Law,Property and Ambiguity: The Uses and Abuses of Legal Ambiguity in Remaking Istanbul's Informal Settlements

What is the role of legal ambiguity in the creation and institutionalization of private property regimes? In what ways does the (ab)use of legal ambiguities affect market‐making processes? I address these questions through a detailed analysis of two large‐scale urban renewal projects in Istanbul that impose a formal private property regime on informal settlements. My research reveals that without the strategic utilization of legal ambiguities and administrative arbitrariness by public and private actors, private property cannot be easily created and hence capitalist markets cannot function efficiently. My findings challenge the assumptions of several social science traditions such as neoclassical and neoinstitutionalist economics, as well as most works within the law and economics tradition regarding the relationship between law, property and economic development. These approaches to economic development are underpinned by the legal certainty that private property entails as the most important element for an efficient economic order. However, in their unconditional support for private ownership, they fail to realize the degree of legal ambiguity and administrative arbitrariness needed to create the private property regime in the first place. As such their arguments remain theoretically and empirically incomplete. A more complete analysis of the relationship between law and economic dynamics must focus on how private property is constructed, and the extent to which legal ambiguities and loopholes are utilized in this process.     

城市安全:生命的呼唤

近年来,城市事故接二连三地发生,反映出城市安全问题的严重性.本文分析了出现问题的主要原因,发出理性的呼吁:城市安全问题必须给予高度重视.城市规模不是越来越大越好;城市建筑不是越来越高越好;城市汽车不是越来越多越好;城市标准不是越来越豪华越好.     

Informal Spaces: The Geography of Informal Economic Activities in Brussels

This paper unravels the relations between different categories of the informal economy and their spatial distribution in the geographical setting of Brussels. Micro perspectives (households as economic agents) and macro perspectives (the informal economy related to economic recession) are combined in order to deal with categories of informal activities which are homogenous in terms of their spatial logic. In the first part we review several classifications of informal economic activities and assess them in terms of their congruence with the distinctions of economic actors and spatial logic. The second part elaborates on the raisons d’être of three large categories of informal economic activities in relation to urban development and on the production environments of these activities in Brussels: the domestic sector and suburban development; economic recession and survival strategies in the inner city; and, finally, flexibility and informalization in urban light industry. Polanyi’s concept of modes of economic integration (market, redistribution and reciprocity) offers a powerful tool to understand informal economic activities as a set of interrelations between households and other economic actors in order to gain access to their living resources — Ce texte analyse les relations entre différentes catégories d’activités économiques informelles et leur répartition spatiale à Bruxelles. Les perspectives micro (les ménages en tant qu’agents économiques) et macro (l’économie informelle liée à la récession économique) sont combinées pour aboutir à des catégories d’activit’és’économiques informelles homogènes en termes de logique spatiale. Dans une première partie nous considérons plusieurs classifications des activités économiques informelles pour évaluer au niveau théorique leur congruence avec les types d’acteurs et les logiques spatiales. La seconde partie décrit les raisons d’? tre de trois grandes catégories d’activités économiques informelles et les met en relation avec le développement urbain et leurs milieux de production à Bruxelles. On distingue ainsi le secteur domestique liéà la péri-urbanisation, les stratégies de survie liées à la récession dans le centre-ville et la flexibilité et l’informalisation de l’industrie urbaine. Le concept de modes d’intégration économique de Polanyi (échange marchand, redistribution et réciprocité) constitue un outil d’analyse efficace pour comprendre ces activités économiques informelles en tant que combinaisons précises d’interrelations entre ménages et autres acteurs économiques permettant aux premiers d’accéder à leurs moyens d’existence.     

Remaking Shanghai: New Divisions in an Expanding Metropolis

This study of Shanghai analyzes the city's emerging patterns of residential settlement in 2010. Most previous research on China focused on central city patterns, but by 2010 urban development in major metropolitan areas was taking place predominantly in the suburbs. The analysis re‐examines and extends previous studies of the level of segregation by various key population characteristics, showing that the highest segregation is found in the suburban ring, where original villager residents are now joined by an influx of migrants from other regions and by intracity movers. We probe the sources of the segregation pattern in multivariate analyses at two scales—an innovative analysis at the level of individuals that shows how people's citizenship status, occupation and education affect the type of housing that they are able to live in, and jointly contribute to their location in the metropolitan area. We show that the patterns attributable to the market reform period mostly did not supplant the socialist urban structure, but rather used it as its foundation. Segregation today can be attributed less to current class inequality than to state policies in the distant and recent past that have determined when, where and for whom housing is built.     

UNRAVELLED HOMES: Forced Evictions and Home Remaking in Jakarta

This article explores the contours of modernization in the unmaking and remaking of homes among evicted and resettled families in highrise housing. We examine the trajectories of forced eviction by drawing upon interviews with 17 individuals from nine evicted families who have transitioned from living in informal settlements to highrise social housing (rusunawa) in Jakarta. Drawing on two strands of literature—‘developmental idealism and the family’ from population studies and the critical geographies of ‘homemaking’—we argue that the demolition of houses is but an initial event in a long, quiet and subtle, yet profoundly defining, process of ‘upgrading’ families as part of ‘improving’ society, according to developmental logic. The disciplining of the urban poor does not end with the demolition of their houses, but rather continues as part of the fulfilment of shelter. This article attends to the slow unravelling of home hidden and embedded in post-eviction everyday lives, which are often overlooked because of the overt and violent brutality of forced eviction. While eviction can be seen as the violent visual expression of developmentalism, we argue that the relocation in rusunawa is where this ideal permeates into daily domestic life, making mundane activities a battleground for different ideals of ‘home’.     

非正规垃圾填埋场治理技术研究——以永州市某非正规垃圾填埋场为例

以永州市某非正规垃圾填埋场为例,对目前较成熟的非正规垃圾填埋场治理技术——原位封场和异位转场开展了比选,基于各治理技术的特点,结合本垃圾填埋场情况,确定了永州市某非正规垃圾填埋场采取原位封场的治理方案,并介绍主要工程措施,为今后类似项目提供借鉴.     

Informal Property Rights as Relational and Functional: Unravelling the Relational Contract in China's Informal Housing Market

In the face of state-led land grabs, enterprising Chinese peasants have started a revolution in the ambiguous and insecure rural tenure system by developing an extralegal property system known as the small property right (SPR). Using the SPR, peasants are able to capitalize on their property through the sale of houses built on collectively owned land. Little is known, however, about the specific process behind the development of the SPR by the peasants, or how this extralegal property system functions in terms of securing the use and transfer of property without the backing of law. This article aims to clarify the situation through the lenses of the Endogenous Nature of Institutions and Relational Contract Theory, aiming to understand the socially constructed, endogenous and relational nature of the property rights that make SPR functional. Based on an ethnographic investigation of Beijing's largest SPR housing settlement, we show how enterprising peasants develop long-term relational contracts with urban households for the provision of housing services, secured on the basis of the common interests and symbiosis of the two parties and a reputation system that serves to deter defaults. The discretionary treatment of SPR housing by local states serves as a further motivation for the village and the informal homeowners to preserve a stable property arrangement, with such a specific institutional setting being an exemplar of China's pragmatic state entrepreneurialism.     

Beyond Space: Spatial (Re)Production and Middle‐Class Remaking Driven by Jiaoyufication in Nanjing City,China

An extension of gentrification, jiaoyufication–urban change driven by a desire for high‐quality education–is not only displacing previous lower‐class residents, but also replacing earlier jiaoyufiers with newcomers, turning formerly blue‐collar neighbourhoods into white‐collar ones. New middle‐class communities are emerging as spatially limited school catchment zones attract social groups who occupy these spaces in an attempt to facilitate social mobility or consolidate social status, causing tension between them. Consequently, jiaoyufication has narrowed down opportunities for intergenerational social mobility and exacerbated social polarization, gradually replacing traditional social hierarchies with intergenerational neoliberal stratification.     

‘No Condition IS Permanent': Informal Transport Workers and Labour Precarity in Africa's Largest City

This article pieces together an understanding of everyday life grounded in the social imagination and everyday experiences of informal transport workers (ITWs) in Lagos, Nigeria's commercial capital and Africa's largest city. The article has two core objectives: to elevate the everyday practices of ITWs to the status of a critical concept in order to advance a sociology of everyday life, and to ground these practices on the precarious rhythm of everyday life as lived by people with the experience of radical uncertainty. By using crisis as a context of action and meaning, the article shows how uncertainty serves as a social resource that ITWs leverage to negotiate the precarious nature of everyday life and to make the most of their time. This foregrounding of uncertainty enhances our hitherto tenuous grasp of labour precarity, informal agency and the everyday struggle for survival in Africa's informal transport sector.     

New Regionalism Reconsidered: Globalization and the Remaking of Political Economic Space

Amid the near frenzied exaltation of economic globalization and a purported decline of the nation state, a range of subnational regional economies and urban metropoles are increasingly being canonized as the paradigmatic exemplars of wealth creation. Indeed, across many of the advanced developed countries a whole host of academics, consultants, influential commentators, politicians and bourgeois interest groups are readily invoking the region to be the appropriate site for regulating global capitalism. In a recent article in IJURR, though, John Lovering disputes this emerging New Regionalism, viewing it to be seriously compromised by several practical and theoretical inadequacies. This article has two principal aims. First, and while sympathetic to the general tenor of Lovering’s critique, it offers a rejoinder through some sobering reflections on what might be recovered from the range of New Regionalist perspectives currently vying for attention within critical studies of regional development. Second, it presents a series of future theoretical directions for a geopolitically sensitive regional research agenda, drawing on recent thinking from the new regional geography, globalization and the politics of scale, institutional‐relational state theory and the regulation approach. An argument is made that a synthesis of these perspectives might intensify our understanding of the social and political construction of regions, the uneven geography of growth, and the moments of re‐scaled regionalized state power that now enframe the process of economic governance.     

Informal investors in the Ottawa-Carleton region: experiences and expectations

This research reports on the investment experience of a sample of informal investors in the Ottawa-Carleton area who have made 156 investments involving $16 million between 1981 and 1986. In addition, the expectations and requirements of these investors with respect to future investments are presented. It is found that investors surveyed seemed to hold realistic expectations regarding the outcome of their risk capital investments. It is also found that the informal marketplace for risk capital is both a local and a personal marketplace. Whereas our knowledge of the characteristics and motivations of informal investors remains incomplete, questions are raised regarding the impact of various public policy incentives that seem to have been targeted at informal investors. An agenda for future research is specified.     

Remaking Equality: Community Governance and the Politics of Exclusion in Bogota's Public Spaces

Bogota's public space policy is often credited with promoting inclusionary principles. In this article, I explore critically the content of Bogota's articulation of equality in public space policy. In so doing, I present a critical view of the work Bogota's insistence on equality does to mediate class relations in the city, relying on deeply held conceptions of both social extremes. This results in the construction of a version of social harmony in public space that at once depoliticizes the claims to public space of subjects such as street vendors and the homeless and claims a new role for the middle class in the city. The analysis focuses on two examples of community governance schemes, documenting the logics and methods used by communities to implement official visions of equality and justify the exclusion of street vendors and homeless people from the area. By looking at the articulation of these exclusions in local class politics through seemingly inclusionary rhetoric, the article accounts for ‘post‐revanchist’ turns in contemporary urban policy, while anchoring its production in local processes of community governance.     

Informal Housing in the United States

Research on informal housing tends to focus overwhelmingly on less developed countries, downplaying or ignoring entirely the presence of informality in United States housing markets. In actuality, a longstanding and widespread tradition of informal housing exists in the United States but is typically disregarded by scholars. In this article we draw on three definitions of informality—as non‐compliant, non‐enforced, or deregulated economic activity—to characterize examples of informality in US housing markets, focusing in particular on five institutions that govern housing market activity in this country: property rights law, property transfer law, land‐use and zoning, subdivision regulations, and building codes. The cases presented here challenge the notion that informality is absent from US housing markets and highlight the unique nature of informal housing, US style—namely, that informal housing in the US is geographically uneven, largely hidden and typically interwoven within formal markets. We conclude with a discussion of how research on informal housing in the US can inform research in the global South.     

Informal ties in organizations: a case study

Network techniques are applied to a case study. The results show that using a joint approach can help in giving further insight into the analysis of informal ties in an organization. Special emphasis is given to centrality. The concept of mutual awareness, both on an individual and a global levels, is introduced and illustrated.