Second, accounts interested in the linkages between informality and state governance are complemented by literature that explore citizens’ modalities and mechanisms of claims-making (Chatterjee, 2004; Groth and Corijn, 2005; Benjamin, 2008; Hou, 2010; Elsheshtawy, 2011). In such accounts, these grounded, small-scale registers are researched as ways in which citizens resist modalities of top-down governance. The state is central to these discussions as the subject of multiple forms of subversion, resistance, or subaltern agency that are leveled against institutions, rather than through its own “agentic” qualities. In this view, informality is examined regarding what is taken to be its reformative, resistant, and subversive qualities – as “a counter strategy against dominant modes of production” (2012: 17), as Rainer Hehl frames it.
The work of Asef Bayat (1997, 2000, 2009) on the street politics of Teheran’s income poor provides an illustrative example of this perspective. Rather than framing informal practices of subversion as grassroots activism directed against state agencies, Bayat seeks to circumvent the rigid divisions between “active” and “passive,” “individual” and “collective,” and “civil” and “political” opposition (2009: 26). Those dichotomies, he argues, have restrained scholarly perceptions and limited the opportunity to comprehend those practices that stay under the radar but may precede important social transformations (ibid). Instead, his analytical key – the notion of “quiet encroachment” – thinks beyond the dynamics of suppression and protest. Focused on the continuous engagement of marginalized urban groups, “quiet encroachment” finds everyday politics in the unanticipated moments of negotiation in everyday life. These struggles, Bayat suggests, broaden the domains of what he oddly calls the “informal people” (Bayat, 1997) by improving their positions in the city, by allowing them to gain autonomy from regulatory restraints, and by advancing their access to social goods and economic opportunities.
Both perspectives have redrawn the nexus of informality and the state in crucial ways: they have been pivotal in recognizing types of agency that were previously ignored, and they have critically analyzed the forces behind forms of exclusion and dispossession that have frequently remained invisible. However, the perspective of these studies (on civil insurgency or arbitrary state governance), their empirical focus (on cities in the South), and (most crucially for the approach pursued in this book) their implicit ontological approach to the state imply that they have less to say about the ways in which informality emerges at the interstices of legal ambiguity, institutional discrepancy, and everyday state enactment in Western liberal democracies.
Let me be clear: this is neither to say that informality or the state are different per se in these sites, nor that some of the mechanisms observed in this research would not be transferable (see Tuvikene et al., 2016, for suggestions on how to approach theorization of informality across sites in the global South, East, and West). Instead, I want to point out that these views of informality lend themselves better to analyzing informality in situations in which states act “with muscles” (Boudreau et al., 2016: 2397), and when the predominant research object is the large-scale displacement of informal settlements. In fact, for showing particular injustices in the state’s dealing with informality, it might be more appropriate to think about the state in the above ways. Differently put, where the state’s governance of informality is driven by heavy-handed eviction, questions other than the small-scale negotiation under examination in this book might be more relevant to pursue – not least, for ethical and political reasons.
I thus list a number of critical points in the spirit of expanding upon these important interventions into the arbitrary and unjust dealings of the state: in such theorizations, the two approaches to informality that I previously outlined in very broad stokes continue to uphold the dichotomy between state and civil society, top-down (oppression) and bottom-up (resistance), and statutory and non-statutory sites.3 More concretely put, parts of this literature envision the state from a distance as an antagonistic force existing outside of civil realms in ways that underscore either the state’s oppressive and flexible use of informality or its encroachment by “informal people” (those outside of the state). In this way, the literature is prone to situate state officials and “ordinary” people in positions from which they respectively either foster destructive and arbitrary oppression or – being subjected to that oppression – react to the state through nonstrategic insurgency. In this reading, agency is precast depending on people’s “formalized” roles in (non)institutional sites. Thereby, “good agency” automatically becomes associated with the insurgency of people cast as “informal,” and, by way of association, the opposite occurs with “state actors.” Moreover, the literature demonstrates a tendency to operate with set assumptions concerning the sites in and through which domination (associated with state offices) and insurgency (associated with informal settlements) is to be sought out.
These points indicate that these perspectives are ill-equipped to analyze registers of power associated with negotiation; their framing implies a more general disregard of the internal workings and everyday operations of states, as well as implicit and preset (mis)conceptions of the rationalities of governing actors. In this way, these accounts leave little room to explore the motivations and rationalities of all concerned agents, including the ambivalent and individual experiences of people acting beyond presumed institutional roles in sites of governance (but see Bénit-Gbaffou and Oldfield, 2011; Radnitz, 2011; Fairbanks, 2012; Boudreau and Davis, 2017; Davis, 2018; Boudreau, 2017). Moreover, how institutional sites or practices of governance are shaped by people’s practices in dealing with informality remains unrecognized.4
I see two methodological reasons for these constraints: First, insights generated from research on informality have rarely spoken to adjacent fields of research that deal with potentially related concerns in urban, criminological, state, or socio-legal theory, which further hampers a more conceptual debate about the notion (see Haid and Hilbrandt, 2019, for a more detailed exploration of that argument). To my knowledge, literatures on informality have rarely attempted to undergird the concept with different conceptions of statehood or, vice versa, considered the plural ways in which informality – however conceived – plays out in different theories of the state. Rather, the conceptual vagueness of informality has led authors frustrated with the notion to forefront other concepts, such as “speculation” (Goldman, 2011), “fragmentation” (McFarlane, 2018), “occupancy urbanism” (Benjamin, 2008), or “suturing” (Boeck and Baloji, 2016) (cf. McFarlane, 2019: 2). Second, informality research remains limited regarding its geographical scope and preferred objects of investigation – with a majority of its work continuing to examine informality in Southern cities. Research that has turned to countries of the so-called global North has primarily addressed informality in relation to poverty or migration, largely neglecting questions informality poses to the routine of everyday governance (cf. Acuto et al., 2019: 5). My suggestion is thus that explicating ontological assumptions about the actors, roles, and structures of governance that undergird conceptions of informality can help to gain a better grasp of the governance of informal housing in Berlin.
Informality and State Enactment
In the last decades, Marxist, Foucauldian, feminist, and, more recently, new-materialist approaches have theorized the state beyond essentializing imaginaries of an all-powerful government: as multiple and embodied rather than bounded and located outside of the social; as a dynamic process rather than a static body; and as a metaphysical effect or a discursive construct rather than a real entity (Jessop, 2016; Jeffrey, 2013; Painter, 2007; Ferguson and Gupta, 2002; Mitchell, 1999). Although heterogeneous in focus and theoretical commitment, these traditions provide a basis from which to approach the state in the everyday enactment of urban governance through processes of negotiation. More specifically, I base my understanding of informality on accounts that focus on the agentic, relational, and situated dimensions of state enactment. Therefore, I refer to literature that places weight on: state actors and their role in negotiation processes,