Second, the case of allotment dwelling highlights that the room for maneuvering through rules lies, in part, beyond the realm of state institutions and is used, and at times coproduced, by civil and institutional actors. Chapter 6 makes this point most explicitly when considering the governance of temporary or permanent occupancy from the perspectives of different bureaucrats and allotment holders involved in the transgression and regulation of order. Through this focus, Housing in the Margins accounts for a constellation of regulating actors that exceeds the realm of Berlin’s bureaucracies and includes the gardeners themselves. Beyond common assumptions about regulatory enforcement as a process in which state actors implement rules, combining the perspectives of all governing actors allows me to consider the ways in which people within and beyond state institutions negotiate room for maneuver in implementing order. Across all chapters, I describe the production of socio-spatial order as a cooperative effort that is shaped by all parties concerned and leads, at best, to a joint although contested arrangement. At the same time, my focus on consensual arrangements raises important questions about the limits of this tolerance and the inequalities that define such a politics of negotiation. The everyday may be a site of small-scale agency, but, as I attempt to show, understanding governance at this scale also unveils the degree to which the various parties concerned with allotment gardening have asymmetric capacities in such maneuvers, and the exclusionary practices that mundane negotiations may also entail – enacted through both civil society and state actors.
Third, Housing in the Margins accounts for the minor acts of negotiation in focus here as a means of redefining how urban governance is “lived out.” For instance, Chapter 5 confronts this question in its spatial and material dimensions by focusing on the ways in which incremental adaptations of the gardens and their governance have shaped the urban development of the city and its modalities of urban change. Theoretically, the chapter traces questions about urban planning and governance, on the one hand, and coproduction and incrementalism, on the other, in order to juxtapose these forms of transformation. My aim is to unravel how these modalities are entangled in urban development and to tease out how we can understand forms of coproduction, incremental adaptation, or self-built housing in a city of the global North. Across the book, I maintain that understanding informality through the ways in which all those concerned with allotment governance shift legal boundaries and alter the city’s urban fabric at the everyday scale allows us to grasp how these practices shape the structures in and through which these practices take place.
Taken together, I suggest that the “payoff” of these theoretical propositions is that they enable us to grasp informality through the routine enactment of rules and regulations. In this view, informal housing emerges in and through a normal, not a particular, “mode of urbanization.” This understanding requires us to rethink the analytical role and significance of informality in an analysis of urban governance and state enactment. Instead of presupposing the existence of formality and deriving the concept of informality from that, placing weight on how transgression and regulation become acted out in negotiation turns the operation of formality itself into an ethnographic question.
In conclusion, Chapter 8 returns to the book’s epistemological starting point and reflects on the promises and difficulties of translating concepts from “elsewhere” to Berlin. Drawing its lessons about processes of formalization and informalization both in and beyond the case discussed, the chapter concludes that Berlin’s allotments are not an exceptional case but rather a paradigmatic example of governing irregular housing conditions through small-scale negotiations. Rather than seeing informal housing as a distinguishing feature of the global South, I maintain that despite the different analytical route taken here, conceiving of irregular housing through the lens of urban negotiation allows us to build more global approaches to housing research.
Methodology: An Institutional Ethnography of Informality and State Enactment
As with other sensitive issues, researching informality is fraught with methodological, practical, and ethical challenges that require critical scrutiny (cf. Auerbach et al., 2018: 263). The methodological challenge lies in accounting for multiple perspectives and levels of investigation: urban order is enacted through the embodied and situated practices of all concerned, but it is also mediated through institutions, codes, laws, and regulations. My investigation starts from the former; I center this inquiry on the level of situated practices – i.e. place-specific, day-to-day interactions. Yet I explore these in relation to the frameworks of order in which they are embedded by adapting Dorothy Smith’s institutional ethnography to the context of urban studies (1990, 1999, 2005). This feminist approach is committed to focus social research on people’s everyday lives, and to ground this inquiry in the discursive, institutionalized, or legal relationships within which their practices are embedded. Through this perspective, Smith argues, the study of everyday life can account for the “ruling relations” – relations that enter into and organize social life through unobservable facts that are mediated through replicable texts, discourses, plans, laws, and the like (1990: 6; see Billo and Mountz, 2016 for a geographical perspective on institutional ethnography).
To hold these perspectives in tension requires a mix of approaches. The study combines three data sets: qualitative interviews with bureaucrats and allotment gardeners, ethnographic explorations of the research sites, and textual sources, including statutory texts, the documentation of legal cases, newspaper reports, and archival data. To collect the first set of data, I conducted interviews between July and November 2013 as well as between April and July 2014 and returned to the gardens to update, expand, and refocus this material in April and May 2019. My interviewees included city officials in the Senate Department for Urban Development, the so-called allotment garden administrators [Kleingarten Sachbearbeiter*innen], who are administrators at the district level, allotment holders with administrative responsibilities, and residents in the allotments. Across these four groups, I conducted a total of 41 “formal” interviews and an uncounted list of shorter spontaneous interviews “across the fence,” as it were.
Access to city officials or functionaries in the allotment association proved to be unproblematic once I had learned that most practitioners already possessed intimate knowledge of the dwelling practices in Berlin’s colonies. Not surprisingly, finding allotment holders who permanently lived in their huts was more complicated, and only a mix of strategies allowed me to recruit interview participants. I ended up searching for participants via postcards that I distributed on walks through the colonies; through the gardening associations, which established contact with gardeners they knew were living in the colonies; and while strolling through the gardens, talking about the topic in public, or mentioning my search to friends.
Second, I complemented the interview material with ethnographic observations in order to gain a better understanding of the lived experience of allotment holders. Within the framework of institutional ethnography, my use of ethnographic observations aimed at explicating how institutional frameworks are felt, produced, and contested within and beyond institutional spaces in the everyday (Diamond, 2006; Billo and Mountz, 2016: 7). I aimed to observe the spatialities and social patterns of interaction as well as the material solutions that gardeners find to adapt their huts in response to regulatory efforts. As it is difficult, if not impossible, to “hang out” in the rather private allotments, because the grid structure of the colonies does not tend to provide spaces for the sojourn of external visitors, a good way to enter into the intimacy of the gardens was to walk through the colonies. In practice, my ethnographic data collection thus took the form of observational strolls and a series of perpetual encounters that these walks facilitated. This part of my strategy is akin to what Streule (2018: 27–41, 2019) and others (Lee and Ingold, 2006) have described as a mobile ethnography – an approach that captures the materiality, geography, and symbolic representation of a field site through walking. These visits allowed me to establish an overview of the phenomena, facilitated a number of informal chats with the gardeners I encountered,