To be sure, my aim is not to establish a direct causal relation between the tightening of housing markets and informal housing practices in Berlin’s allotments. Rather, the book approaches questions of the housing crisis “sideways,” as Jackson (2015: 3) puts it, through examining one of the “back ends” of the housing crisis – temporary or permanent residency in sites not deemed appropriate for dwelling. This includes discussion of people’s lived realities, strategies of staying put, and interim solutions; for instance, when people lessen their rent burden by moving into their allotments over the summer and subletting their apartments during that time. In particular, Chapter 4 offers a rich empirical account of how and why gardeners take up residence within allotment huts. On the one hand, it illustrates the entanglement of formal and informal housing in the dwelling biographies of the allotment’s residents. On the other hand, it explores how residents experience their housing conditions in widely varying ways.
This perspective promises two conceptual contributions to understandings of housing precarity. First, allotment dwelling constitutes an object of inquiry through which questions of governance can be explored through processes of negotiation in which informality tends to be tolerated and sustained. Although I also discuss instances of evictions, allotment dwelling allows examining the normalcy of governance arrangements in which rule-breaking is mostly accommodated by all concerned. Instead of top-down regulation by a heavy-handed state, the case of allotment dwelling permits us to understand how such compromises are collectively secured. Second, and conversely, I maintain that a focus on understanding small-scale negotiation also fosters an understanding of registers of exclusion and boundary work that often remain uncovered in structural accounts of informality and the state. This includes discussion of how ethnic discrimination, self-regulation, and other boundary mechanisms undergird the compromises I previously discussed.
Negotiating Formalities: Postcolonial Urbanism, Informality, and the State
Beyond empirical questions about housing precarity, this book wrestles with the theoretical implications of allotment dwelling and its regulation for an understanding of informality in cities that are commonly understood to regulate thoroughly, coherently, and according to fixed rules. For decades, scholars have argued that informality was a “problem” of the South, in quantity at least, if not in sheer existence. It was seen, as Auerbach et al. put it, as “perhaps the distinguishing feature of contemporary urban life in the Global South” (Auerbach et al., 2018: 262). Yet, informal housing in Berlin’s allotments can hardly be understood as a shift in the geographies of power that has fostered the growth of this allegedly Southern phenomenon in a European city – not least because it has had a century-long tradition in Berlin. Rather, an analysis of informality in a relatively rich city of the global North calls for a critical reflection of the concept of informality itself, as well as of the epistemological place and value of that concept in a more global urban analysis.4
Critiques of the paternalistic and colonial gaze of theorizing that prescribed informality to the South have long been ubiquitous in postcolonial urban studies (e.g. Comaroff and Comaroff, 2012; McFarlane and Robinson, 2012; Lawhon and Truelove, 2019). But the challenge of “othering” Southern cities continues to “haunt” urban studies (Hentschel, 2015: 80), enlisting cities of the global South into an alleged trajectory of development that presumes one desirable future for all cities, epitomized by the economic hubs of the global North. For the development of a more cosmopolitan urban studies, this debate has proposed forging new lines of connection through more “worldly” (Roy and Ong, 2012; McCann et al., 2013), “planetary” (Brenner, 2014; Sidaway et al., 2014), and comparative methodologies (Nijman, 2007; Robinson, 2011; Myers, 2014). In this vein, authors have attempted to “theorize back,” or to postcolonialize the global North by transmitting knowledge from the South northwards (Schindler, 2014a; Hentschel, 2015; Lamotte, 2017; Hilbrandt et al., 2017).5 This book follows that suggestion: it brings informality – a concept that tends to be used to research cities commonly located “off the map” (Robinson, 2002: 531) of mainstream theory-production – to Berlin, a place normally understood through conceptions of Western urbanism. Yet, this move confronts significant hurdles that may have more to do with the conceptualization of the state in understandings of informality and less with this epistemological approach itself.
As noted, today’s more prudent use of the concept of informality in most parts of interdisciplinary urban scholarship has developed a nuanced understanding of the multiple entanglements of informality and the state. First, authors have placed a spotlight on the ways in which the state itself acts informally: by the rule of exception – in other words, suspending the validity of its own order (Roy, 2009a, 2011; Wigle, 2014; Davis, 2018), and by maintaining flexibility in regulation, thereby leaving its citizens in a state of “permanent temporariness” (Yiftachel, 2009a: 90). For instance, Ananya Roy suggests that informality is not a result of planning failure but a mode of urbanization in which “the law itself is rendered open-ended and subject to multiple interpretations and interests” (Roy, 2009b: 80). Moreover, discussions of informality and the state have considered the relation between the two through questions about citizenship, insurgency, and multiple other modalities of struggle and subversion (Miraftab, 2009; Meth, 2010; Porter et al., 2011). In these debates, the state is central as the primary object of contention – an antagonistic force working through the powers of oppression and domination.
Despite their critical contributions, I suggest that these approaches do not travel well into Berlin’s allotments. In Chapter 2, I argue that the literature on informality, by casting the state in ways that tend to either underscore its flexible and oppressive use of informality or the ways in which citizens obstruct state powers by resisting it “from the outside,” methodologically has less to say about the more interactive practices of negotiation that this book is concerned with, where the roles and interests of “both sides” are more fluid and frequently merge. By constructing informality through the powers of domination and oppression, on the one hand, or insurgency and resistance, on the other, the debate tends to neglect analyzing informality through the quieter registers of change, i.e. the small-scale and incremental powers of negotiation. Housing in the Margins focuses attention on these mundane negotiations, drawing on theoretical traditions that place weight on the normative judgments and social embeddedness of those who are negotiating (e.g. Tilly, 1999; Lea, 2008; Lipsky, 2010 [1980]), the legal-material processes of regulatory enactment (Valverde, 2011; Blomley, 2014), the entanglement of institutions in social life (Tilly, 1999; Corbridge et al., 2005; Straughn, 2005), and the ways in which these processes of enactment reflect on and transform wider processes of institutional transformation (Cooper, 1998; Hunter, 2015). Examining allotment dwelling through this lens suggests three contributions to understanding the governance of urban informality in Berlin.
First, by placing weight on the normative judgments, subjective understanding, and social embeddedness of governing actors, Housing in the Margins reads informality and its regulation through the ways in which people apply their ambivalent and multiple understandings to processes of governance. For instance, this becomes apparent in Chapter 7, which focuses on the legal work upon which practices of governance rely. Utilizing critical legal studies, the chapter unravels how both regulators and allotment holders employ legal frameworks in regulatory practices to maintain, extend, or restrict outsized huts. Yet, while such frameworks of order constitute a pivotal resource in the making of order, the chapter discusses their operation in practice to understand how order is built through the interpretive mechanisms that shape how rules become “emplaced.” In this way, the book seeks a more practice-centered understanding of the interpretive work through which rules operate “on the ground.” This fosters