Land Trafficking and the Fertile Spaces of Legality

Land trafficking, responsible for the unprecedented rate of urbanization in many Latin American cities, is often conceptualized through corruption as ‘abuses of public office for private gain’. While those involved in the practice rely at times on violence and illegality, their repertoire is sophisticated, allowing them to move in and out of legality as part of their cost–benefit calculations. In this article I argue that land trafficking is based on legalized corruption. I use an ethnographic approach to observe the strategic conduits that are technically embedded in, and opportunistically related to, different municipal processes to legalize illegality. I demonstrate how land traffickers use morphing possibilities between land tenure types (communal, private and government) and mimic development typologies that have gained legitimacy over time. I also show how conflicting, competing and humanitarian rationalities that characterize the state play a crucial role in promoting land trafficking, by grafting illegality and violations onto ‘formal’ practices.     

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.     

Rule of Law and Rules‐Lawyering: Legal Corruption and ‘Reprivatization Business’ in Warsaw

Delving into the nexus between the state and informality, this paper discusses the informality of the legal and judicial systems. Produced by structurally powerful actors, this kind of informality is not so much legitimized by the law, but concealed within the very process of legitimization. To capture how legal engineering welds formalized laws with informal translations, I look at judicial outcomes that, while formally legal, are socially delegitimized and perceived as legal corruption. After analysing the contested judicial outcomes of Warsaw's ‘reprivatization’ process (property restitution), I define the mechanism of legal corruption as rules‐lawyering, by which I mean an attempt to gain legal advantage by obsessively sticking to the written laws, while deliberately desecrating its spirit. I describe three of its mechanisms: appropriation, redefinition and fraud laundering. Finally, in my preliminary vivisection of the recent and ongoing process of delegalizing the legal corruption that has been part of the reprivatization process, all the allied concepts of this forum come together to demonstrate the essential inseparability of informality and state.     

Trade liberalization and informality nexus: Evidence from Pakistan

This study investigates the impact of trade openness on informal sector employment during the drastic 1988s trade reforms of Pakistan. It is generally perceived that increased external competition in less developed countries results in as an expansion in informal sector, which has less compliance with labor market regulations. Using micro-level data of Pakistan, we study the adjustments in the employment of informal sector due to trade openness. We find that informality and trade openness are associated. In Pakistan, trade reforms have given rise to employment in the informal sector. Our findings are robust to different trade-related measures. A substantial flexibility in labor market is required to benefit from the gains of liberalization.     

Juggling Legitimacies: Informal Places for Burials and Worship in Hong Kong

The Hong Kong government's neoliberal approach regarding land development and urbanization affects not only the housing market but also burial places, increasing inequality for both the living and the dead. The urgency of tackling the issue of places for burial is all the more pressing given current demographic changes and an existing backlog of public burial places in inner‐city locations. Against this backdrop, this paper focuses on the cultural practices around burial and worship among the inhabitants of Hong Kong, and on their struggle to maintain these practices. It illustrates various forms and means of legitimacy (e.g. pragmatic, normative and cognitive) being applied by all actors, and shows how the continuing practices around worship and burial lead to the production of informality. The main argument is that socially constructed legitimacy can be gained and lost by various actors in a dynamic negotiation process based on belief systems, rules and norms (following Suchman, 1995). Thus, it should be understood as a strategic mode both within and outside the state. This perspective of legitimacy provides a better understanding of how and by what means resources and power are being negotiated in order to draw lessons from informal dynamics.     

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.     

Governmentality and Spatial Strategies: Towards Formalization of Street Vendors in Guangzhou,China

A new policy approach that seeks to formalize street vendors by immobilizing them in designated places has been taken as an alternative to exclusion in Guangzhou, China. This article develops an analytical framework for understanding this spatial formalization by drawing upon Foucault's concept of governmentality. Formalization can be understood as a form of spatial governmentality that seeks to guide the behaviour of informal economic individuals towards officially desired norms by creating bounded spaces. While the formalization programme reflects a moral form of political rationality that directs modern governments towards principles of social justice, it is fundamentally founded on a dispositional spatial rationality that imagines the dependence of social control on the ordering of space. However, this spatial rationality entails a tension between the goal of formalization and its practical effects, resulting in a failure to respect vital attributes of street vending and vendors’ counter‐responses to it. The article concludes by questioning the government's formalization approach, given its ignorance of the reality of informality, and opens up the question of what might be good formalization.     

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.