In order to further immerse myself in the colonies, I eventually decided to lease an allotment garden and became a member of an association. Although I never ended up living in an allotment, despite my original plan to do so, this strategy of membership still proved to be a fruitful way to gain access to information. Most importantly, the “hunt” for the right hut provided me with an opportunity to get in contact with gardeners, to learn necessary tricks for remaining under the radar, and to get an inside glimpse into the lived experience of allotment dwelling. In my quest for a garden, I struggled to combine the role of a fellow gardener with that of an investigator. Although I was initially worried that any reference to the study would prevent my gaining access to an allotment plot, I nevertheless decided to introduce my role as a researcher, as well as the theme of my project, whenever the opportunity arose. Mentioning my research not only seemed more ethical but also triggered further chats about dwelling practices in the colonies.
It may be difficult to get to the mechanisms through which regulations are understood and put to work “on the ground” through surveying documents, such as laws, contracts, or reports, but the question of urban order is not one that could be answered without these accounts. To understand how spatial order is shaped through these documents, they make up the third set of data in this study. As institutional ethnography is concerned with the ways in which sequences of text coordinate “relations of ruling” (Smith, 1990: 6), this method of investigation is particularly well placed to frame an analysis of documents. Broadly speaking, I concentrated this analysis on two more or less active modalities through which textual discourse shapes socio-spatial relations.6 On the one hand, I followed a linguistic approach (Dittmer, 2010) to grasp the ways in which documents influence spatial order through the understandings that are embedded in text. On the other hand, I pursued a more contextual approach in order to analyze documents with regard to the ways in which they enter into public life, circulate through different social spheres, and interact with local practices.
Geographically, the primary data collection focused on multiple allotment compounds in four Berlin districts: Pankow, Neukölln, Reinickendorf, and Treptow. I do not explicitly compare the colonies in these districts. The selection aimed to cover a wide variety of colonies across a range of regimes of regulation (with varying degrees of laxity) and locations in the city (across the different historical and legal contexts of the former East and West Berlin). Furthermore, the project is designed as a multi-sited study due to an ethical concern with anonymity, i.e. in order not to compromise specific colonies. To publish on the specificity of one colony or the colonies in one district would have allowed for identifying particular sites and calling individual gardeners or associations into account. When considering particular colonies, I refer to them anonymously. Similarly, I pseudonymized all personal data to ensure the anonymity of my participants.
This book continues across seven further chapters, structured as follows: Chapter 2 presents the book’s theoretical perspective. Chapter 3 discusses the shifting political and normative placement of allotment dwelling over a century of allotment governance from a historical perspective. To follow the tracing of these larger political shifts, Chapter 4 turns to the contemporary housing question to explore how and why gardeners take up residence within allotment huts. The subsequent empirical chapters then discuss small-scale negotiations and their wider effects from three perspectives. Chapter 5 considers the negotiation of allotment dwelling in its spatial and material dimensions. Chapter 6 analyses the gardens’ temporary or permanent occupancy as a question of governance. Chapter 7 focuses the discussion of negotiability on the legal work upon which practices of governance rely. Finally, Chapter 8 concludes by revisiting the book’s key themes.
Summary: Chapter 1
This chapter outlines the book’s empirical and theoretical objectives, introduces the study on which the book builds, and explicates the methodological underpinnings of that study. It shows that studying empirically how Berliners negotiate ways of staying put in allotment gardens and how boundaries around their dwelling practices are drawn fosters an understanding of the production and governance of housing precarity in a relatively rich European city. In theorizing these processes of governance, the chapter unveils the possibilities of conceptualizing informal housing in the context of bureaucracies that are commonly understood to regulate thoroughly, coherently, and according to fixed rules.
Notes
1 1 Wherever possible, I restrain from translating the diverse German terms for urban allotments, most importantly “Kleingarten,” “Schrebergarten,” and “Laubenkolonie,” as they are materially and culturally not equivalent to what the word “allotment” generally signifies in English. While the official term for a German allotment is Kleingarten [literally: small garden], the term used most commonly in colloquial language is Kleingartenkolonie [literally: small-garden colony].
2 2 The German term Laube refers to a small-scale roofed building that is typically made of stone or wood, is more solid than a shed, but more lightweight than a house.
3 3 The term Schwarzwohnen is more commonly known in the realm of other informal housing practices in the GDR, but used to designate irregular dwelling practices in allotments as well.
4 4 The terms “global South” and “global North” are used here as a “concept-metaphors,” (Lawhon and Truelove, 2019: 11; see Sparke, 2007, for a similar argument) to point to the global dimension of postcolonial relations rather than to a geographical hemisphere.
5 5 In this vein, concepts such as “fabricating” (Hentschel, 2015) or “subaltern urbanism” (Schindler, 2014a) have been employed to understand European and US cities.
6 6 I considered five types of documents: legal statutes and administrative regulations, transcripts or reports of court cases, statutes and pamphlets of the allotment holders, historical documentation of the colonies, and finally, secondary and tertiary material, especially statistical data and media reports.
Chapter 2 Negotiating Formalities Informality and the Everyday State
This chapter unpicks the relation between informality and the state. The thesis that guides this inquiry is that explicating the ontological assumptions about the state that undergird conceptions of informality can explain some of the limits of the latter concept for an analysis of housing in Berlin’s allotments. My related proposition is that specifying these assumptions can help to better grasp and qualify informality’s utility in an analysis of state enactment and urban governance. The chapter thus explores the implications of understanding informality through the particular aspect of the state I work with in this book, where the focus lies on how everyday actors negotiate the implementation of regulations in the urban everyday.
The relation of informality to the state has been understood in widely varying ways that are clearly shaped by different ontologies of the state. These underpinnings have rarely been made explicit in research on informality. Yet the ways in which informality is researched and defined are conditioned by how the analytical relations between imaginaries of informality and the state are cast. While informality has long been described as the “other” of states, twenty-first-century scholarship has seen a new generation of urban research advance critical investigations into the multiple interrelations between both concepts, offering more differentiated accounts of the role of the state in the production of urban exclusion. This work has discussed informality as a tool of governance, a negotiable value, a form of state speculation, a means