagos, the state weaponizes this heterogeneous system in pursuit of modern development and urban growth.