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Planning Theory & Practice, Vol. 12, No. 1, 115–153, March 2011

INTERFACE

Informality, the Commons and the

Paradoxes for Planning: Concepts and
Debates for Informality and Planning
LIBBY PORTER
Department of Urban Studies, University of Glasgow, UK

In its Global Report on Human Settlements in 2009, UN-Habitat placed the challenge, and
much of the cause, of the world’s one billion urban dwellers who live in squatter
settlements (32% of the global urban population) squarely at the feet of a failing planning
approach. It finds:
Planning is still weak in terms of how to deal with the major sustainable urban
challenges of the twenty-first century: climate change, resource depletion,
rapid urbanization, poverty and informality. (UN-Habitat 2009, xxiv)
Informality is firmly cast as not only one of the key problems facing cities and urban
dwellers, but also one of the major challenges to both long-standing and contemporary
approaches to planning.
This Interface explores this critical issue of informality, by addressing it, as Roy (2005)
suggests as a particular mode of urbanisation in contemporary human settlements.
Different manifestations, from different contexts around the world, of that informal mode
of urban life are explored to ask what they mean for contemporary planning practice and
theory. It asks: if informality is a mode of urbanisation, then what does it look like in its
locally situated manifestations? What modes of planning are being mobilised in response?
What are the practical dilemmas for planning? How can they be resolved?
Informality is associated with modes of human settlement and trade or exchange that
occur outside of formal legal structures and processes. In urban settlement terms, it is most
often studied in the context of slum development on squatted lands on the periphery of
rapidly growing cities. In economic terms, it is most often related to street vendors, labour
migration and illegally employed and exploited workers—phenomena that are
increasingly global in scope. In a footnote, Alsayyad (2004) notes that the term “urban
informality” was first employed in Spanish by Juan Pablo Pérez Sáinz in 1989, but that the
notion of the informal sector in relation to labour migration to cities was being analysed
earlier than that, in the late 1960s.
There are various ways, then, that we might define informality, and there is
unsurprisingly considerable debate about such definitions. To that end, I find Roy’s
comment in her dialogic introductory exchange (Alsayyad & Roy 2004, p. 5) insightful:
Correspondence Address: Libby Porter, Urban Studies, University of Glasgow, 25 Bute Gardens, Glasgow, G12 8RS.
Email: Libby.porter@glasgow.ac.uk

1464-9357 Print/1470-000X On-line/11/010115-39 q 2011 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/14649357.2011.545626
116 Interface

If formality operates through the fixing of value, including the mapping of

spatial value, then informality operates through the constant negotiability of
value and the unmapping of space.
Such a definition offers an instructive departure point for this Interface. It opens up for
investigation approaches to informality that show not only the “way of life” arguments,
but also the relations of urban development that shape and construct those ways of life.
Moreover, it reconnects analytically and conceptually the informal with the formal and
highlights the transactive and relational nature of both “modes”. Informality is not
“outside” formal systems, but is instead produced by formal structures and always
intimately related to them. Actually existing informality might include self-build housing;
the “illegality” of traveller settlements in European cities; illegal housing in contexts of
rapid urbanisation; street vendors who operate without the structure and protection of
legal systems; unregulated labour markets; squatters rights; communally held and orally
recorded or traditional land title.
Even as we recognise the inter-related and transactive relations between informal and
formal it is useful to also hold these modes of urbanisation distinct from each other to
explore the nature of their relations more clearly. One reason for holding the more
dichotomous debates up for examination is to investigate the power in discursively
constructing informality as informal. The UN-Habitat report quoted earlier, as well as the
United Nations Economic Commission for Europe’s recent report that Lombard and
Huxley analyse in this Interface, are deeply concerned with the unplanned nature of
informal human settlements. Informality is seen as the unregulated, uncontrolled, messy
and inefficient settlement and use of land. In this sense, it is positioned as fundamentally
different from the ordered, regulated, efficient notions of planned land use and settlement.
Informality becomes the “other” to planning’s ordered, neat spaces and thereby created as
a policy problem. There has been a long and critical debate exposing how certain places
(and people) are rendered “uncontrolled problems” and illegitimate forms of social
organisation. Indeed, such a rendering can be seen as an actively produced mechanism
that supports the power of those defined as legitimate and formal modes of urban life. The
study from Istanbul’s Sulukele district by Kıyak and Islam in this Interface is an excellent
example.
One of the very concrete and powerful ways illegitimacy is constructed around
informality is the notion of property rights. Given that property is fundamental to urban
development and planning, it is important to explore how analysing property rights might
allow us to unlock different planning possibilities for informality. A focus on property asks
us to pay greater attention to the “fixing of value” in urban space that Roy (2005) speaks
about so we can conceptually and empirically “see” informality as within, not outside,
property relations. Such a focus will also draw our attention to the propertied outcomes of
attempted formalisation policies.
Most planning disputes are about property—the rights to say who can do what where.
Fundamental to many disputes is the liberal-economistic model (Blomley, 2008) of
property. In this model a fundamental distinction is made between public and private
property rights. Public ownership consists of state-owned and controlled land, and
private ownership is individual-owned land. Property, then, is about “owning” in this
model, and that ownership is unitary and stable: there is one identifiable owner and the
rights do not change (Blomley, 2008). This is the narrow and limited ideal type of “real
estate” that dominates our understanding of planning and urban development. Yet as
Krueckeberg (1995) reminds us, property is not an object or a thing, but is in fact relational:
 Interface 117

property is one person’s claim about something in relation to everybody else’s claims
about the same thing. It is a set of relational rights that has become narrowly defined in
relation to ownership.
What if we were to recognise different kinds of property rights? Krueckeberg identifies
nine kinds of property rights, most of which (possession, use, alienation, consumption,
modification, destruction and management) are “use rights” and only two (exchange and
profit taking) are “exchange rights”. Many planning conflicts occur around whether full
ownership (both use and exchange rights) should exist or are necessary for a just society,
or whether use is more important than exchange rights. For example, the dispute over
whether to allow the American tycoon Donald Trump to build a golf course, luxury hotel
and residential development on a Site of Special Scientific Interest in northern Scotland is a
dispute that is partly centred around the public use rights of that place (which include its
environmental significance) and the private exchange rights of the Trump organisation.
A common outcome is that planning becomes an activity and process concerned with
regulating and mitigating the use rights of a formally identified private owner (one who
has exchange rights) against the more nebulous use rights (such as amenity) of others. In
other words, in planning we often ask the wrong question. Instead of asking the “where”
questions of spatial planning (the land use questions of where something should be
located), we should be asking “to whom do things belong?” (Krueckeberg, 1995). By
asking that kind of question, we might unsettle the assumed clarity of “who has the right
to what”, open up the use rights questions and begin to see the existence of many other
forms of property relationship.
One such property relationship is that of commons property (Ostrom, 1990). Commons
property, particularly in urban settings, is almost invisible in planning theory and practice,
mostly because the very narrow assumptions about what constitutes property discussed
above means we are unable to recognise commons property as property. In other words,
commons property does not look like property because there is neither a unitary nor stable
set of exchange rights (Blomley, 2008, p. 311). Yet the commons are everywhere, so when
we fail to see them, we miss seeing whole parts of human settlements and significant
elements of human –environment relations. The urban commons can be seen in
community gardens, land trusts, squatting, and common interest developments (such
as gated communities). Our contemporary arguments about privatization of city spaces
(such as parks and public squares) hinge on often unstated assumptions about commons
property. Recognition of communal rights over privately owned land (such as the right to
roam in the UK) are all based in a recognition of forms of property beyond liberal private
property rights.
From this perspective, the common use rights often being exercised in conditions of
urban informality would come to be identifiable as real property. This would be a quite
different view of informality from disorder and illegality, or as a kind of coping
mechanism of the poor. We have broken down the dichotomy between market and non-
market and are able to see that “informality is already a domain of intense market
transactions” (Roy, 2005, p. 152).
Policy directions to formalise land tenures and other forms of rights where urban
informality exists also now begin to look very different. The kinds of formalisation policies
such as those advocated by the influential economist Hernando De Soto (2003),
particularly in African countries such as Tanzania, as Briggs’ analysis in this Interface
shows, are based on the liberal-economistic model of property as either market or non-
market, public or private. De Soto advocates the legalisation (i.e. marketisation) of
informal property rights in land as an end to poverty, by arguing that the assets held by the
118 Interface

poor in their informal land tenure can be capitalised by drawing them into the formal
system of private property exchange rights. There is of course something deeply attractive
about this argument. If, for example, the lands upon which the one billion people
identified by the UN-Habitat report illegally build their houses on were legalised, those
one billion people would then formally own, and therefore be able to exchange for profit,
their property. De Soto offers this as a potential end to poverty. Yet the attractiveness is
only seduction, because of course this model ignores the real property rights that those one
billion people are already exercising: their use rights. These are potentially far more
significant rights (if they were recognised) than private exchange rights. And it ignores the
effects of marketising those rights particularly the severe displacement and gentrification
effects, as both Briggs and Kıyak and Islam show in this Interface. Using a right- and
property-based approach also exposes how price pressure and potential (if not inevitable)
displacement is an intentional cornerstone of formalisation policy. Formalisation might
therefore be analytically closer to a form of enclosure and dispossession (Harvey, 2003)
because it ignores the real property use rights already being exercised.
When we see this we can analytically engage with formalisation not as a liberal attempt
to address questions of urban justice, but as an action orientated around control and
power. If informality and the commons present alternative and potentially challenging
modes and relations to dominant orders of market exchange and neoliberal government,
then formalisation might be about the ordering and controlling of those modes, relations
and activities. It is the state’s synoptic and highly abstracted viewpoint (Scott, 1998) that is
both the source and the means for efforts to standardise informality, “clean up” disorder,
and codify “messiness”. Formalisation of urban informality, then, is not (only) attempting
to “improve the humanitarian conditions of people living and working in informal
conditions”, though this is clearly a serious and genuine policy intent. It is also about
restructuring property relations for accumulation and control.
What do these formalisation measures look like in practice? There are attempts to
legalise street vending through permit systems, to title informal housing, to create new
zoning instruments, to clear slums and to recognise communal ownership, all of which are
positioned as policy fixes toward humanitarian ends: improve infrastructure, ensure
quality housing, provide clean water, and protect workers. Such policy intents are clearly
progressive yet are cast in a dichotomy that makes formalisation the only promising
option while ignoring fundamental structures of power. Formalisation measures are
sometimes, though not always, exercised through planning activities. The UN-Habitat
(2009) explicitly points to planning as the set of activities and processes that can help “fix”
urban informality. Yet if formalisation policies are potentially problematic, and planning
operates within the constraints of state action, what then might be done? The practical
dilemmas and contradictions are profound.
If the focus of the policy-related questions we ask were to change, this may offer some new
avenues for exploration. Planning could focus on the operations of power and control that are
being exercised through formalisation measures. By seeing such modes of formalisation as
operations and relations of power and control, our understanding of the nature of urban
informality and its impact on people’s lives is transformed. Our focus can be on the “forms of
vulnerability” (Alsayyad, 2004, p. 15) that are power’s consequence. The right to the city as a
normative conception, alongside recognition of a bundle of use rights might better engage
and treat such notions of vulnerability. The means of attending to poverty, vulnerability, and
poor living conditions are not logically structured through technical means of “legalisation”
and infrastructure provision but instead are political struggles about rights and entitlements
(Roy, 2005, p. 150). The two very different papers in this Interface about informal street traders
 Interface 119

point to this important struggle for the right to the city beyond property ownership. Devlin’s
paper, based in New York, shows how legalistic provisions have ultimately constrained the
use rights of migrants in that city. Rukmana’s paper, looking at Jakarta, shows an informal
sector increasingly under the control of the state.
The dilemmas for planning are global in their scope and nature. What was once seen as
a phenomenon of the global south, is now identified in many different human settlement
contexts around the world. Questions of informality arise in urban regeneration
programmes where long-standing familial-based systems of land tenure are suddenly
threatened by private property rights. Disputes about gypsy and traveller accommodation
in western cities might be recast more usefully as tension between informal and formal
land use in western cities. Movements for self-build housing and land cooperatives are
instances of taking common property rights seriously.
In this Interface, then, we have taken a very prosaic view of informality and planning
and have looked widely for instances and contexts of informality to explore the
relationship, and impact of planning, upon this domain of urban life. Each of the
contributors was asked to write about the nature of informality in their own contexts, and
explore the following questions:
1. In what ways does informality challenge the practice and theory of planning in your
context?
2. What are the mechanisms and regulations by which planning attempts to order and
formalise informality?
In different ways and with different approaches, each of the contributions in this
Interface are finding deep problems for how planning is encountering informality. Two in
particular seem paradigmatic: first, how embedded the binary conceptualisation of
informal and formal is within planning and policy discourse, where formality is seen as
the only fix for the problems of informality. Second is the predominance of solutions to be
sought in legalistic mechanisms of control and ordering. All of the studies here indicate
how such mechanisms can result in unjust effects, but the paradox is also in how
important legal structures are for ensuring some level of rough protection, and the
contributions from Devlin and Rukmana are particularly instructive about this paradox.
Melanie Lombard and Margo Huxley provide a critical analysis of the United Nations
Economic Commission for Europe’s (UNECE) recent important policy document on
informal settlements in the European region, particularly eastern European countries.
They find it to be an important acknowledgement of the ways informality is encountered
in the European region, yet it is a policy document that remains embedded in the binary
hierarchisation of “proper” formal cities and their illegitimate other of the informal. We
then move to Istanbul, where Aslı Kıyak and Tolga Islam analyse the pernicious effects of
urban renewal planning in the historic Romany district of Sulukele. They find that
planning in this instance actively uses informality as a weapon in its policy discourse to
legitimise the displacement and demolition of an entire neighbourhood. From the
perspective of the peripheral settlements of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, John Briggs
analyses the effects of title formalisation policies. He finds the evidence to suggest that
those effects are varied and by no means guarantee a climb out of poverty. Instead, in
many instances they are the beginnings of gentrification and the further displacement of
the most vulnerable. Formalisation appears to serve the interests of the already wealthy.
Taking a different instance of urban informality, Deden Rukmana reviews the effects on
street vendors in Jakarta of new Indonesian spatial planning laws. This is a city where
informal street vending is part of the socio-economic fabric, and is beginning to be
120 Interface

recognised in new ways within spatial planning frameworks. Yet Rukmana demonstrates,
perhaps indirectly, that the possibilities of displacement and the use of power are
ever-present. The position of street vendors is also the subject of Ryan Devlin’s paper, but
from the very different urban context of New York. Devlin describes how local regulatory
powers come into operation when encounters with the informal appear to cross a
boundary into mainstream urban life. The effects are difficult and replete with
contradictions, and he concludes that planning is not well equipped to handle the
dilemmas involved. In a concluding commentary, Vanessa Watson sums up the themes
discussed in the Interface and suggests some possibilities for where more transformative
planning practice in relation to informality might lie.

References
Alsayyad, N. (2004) Urban informality as a “new way of life”, in: A. Roy & N. Alsayyad (Eds) Urban Informality:
Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America and South Asia (Oxford, Lexington Books).
Alsayyad, N. & Roy, A. (2004) Prologue/Dialogue. Urban Informality: Crossing Borders, in: A. Roy & N. Alsayyad
(Eds) Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America and South Asia (Oxford,
Lexington Books).
Blomley, N. (2008) Enclosure, common right and the property of the poor, Social & Legal Studies, 17(3), pp. 311– 331.
De Soto, H. (2003) The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (New York,
Basic Books).
Harvey, D. (2003) The New Imperialism (Oxford, Oxford University Press).
Krueckeberg, D.A. (1995) The difficult character of property, Journal of the American Planning Association, 61(3),
pp. 301–309.
Ostrom, E. (1990) Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press).
Roy, A. (2005) Urban informality: Toward an epistemology of planning, Journal of the American Planning
Association, 71(2), pp. 147–158.
Scott, J.C. (1998) Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve Human Conditions have Failed (New Haven, CT,
Yale University Press).
UN-Habitat (2009) Planning Sustainable Cities: Global Report on Human Settlements (London, Earthscan).

Self-Made Cities: Ordinary Informality?

MELANIE LOMBARD* & MARGO HUXLEY**
*Global Urban Research Centre, University of Manchester, UK; **Queen Mary, University of London, UK

Introduction
In this essay we examine the report by the United Nations Economic Commission for
Europe (UNECE), Self-Made Cities: In Search of Sustainable Solutions for Informal Settlements
(UNECE, 2009) in the light of the importance of learning from the global south.
This report explicitly sets out to tackle the problem of informality in the European
region.1 Self-Made Cities identifies policy responses to address the challenge of informal
settlements, with a particular focus on the role of housing provision, land management,
and urban planning. However, the report makes very little reference to the wealth of
Correspondence Address: Melanie Lombard, Global Urban Research Centre, University of Manchester, Humanities
Bridgeford Street Building, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL Email: Melanie.lomboard@manchester.ac.uk
 Interface 121

empirical research already carried out, or to current theoretical debates about informality
in the global south. Thus, we argue, it is limited in its understanding of the social
dynamics and lived experience of informal settlements.
Through an approach mixing case studies with documentary evidence and research, the
Report reveals widespread and diverse manifestation of urban informal settlements across
Europe and the UNECE region: the “problem is significant in [almost] half of the UNECE
Member States (20 countries) and affects the lives of over 50 million people” (UNECE,
2009, pp. 25– 26). The main causal factors are identified as economic change (particularly
relating to eastern European countries’ transition to capitalist economies, resulting in
deregulation and rising inequality); urban change (urbanisation and migration); and the
crisis of displaced people and refugees (UNECE, 2009, pp. 25– 34).
Self-Made Cities represents the first study of urban informal settlements in the UNECE
region, and significantly, in the European Union, and appears to be a response to anxieties
about the conditions in post-socialist accession states and countries to the east of Europe
(although this is not explicitly discussed as such), as much as to the widening disparities
in income and life chances in cities in the European Union. It is, nevertheless, a potentially
influential source of information for planners and policy makers interested in the
increasing phenomenon of urban informal settlements in Europe, as well as the global
south where such settlements are normally understood to be located. And it would seem
an exciting opportunity for European urban policy makers and planners to engage with
debates about, and experiences of, informality in the global south and to apply some of
these insights to the “discovery” of informality in the UNECE region cities.
These debates about informality dating back to the 1950s have more recently witnessed
increasing calls for urban studies and planning theory to take seriously the fact that “the
urban future lies neither in Chicago nor Los Angeles...[but] in ‘Third World’ cities like Rio
de Janeiro, Mumbai, Hong Kong” (Massey, 2001 cited in Roy, 2005, p. 147). Such critiques
draw attention to the ways in which planning theory and practice continues to privilege
the experiences of the global north/west and produce dichotomies between, for instance,
economically and culturally powerful global cities (of the north) and sprawling,
problematic, less powerful megacities (of the south) (Robinson, 2002, 2006). Central to
these debates is the notion of informality (Alsayyad, 2004; Marx, 2009; Roy, 2005; Varley,
2008). The binary distinction between formal and informal—economies, housing,
settlements—often carries with it an implicit positive appraisal of formality and a
devaluation of informality, and an accompanying assumption that informality is a
problem of cities of the Third World that rarely if ever, appears in western nations.
The UNECE report’s lack of acknowledgement of these long-established debates about
informal settlements leaves it open to critique on several fronts. Its problematisation of
informality is predominantly negative: informality is treated as an aberration in the urban
setting. This treatment is partly due to the fact that the voices of those who live in informal
settlements are almost entirely absent from the report, and it does not engage with
everyday experiences of informality from the perspectives of residents.
Instead, informality is seen as a problem to be solved; and the solutions offered reveal a
central tension in the report, between housing rights and property rights. This is in part
because the authors at times take “legalist” views of the “solutions” to informality—that
is, formalisation of titles, introduction of property markets, inscription of legal rights; and
at other times espouse structuralist attempts at distributive justice—that is, locating causal
factors in the dynamics of economic, social and political inequalities (Huchzermeyer, 2004;
Lombard, 2009; Marx, 2009). Unless informality and informal markets are seen as already
embodying various kinds of legitimate exchanges and ongoing negotiations with the state
122 Interface

(Corbridge et al., 2005; Marx, 2009), legalisation and marketisation programmes can be
incompatible with policies to redistribute wealth and tackle inequalities. Thus, the report
largely fails in its valiant efforts to square the circle of the provision of housing and redress
of urban inequalities with the introduction of property rights and market relations in land.
Overall, the report contains many positive elements, including awareness of the need
for redistributive approaches to informality; and the opportunity for widening the field of
debates in European/western planning practice and theory. However, in order to resolve
theoretical and policy tensions between strategies for formalisation and legalisation with
calls for social justice, it is the lived experiences of settlement inhabitants that must
centrally inform the field, as the critical literature on informality in the global south
suggests.

Ordinary Informality
Self-Made Cities characterises informal settlements as “spatial manifestations of social
inequality” (UNECE, 2009, p. xx, based on the UN-Habitat’s (2003) analysis) “built with
poor security of land tenure and without any planning regulations or building controls”
(UNECE, 2009, p. 1). This broad conception of informality includes various forms of
illegality (land, property, construction and planning): squatter settlements, refugee camps,
inner urban derelict housing; developments carried out without planning permission (i.e.
built for sale by speculative builders); unauthorised developments on public land, and so
on (UNECE, 2009, ch. 1). This is a useful reminder that there is spectrum of “differentiation
within informality” and different forms of power, exclusion and legitimacy (Roy, 2005,
p. 149). However, the report does not develop this insight very far, and such a “mixed bag”
of characteristics constructs informality as a general category of almost everything that is
“other” to some imagined ideal of western, developed, market-produced, residential
development (Porter this Interface; Scott, 1998).
Similarly, the report’s typology of informal settlements frames them in terms of a
spectrum of characteristics such as: legal status (from informal to formal); security of
tenure (from insecure to secure); physical standards (lack of access to infrastructure to full
provision of infrastructure); and general environmental, socio-economic, cultural and
political factors (UNECE, 2009, p. 15). But even though these characteristics are placed
along scales, rather than positioned as stark dichotomies, informality is correlated with the
undesirable ends of the spectrum and formality is positioned as the desired goal, thus
creating formalisation as the “solution” to informality (Roy, 2005). Such responses portray
informality as a “state of exception” from the formal order of urbanisation, in which
informal sectors and areas are viewed normatively as separate from, and inferior to, those
of the formal city (Roy, 2005, p. 147).
In fact, although the report’s title Self-Made Cities might imply a direct and fruitful
encounter with the experiences and knowledge of settlement inhabitants, the conditions of
life for residents are seldom described or really engaged with: the viewpoint is very much
that of the “Eurocrat”—statistics and categories filled out with case study anecdotes in
boxes. The 11 concluding principles all stress the need for responsive, locally sensitive
policies that see the problems of informality stemming from poverty and inequality, and
address access to shelter, abolition of social polarisation, support for the creation of social
capital, and pro-poor planning systems (UNECE, 2009, pp. 92 – 101). But these are very
broad, abstract “feel good” statements. The nuts and bolts, do-able detailed analysis is of
land management, property registration and planning systems, and the introduction of
land and property markets (e.g. chapters 3 and 4).
 Interface 123

Such a focus is understandable in the light of the challenges facing post-socialist states’
transitions to market-based economies. But the sub-text appears to be that post-socialist
states are not yet developed enough and need to be “modernised”, and their lack of
“development” threatens the stability of the rest of Europe (Robinson, 2006).
Although it is implied in the insistence on transparent land registration and planning
systems, the report rarely explicitly touches on other forms of illegality such as corruption.
The case studies describing the hardships of living in informal settlements fail to evoke the
realities of violence, bribery, or discrimination that settlement dwellers encounter every
day; and give little emphasis to residents’ inventive strategies for getting by in daily life, or
to the alternative forms of economic activity, or self-governance that often characterise
settlements. Accounts of such realities provide a rich source for practice and critical
theorisation in the global south (e.g. Corbridge et al., 2005; Kudva, 2009; Meth, 2010) that
are sadly lacking from this document.

Everyday Rights
Nowhere is the report’s lack of engagement with these debates more apparent than in its
central tension between housing and property rights. The report views informality and its
solutions through the lens of housing, and the acquisition of housing rights are a guiding
principle. However, the influence of De Soto’s (2000) arguments can be discerned
throughout the report: formalising the “dead capital” of the poor and formally recognising
their entrepreneurial activities is posited as the solution to the problem of informality
(UNECE, 2009, p. 29). This central tension between housing rights (encompassing a broad
range of needs and interests including community, services, and a general recognition of
existing inputs) and property rights (a more narrowly focused, legalist view) is apparent
throughout the text. There is a genuine concern for rights to shelter and livelihood (from
an implicit structuralist perspective) framed in terms of international charters of human
and housing rights (UNECE, 2009, p. 3), but this concern is never brought into contention
with the recommendations for De Soto-influenced programmes of legalisation,
formalisation, and access to credit, to enable entry into the formal market, which may,
in effect, exacerbate inequalities (Marx, 2009).
In the spirit of learning from the global south, it is instructive to see the complex and
sometimes problematic nature of property rights in the experience of Mexico, where land
tenure regularisation has become a routine form of state intervention in low-income
housing (Lombard, 2009). Mexico has one of the most ambitious and long-established land
tenure regularisation programmes in the world, established in 1974 and replicated across
Latin America. Regularisation is effected through a presidential decree expropriating the
land from the ejido2 in favour of the government, which then sells the land to individual
residents and compensates the ejidatarios. Settlers thus pay for the land twice, and the
regularisation process is dependent on the government’s volition. The programme’s
systematic use has been seen as a strategy to bring about the social and political
integration of the urban poor (Varley, 1998); as a safety valve for unplanned urban
development (Austin, 1994, p. 330); or as a tool for co-opting opposition movements
(Azuela & Duhau, 1998).
Regularisation has also protected the illegal land market, thereby reducing state control
of urban expansion, and has had the apparently contradictory effect of promoting
illegality at the same time as removing it. Moreover, the division of a city into legal and
illegal areas implies that not all individuals are subject to the same rules, and entails
profound social inequalities, which have become accepted as a natural feature of urban
124 Interface

society (Azuela & Duhau, 1998). In this sense, regularisation could be seen as a state policy
which contributes to the construction of informality, and dualistic conceptions of the
formal/informal (or legal/illegal) city. Thus formalisation does not necessarily provide
the hoped-for social transformation, and may in fact safeguard powerful interests, while
encouraging informal development. Whatever the problem of informality, its solution
does not simply rest in legalistic policies of formalisation or regularisation (Roy, 2005;
Marx, 2009).
In fact, recent research into everyday histories of land tenures in informal settlements in
South Africa shows that disentangling informality from formality is almost impossible
(Marx, 2009). Given this complexity, viewing informal settlements as ordinary places,
rather than states of exception, offers a better prospect for engaging with their lived reality
and thus going beyond simplistic dualisms. Repositioning informality as a mode of
urbanisation of equal importance among other forms (Roy, 2005) enables planners and
policy makers to take more nuanced views of informal settlements, and gain a greater
understanding of urban processes.

Conclusion
There is much more to Self-Made Cities than we have been able to indicate here. It is an
important policy document. It points to the existence of informal settlements in the
European region and thus acknowledges that informality is not confined to the global
south. It draws attention to the difficulties being faced in post-socialist countries in the
transition to a market economy. It attempts to indicate positive and socially just steps to
engage with problems raised for planning in encountering informality, and is alert to the
injustices of purely negative responses (such as clearance).
However, it is limited by the unaddressed tensions between advocating market
solutions to land tenure and housing, together with administrative and legislative
reforms, while at the same time suggesting further state support, positive redistributive
strategies, and locating the causes of informality in social and economic processes. In the
end, Self-Made Cities does not escape binary characterisations of normal formality and its
problematic informal other.
These limitations demonstrate the need for European planners to engage with the
critical debates now taking place around informality in the global south; to understand
informality as a mode of urbanisation, not a state of exception; and to see informal
settlements first and foremost as ordinary places, albeit with less than favourable living
conditions.

Notes
1. The UNECE was set up in 1947 as one of the United Nations’ five regional commissions, with the aim of
promoting pan-European economic integration by bringing together 56 countries located in the European
Union (EU), non-EU Western and Eastern Europe, South-East Europe and the Commonwealth of
Independent States (CIS), and North America (www.unece.org, accessed 4 September 2010).
2. Agricultural land owned collectively by farmers under Mexican law.

References
Alsayyad, N. (2004) Urban informality as a “new” way of life, in: A. Roy & N. Alsayyad (Eds) Urban Informality:
Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America and South Asia, pp. 7–30 (Oxford, Lexington Books).
Austin, (1994) The Austin Memorandum on the Reform of Article 27, and its impact upon the urbanization of the
ejido in Mexico, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 13(3), pp. 327–335.
 Interface 125

Azuela, A. & Duhau, E. (1998) Tenure regularisation, private property and public order in Mexico, in: E. Fernandes &
A. Varley (Eds) Illegal Cities: Law and Urban Change in Developing Countries, pp. 157–171 (London, Zed Books).
Corbridge, S., Williams, G., Srivastava, M. & Véron, R. (2005) Seeing the State: Governance and Governmentality in
India (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).
De Soto, H. (2000) The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (New York,
Basic Books).
Huchzermeyer, M. (2004) Unlawful Occupation: Informal Settlements and Urban Policy in South Africa and Brazil
(Trenton, NJ, Africa World Press).
Kudva, N. (2009) The everyday and the episodic: The spatial and political impacts of urban informality,
Environment & Planning A, 41(7), pp. 1614– 1628.
Lombard, M. (2009) Making a place in the city: Place-making in urban informal settlements in Mexico., Doctoral
dissertation, Department of Town and Regional Planning, University of Sheffield
Marx, C. (2009) Conceptualising the potential of informal land markets to reduce urban poverty, International
Development Planning Review, 31(4), pp. 335–353.
Meth, P. (2010) Unsettling insurgency: Reflections on women’s insurgent practices in South Africa, Planning
Theory & Practice, 11(2), pp. 241–263.
Robinson, J. (2002) Global and world cities: A view from off the map, International Journal of Urban & Regional
Research, 26(3), pp. 531–554.
Robinson, J. (2006) Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development (Abingdon, Routledge).
Roy, A. (2005) Urban informality: Toward an epistemology of planning, Journal of the American Planning
Association, 71(2), pp. 147–158.
Scott, J.C. (1998) Seeing Like a State, How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (London, Yale
University Press).
UN-Habitat (2003) The Challenge of the Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements (Geneva, UN-Habitat).
UNECE (2009) Self-Made Cities: In Search of Sustainable Solutions for Informal Settlements in the United Nations
Economic Commission for Europe Region (New York, UNECE).
Varley, A. (1998) The political uses of illegality: Evidence from urban Mexico, in: E. Fernandes & A. Varley (Eds)
Illegal Cities: Law and Urban Change in Developing Countries, pp. 172 –190 (London, Zed Books).
Varley, A. (2008) Postcolonialising informality? Paper given at From Villas Miseria to Colonias Populares: Latin
America’s Informal Cities in Comparative Perspective., Northwestern University Programe on Latin American
and Caribbean Studies, Evanston , IL, 13 June.

The Reordering of a Romany

Neighbourhood
ASLı KıYAK _INGIN* & TOLGA ISLAM**
*Sulukule Platform, Istanbul, Turkey; **Urban Planning Department,, Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul,
Turkey

Since the mid 2000s, Istanbul has been experiencing radical changes in its urban
governance that have altered the roots of the urban transformation dynamics in the city.
One such change is Code 5366 (Grand National Assembly of Turkey, 2005). Introduced in
2005, this “Law on the Protection of Deteriorated Historic and Cultural Heritage through
Renewal and Re-use” gave new legal and policy tools to local authorities to prepare and
implement urban renewal projects in historically designated neighbourhoods, often
leading to gentrification. One of the strategies used by the local authorities to justify these
projects is to highlight the informal character of these neighbourhoods and present
renewal as a remedy to solve problems related with informality. Sulukule is a good
Correspondence Address: Aslı Kıyak _Ingin, Celik Dizayn, IPKAS 7 A Blok No:7-8, Ikitelli-Istanbul, PK:34306, Turkiye,
Email: aslikiyak@celikdizayn.com
126 Interface

example in this regard, as the first area subject to urban renewal under Code 5366, and this
is where we focus in this paper.
Three critical changes have been brought about through Code 5366. First is a set of new
expropriation powers for local authorities, abolishing the need to receive the consent of the
property owner in a designated renewal area. According to the law, owners have to either
come to terms with the conditions raised by the local authorities, or must sell their rights to
the Municipality. The local authority has the power to expropriate the properties of those
who do not accept their conditions. As will be seen in the following sections, the
Municipality of Fatih used this expropriation power cunningly in Sulukule to discourage
and force the owners to come to terms with their offers.
Second, Code 5366 opens the way for urgent expropriation if the Municipality considers
that “the regular expropriation processes will cause a delay in the implementation of the
project” (Regulations of the Law no 5366, Clause 24 [Ministry of Internal Affairs, 2005]) .
Urgent expropriation is a tool reserved by the authorities for extraordinary conditions,
such as war or natural disasters. As will be seen in the following sections, in Sulukule the
Municipality did not hesitate to use these powers to increase their advantage during the
bargaining processes with the residents.
Third, Code 5366 changes the scale of intervention to neighbourhoods. With the
increased powers the local authorities have gained, renewal projects are now much wider
in scope and bigger in scale. This has necessitated the development of a new renewal
board focusing on neighbourhood scale interventions. Prior to Code 5366, renewal boards
made decisions at the scale of individual land parcels. A new renewal board was
established in 2007 to monitor and control the scale and scope of urban renewal projects on
historically designated sites.
While the law is applicable only in historically designated areas, in a city like Istanbul
this puts dozens of neighbourhoods as candidates for renewal. Not surprisingly, a series of
historical neighbourhoods were declared as renewal areas by the authorities just after the
introduction of the law, including Sulukule, Tarlabaşı, Süleymaniye, Yalı, Fener, and Balat.
Sulukule, the focus of this paper, was the first to be declared and has seen the destruction
of the historic fabric, the displacement of local residents, and the demolition of cultural
and social networks of solidarity.

The Discourse of the Local Authority

Sulukule is a historic, residential neighbourhood situated within Istanbul’s historic
peninsula and its World Heritage listed Land Walls. The existing street pattern of the
neighbourhood can partly be read in the maps from the early nineteenth and twentieth
centuries (Çeçen, 1999). Sulukule has a predominantly Romany population, though it is
home to non-Romany families as well. Up until the 1990s, Sulukule’s main economic
activity was running the culturally unique “entertainment houses”, houses that have
separate rooms where groups of guests are served food and drinks accompanied by
Romany music and dance. Authorities used police raids to close the entertainment houses
in the 1990s, after which the neighbourhood went into decline.
Sulukule is constituted of both formal and informal structures. It is certainly not a
squatter settlement: most of the houses are legally constructed and have title deeds, some
dating back to the Ottoman era. Yet there are at least three dimensions of informality in
Sulukule, and these have been projected as significant problems. In a way, the renewal
project has been used to “fix” informality by formalizing the neighbourhood. These three
dimensions are: socio-cultural patterns and lifestyles; an informal economy; and spatial or
 Interface 127

physical characteristics. In this section we will evaluate the discourses used by the local
authority to project Sulukule as an informal settlement and to justify the renewal project
by analysing the public documentation of the renewal plan prepared for Sulukule by the
Fatih Municipality (Fatih Municipality, 2008).
The particular socio-cultural lifestyles of Sulukuleans is the first dimension of
informality used by the Municipality to construct a problem for renewal. Romany culture
is explicitly characterized within the Municipality’s renewal project document as a
problem. The neighbourhood is seen as “inhabited or invaded by low-income and sub-
cultural groups” and the project is seen as necessary to “prevent the disintegration of the
[neighbourhood] with these kinds of life styles and problems” (Fatih Municipality, 2008).
Such phrases demonstrate that the social fabric of Sulukule is seen as a problem to be
fixed, rather than an asset to be realized. More specifically, the document targets particular
social groups that are seen to have “invaded” the area: “renters, squatters and some
marginal groups” (Fatih Municipality, 2008). The conflation of renters with squatters and
invaders is obviously extremely problematic, as renters constitute a distinct tenure in
housing markets and constitute around half of Sulukule’s population. They have been
living there for decades and are important elements of the culture in the neighbourhood.
A small proportion of people live in buildings without paying any rent as they have long-
standing informal agreements with the owners of those properties. The Municipality
appears to characterize these informal agreements as “squatting”, giving a pretext for the
renewal project.
The economic base of the neighbourhood forms a second dimension of informality in
Sulukule. The livelihood of most residents is based on informal jobs, particularly as the
neighbourhood’s economy has declined since the closure of the entertainment houses.

Figure 1. The courtyard houses system in Sulukule (produced by Sulukule Platform ).

128 Interface

According to a 2006 neighbourhood survey (Fatih Municipality, 2006), 80% of families are
outside the formal labour force, either without jobs or working informally. Turkey’s social
security system is linked to formal employment: consequently only one in five families
have access to social security. As an indication of poverty, 16% of residents have “green
cards” (a system that gives the very poor the opportunity to use social welfare system
without paying any payments to the security system). The Municipality identifies the
informal economic character of Sulukule in its project documents, indicating this as an
economic problem to be resolved through renewal.
A third dimension of informality portrayed in the project document is spatial or
physical characteristics. Sulukule is a traditional neighbourhood, with narrow streets,
courtyard houses, gardens, squares and fountains. These physical characteristics are what
give the neighbourhood its character. Most important is the courtyard house structure.
Courtyard houses are single-storey units composed of one or two rooms located around
the courtyard of a house. Each of these units hosts independent families who are usually
related to each other. These units have entrances from the common courtyard and usually
share a common toilet located in the courtyard. The courtyard houses have a distinct
spatial typology (see Figure 1), and were specifically identified by UNESCO (2008, p. 17)
as a cultural asset in its report on the historic areas of Istanbul.
These room-like units also serve an important social function in a city that has no state-
owned social housing by acting as cheap rental stock for the very poor. Similar spatial
housing configurations in Sulukule are two- and three-storey single family houses, where
each storey is divided into a separate unit and occupied by an independent family (again
mostly with familial relations). These housing arrangements allow Sulukuleans to
collectively use their neighbourhood, provide important social solidarity, and enable the
inheritance of land and housing down the generations. With more than one unit per plot,
the pattern allows multiple shareholders in each plot as families hand on their land and
housing to the next generation. Such unique, informally derived characteristics are
portrayed by the Municipality in a highly negative way:
[Sulukule] with its existing building structure seems like a primitive living space
that lacks healthy living conditions and amenities like electricity, water and
heating, is neglected, of inferior quality, shed-like.

The area . . . with its shabby buildings, run-down sheds and additions, looks
like a middle-age city. (Fatih Municipality, 2008, emphasis added)
The language used indicates that the local authority perceives the unique cultural and
spatial arrangement, and particularly the informality that is present in this arrangement,
of Sulukule’s traditional neighbourhood as “primitive” and outmoded.

The Sulukule Renewal Project: New Policy Tools and Regulations Used by the Local
Authority
The Sulukule Renewal Project was a plan commissioned by the Fatih Municipality
undertaken by a private planning consultancy and approved by the Renewal Board in
November 2007. The renewal plan entirely recreated the physical and spatial structure of
Sulukule. It ignored the existing urban form and social community, treating the
neighbourhood as it if were an empty terrain to be recreated in a so-called “historically
compatible” style. The traditional system of streets and islands was destroyed: courtyards,
facades, streets, squares, scales and usage typical of the district were abandoned.
 Interface 129

Most contrary to the needs and morphology of the neighbourhood, the plan included a
large hotel and commercial centre right below the city walls. Although only 5% of the local
population possessed a private vehicle (Sulukele Platform, 2007), the ground below the
entire renewal area was proposed as an underground parking lot. The existing small
(70 – 90 m2) low-cost social dwellings have been reconfigured into 100, 120, and 180 m2
houses. The plan was never sufficiently explained or presented to residents; however, it
was offered to investors at real estate summits and renewal fairs, and appeared on the
covers of real-estate magazines. The renewal project served to increase the value of land
for private speculation by removing the existing community and historic urban form.
Three new political and legal powers were important for the implementation of the
renewal project: new powers that make larger scale transformations possible; new
expropriation powers; and new financing models. First, the new law (Code 5366),
provided the regulatory framework which opened Sulukule to large-scale redevelopment.
Prior to this law, Sulukule had been protected from alteration and the Municipality did not
have the authority to prepare a project at a neighbourhood scale. It became open, under
Code 5366, to large-scale projects and construction through its designation as a renewal
area in a historic place. Neither its designation, nor the plans were discussed with
residents. Second were new expropriation powers provided by Code 5366. The
Municipality appealed to the Council of Ministers for an urgent expropriation decision
in the Sulukule renewal area, which was granted immediately in December 2006. Urgent
expropriation is normally reserved for extraordinary circumstances such as war or natural
disaster. It gives the authority to evict residents and demolish homes within a week
without needing to secure agreement with the homeowners beforehand. This was the first
time it was to be used in a renewal area. Urgent expropriation, ultimately, was not
implemented due to a legal challenge brought to court by the neighbourhood association,
and public pressure created by activists. However, it was used as a means of leverage with
the local residents during the entire process.
The Municipality also used new finance models for home-owners and renter residents.
The approved plan made it impossible for homeowners to restore or rehabilitate their
properties, as it removed the existing plot structure. Instead, the plan left them with two
options: to buy a unit in the project area or to sell their share to the local authority. For the
owners to purchase a new unit in the renewal area, the expropriation value of their
properties would be deemed as a down payment. They would then be required to pay the
remaining sum as monthly instalments of e200 –300 for fifteen years. Non-payment for
two consecutive months would result in the seizure of assets. Homeowners were thereby
pushed into debt in order to remain living in their own neighbourhood; debt that is far
beyond the capacities of residents working in informal jobs with very low incomes. As
property speculators began to operate in the area, a third option arose. These speculators
sought land to develop under the new plan and offered the existing owners better prices
for their properties. Thus, of the 620 right holders in the neighbourhood, many chose to
sell their shares to these third-party buyers (Hürriyet, 2009).
For the many tenants in Sulukule, the displacing effect of the renewal project was
dramatic. The Municipality did not offer renters the option of staying in the district even
though they constituted an important part of the local culture. Instead, they were given the
rights to own units constructed by the mass housing authority, TOKI, in Taşoluk, a
peripheral district 40 km from Sulukule. This would require payment of monthly
instalments of around e100 –150 for 15 years. Additional expenses added to the financial
burden, such as gas central heating and lack of access to local forms of credit and low
priced shopping. Many residents relied on informal work within Sulukule through long-
130 Interface

standing networks and familial ties. These jobs were not accessible from 40 km away and
consequently livelihoods could not be maintained. As a result, except for a few, most of the
303 Sulukuleans who had moved to Taşoluk then had to leave Taşoluk by selling their
housing rights to return to neighbourhoods around Sulukule.

Resistance Strategies and Attempts Towards an Alternative Plan

None of this has been and is taking place in Sulukule without struggle and without the
search for alternatives. Local residents and associations, activists, students, academics and
urban practitioners have formed important civil movements. One such movement, the
Sulukule Platform, has undertaken a range of initiatives to highlight the possibility of
alternative planning approaches that build on the informal characteristics of the
neighbourhood. Sulukule Platform organized a collaboration with experts, academics and
volunteers to undertake alternative planning studies to inform local and international
bodies, including the Chamber of Architects and UNESCO World Heritage Committee,
about the conditions of the neighbourhood. They applied to the renewal board for the
historic registration of 85 houses in the neighbourhood. As nine were accepted, this raised
the possibility of reconsidering the entire plan.
Sulukule Platform also supported a group of homeowners who wished to remain in
their own registered houses by obtaining permission and support for simple repair work
to the houses from the Directorate of Protection Application and Supervision of the
Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality. Practical repairs were undertaken without evicting
the families. Such efforts showed that alternative solutions are possible. The platform also
made an application to the Renewal Board for the preservation of the existing structure of
the Küçük Çeşme Street, the most historic and characteristic street in the neighbourhood
hosting most of the courtyard houses. The Renewal Board indicated support for
preserving the street stating that “the issue of the preservation of the Küçük Çeşme
street . . . can be evaluated within the unity of the project” (Renewal Board, 2008).
However, Fatih Municipality went ahead and demolished this street.
Finally, the activists developed a proposal for a “multi-partner planning commission”
(including Fatih Municipality) to create a forum to address the problems with the renewal
approach. While Fatih Municipality gave some signals it was willing to collaborate, when
the demolitions commenced and renters were directed to move, the negotiations were
stopped. Through this process, attempts were made to produce an alternative plan for
Sulukule where the characteristics of informality were supported, and renters could also
live in the region alongside the homeowners (Sulukule Atölyesi, 2009, STOP, 2008).
Surprisingly, this plan drew the interest of the director of TOKI, one of main actors of the
renewal process although it is yet to yield a productive result.
The renewal process has caused the disintegration of Sulukule’s social structure by
dispersing residents across the city, severing them from long-standing networks and familial
relations of solidarity, their livelihoods and their cultural base. All of this has been justified on
the basis of cleaning up informality in various dimensions: the informal economic base of
Sulukule, informal housing arrangements, and the socio-cultural structure. Specific planning
laws and regulatory tools have been instrumental in achieving this. Informality has been used
as the basis for planning laws to create displacement through urban renewal. This has not
occurred in Sulukule through formalizing rights and structures, such as title deeds or
investing in economic development to secure formal employment. Instead, it has occurred by
the demolition of an entire physical structure and the displacement of a people.
 Interface 131

References
Fatih Municipality (2006) Neighbourhood survey, Neslişah Mahallesi Toplumsal Yapı Araştırması, [Research on the
social structure of Neslişah Neighbourhood] (Istanbul, Fatih Municipality).
Çeçen, K. (1999) İstanbul’un Osmanlı Dönemi Su Yolları, [The Water Roads of Istanbul in the Ottoman Era]
(İstanbul, İSKİ Yayınları).
Faith Municipality (2008) Neslişah Ve Hatice Sultan (Sulukule) Mahalleleri Yenileme Projesi, [The renewal Project of
Neslisah and Hatice Sultan (Sulukule) Neighbourhoods]. Available at http://www.fatih.bel.tr/bpi.
asp?caid¼631&cid¼1155 (accessed 20 September 2010).
Faith Municipality Renewal Board (2008), Decision no: 438, 23 October 2008, Istanbul.
Grand National Assembly of Turkey (2005) Law on the Protection of Deteriorated Historic and Cultural Heritage
through Renewal and Re-use, Ankara, 16 June.
Hürriyet (2009) İşte Sulukule’nin rantsal dönüşümü [Here is the speculative transformation of Sulukule], Hürriyet
(newspaper), 19 March 2009. Available at http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/gundem/11232807.asp (accessed 20
September 2010)
Ministry of Internal Affairs (2005) Regulations of the Law no 5366, Ankara, 14 December.
STOP (2008) “Başka bir Sulukule mümkün” [Another Sulukule is possible]., Available at http://www.
alternatifsulukule.org (accessed 20 September 2010).
Sulukule Atölyesi (2009) “Alternatif proje” [Alternative project]., Available at http://sulukuleatolyesi.blogspot.
com/2009/11/alternatif-proje_06.html (accessed on 20 September 2010).
Sulukule Platform (2007) Neighbourhood survey. Unpublished work by the Sulukule Platform.
UNESCO (2008) Report on the Joint World Heritage Centre/ICOMOS mission to the Historic Areas of Istanbul (Istanbul,
UNESCO/WHC, ICOMOS). Available at http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/356/documents/ (accessed on 20
September 2010).

The Land Formalisation Process and the

Peri-Urban Zone of Dar es Salaam,
Tanzania
JOHN BRIGGS
Glasgow Centre for International Development, University of Glasgow, UK

Land Formalisation
Formalising landholding through the issue of legal land titles has proved to be a seductive
proposition for a number of governments in the global south during the first decade of the
twenty-first century. Much of this thinking, and indeed policy development, has been
based on Hernando De Soto’s conceptualisation of dead capital, perhaps most accessibly
captured in The Mystery of Capital (De Soto, 2001). The argument has been very persuasive
in some influential quarters, and not least in the World Bank, where land titling is seen
particularly as having the potential to promote increased private investment within the
poor countries of the global south (Keivani et al., 2008).
In essence, De Soto’s argument is that most of the property in the global south is
extralegal—not illegal, but outside the legal sector in the sense that it is not formally
registered and/or titled to identifiable owners with written documentary evidence as
proof of ownership. This does not necessarily mean that land is not “owned”, as
ownership of plots of land by individuals may well be recognised by a range of local
Correspondence Address: John Briggs, Department of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow, East
Quadrangle, University Avenue, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, G12 8QQ, UK. Email: John.briggs@glasgow.ac.uk
132 Interface

bodies such as village councils, chiefs or other locally based authorities. However, such
types of ownership are rarely documented through formally written, or even
electronically stored, documents that unequivocally attribute that land by law to a
particular individual. Even if written records exist, these are rarely seen to be valid in the
legal sense of the word. This is a challenging problem because, without such titles, De Soto
argues, people cannot realise the full value of their land or property. Land titles not only
provide security for loans, but also a proof of existence of wealth which, along with a
formal address, serves to strengthen business trust and social capital more generally.
Consequently, following De Soto’s argument, formal land titles provide the means of
unlocking domestic capital for development.
The problem with informal landholding systems is that although there may exist a
thriving land market, the value of a piece of land can be realised only on the occasion
when it is sold. At this point, the existing owner loses access to the value of the land, and
therefore he or she can only receive a monetary reward for the land on that one solitary
occasion. However, a formal land title can be deployed as security against a loan, and
hence the value of the property can be realised several times over the lifetime of the
ownership, as long as, of course, each of the loans is repaid on time. Extralegal property,
therefore, is not fungible—it cannot be split up in various ways to generate funds for
investment, as can be done with legally recognised property. In De Soto’s view, this is vital
for economic development because, as he puts it: “Legal property thus gave the West the
tools to produce surplus value over and above its physical assets” (De Soto, 2001, p. 49).
Hence, property assets enable the generation of capital for investment through legally
titled land being used as security or collateral.

Land Formalisation and Titling in Tanzania

It is this liberalisation of domestic assets that has proved to be attractive to many
governments in the global south, anxious to delink themselves from aid dependency, but
at the same time rightly concerned that foreign direct investment, which might move into
the space created by the reduction in development assistance flows, may pass them by.
The government of Tanzania, in particular, has been especially keen to embrace De Soto’s
ideas, although it has been by no means the only government to do so: see, for example,
Peru (Calderon, 2004), and Botswana (Nkwae & Dumba, 2010). The formalisation policy in
Tanzania has been encapsulated within the Property and Business Formalisation
Programme (going by the Kiswahili acronym of MKURABITA—Mpango wa Kurasimisha
Rasilimali na Biashara za Wanyonge) which started operation in 2005. It is worth noting that
embedded in the programme’s title there is a very clear and strong link between property
and business, thus underlining the government of Tanzania’s desire to liberate funds from
legal property rights to finance business expansion. Hence, MKURABITA was given the
aim of transforming property and businesses held in the informal sector into legal entities,
rooted firmly within the formal sector.
There have, inevitably, been tensions in this process, not least because Tanzania’s
constitution still recognises that all land title is invested in the state, which is at odds with
the current government’s pursuance of a neoliberal, market-based approach to economic
development. These tensions play out therefore between the desire for legal security of
tenure for individuals and businesses, and the fact that all land is vested with the state.
Kulaba (2007) also notes that the proposed formalisation programme was essentially an
imported foreign strategy which, in his view, failed to engage sufficiently well with the full
range of actors and government departments in Tanzania. Hence, a large amount of local
 Interface 133

material and understanding has not been gathered, much of which would have been of
critical importance in shaping the subsequent programme itself.
It was envisaged that MKURABITA would comprise four phases, these being diagnosis,
reform design, implementation, and capital formation (Kulaba, 2007). The first phase has
been relatively straightforward, and in the Diagnosis Report of the Property and Business
Formalization Program (Ministry of Lands and Human Settlement, n.d.), the total of what
De Soto describes as dead capital in Tanzania was calculated to be in the order of US$29
billion. To put this in perspective, this figure exceeds the total value of official
development assistance, or aid, which Tanzania has received since independence in 1961.
There are serious methodological issues about how this figure was derived (as indeed
there is around the figure of US$9.3 trillion which De Soto (2001) calculates as being the
total value of extralegal land in the entire global south). It was, however, estimated from
land sales figures available from a vibrant land market in Tanzania, and especially Dar es
Salaam. The figure of US$29 billion is, of course, a seductive sum to be released by the legal
formalisation of land and property, and, unsurprisingly, the government of Tanzania has
committed itself to a programme of formalisation.
In Dar es Salaam alone, the value of extralegal property was put at US$9.4 billion and
97% of businesses in the city were estimated to be extralegal with an additional value of
US$2.2 billion. Hence, MKURABITA calculated that the value of dead capital in Dar es
Salaam is $US11.6 billion, which is about 50 times the total foreign direct investment which
has come into Tanzania since 2002. Consequently, given that about 40% of Tanzania’s dead
capital is seemingly located in Dar es Salaam, plus the fact that Dar es Salaam has the most
vibrant land market in Tanzania, this has led to the city becoming the immediate focus of
the formalisation programme.
To encourage people to register their property, the Government of Tanzania launched the
Residential Licence programme in May 2005 which was aimed at existing owners in areas
that have not been formally surveyed by the government of Tanzania, but on which people
are living with secure tenancy/ownership rights. A good number of people in these areas
migrated to Dar es Salaam and settled as squatters, but as they have lived in these locations
in excess of 10 years, and, in some cases, considerably longer, it is now accepted that they
have residential rights. For them, the Residential Licence programme is designed to
shorten the length of the registration process, which, before MKURABITA, required a
minimum of 68 bureaucratic steps taking an average of 8 years at an average cost of
US$2,250 to see through to finalisation (Property and Business Formalisation Program, no
date ). It is hardly surprising that this process in itself was a major disincentive for anyone
wishing to register their property formally and legally. However, despite the truncated
process introduced in 2005, uptake has been slow, with only 52,000 applications made by
November 2005, and, of these, only about 38,000 actually approved by 2008.
The government of Tanzania also launched the so-called 20,000 plots programme which
had the ambitious aim of formally surveying that number of plots for future urban
expansion. By May 2006, the target had been exceeded with over 30,000 plots being
formally surveyed and put up for sale. These were located mainly in the peri-urban zones
of the city, but they have often been controversial in that compensation levels paid to
existing users of this land have been relatively low (sometimes as low as US$60), and the
subsequent sale price of the surveyed land has been significantly higher, thus benefiting
better-off households in the land market.
134 Interface

The Reality of Land Formalisation and Titling

The prospect of having a formal legal land title would seem to be a very attractive
proposition, both providing security of tenure and collateral to release capital for
investment along the lines envisaged by De Soto. If people can demonstrate that they
already “own” a piece of land through usufructary land rights, or by having their land
“purchase” already recognised by the village or ward authority, then it is essentially a
formality, although perhaps a time-consuming one, to have a formal land title issued. To
this extent, it would seem to be a rational decision to register the land formally. However,
preliminary research in the peri-urban zone of Dar es Salaam suggests that the response by
many people in this area has not been wholly favourable towards these new opportunities,
and there exists an ambivalent attitude due to a range of clear and rational reasons for
resisting formalisation.
It became clear from interviews and focus group discussions that many people do not
see the benefit of formalisation and land titling. Not only is it seen to be a long and
expensive process, many are unconvinced that they would gain any stronger security
rights than they already enjoy. If they have already registered their land purchase with the
village or ward, they already have de facto security of tenure, something which is
reinforced further once house construction is started on the plot. There is little more to be
gained by obtaining a legal land title. Significantly, it tended to be poorer landowners who
expressed this view more strongly, as the expense of the formal registration process is a
proportionately greater drain on their financial resources than for wealthier households.
There was also a concern that corrupt officials would have to be “looked after”, increasing
the financial costs of registration. Similar observations have been made in Accra where
views were expressed that the extra transaction costs of a more formal system were
unattractive (Gough & Yankson, 2000; Antwi & Adams, 2003). Nkurunziza (2008) draws
similar conclusions in Kampala where the local context, separate from the state, remains
strong and attractive to many.
But it is more than just a financial constraint. Many of the poorer landowners have little
or no formal education and therefore the type of legal language used in formal land
registration can be opaque and confusing. There was a widespread fear expressed that
they could be signing up for something that they do not fully understand and could end
up being tricked into losing their land. The process of formal land registration is seen to be
complex, disembodied and abstract, unlike registration with the ward council, for
example, which is seen to be real, grounded, experienced and relatively easily understood,
with officials who are easily contactable on a daily basis.
There is a further dimension to this resistance which is particular to Tanzania. When
Tanzania went through a strong socialist phase of its national development after the 1967
Arusha Declaration, a key element of this programme was the creation of ujamaa villages
throughout rural Tanzania (Hyden, 1980; Coulson, 1982). This involved moving people
from a largely dispersed rural population distribution pattern into about 8,000 nucleated
villages spread across the geographic space of Tanzania, with each village engaging in
communal production by pooling labour and capital resources. In the event, very few of
the 8,000 villages ever became such fully fledged ujamaa communities, but there was
nonetheless a sense at that time that they had somehow “lost” their land to the state, even
though in practice this was rarely, if ever, the case. Nonetheless, among those older people
who experienced the ujamaa “operations”, the memory remains—the state had once before
tried to take land, and, for them, land formalisation was yet another attempt to do so,
 Interface 135

albeit in a neoliberal rather than socialist framework. Interviewees indicated this was a
powerful negative narrative for those with long memories.
Central to De Soto’s argument is the way in which having access to land title will
apparently unlock capital for investment in business, whether it be in agriculture,
industry, trading or petty business. Indeed, this is a key driver for promoting formalisation
and land titling. Whilst it is the case that a few landowners who had formal land titles had
used them to secure loans, this was by no means a widespread practice. As with the formal
land registration process itself, it tended to be poorer landowners who were more
suspicious and less likely to take up the opportunities. A key reason was that they failed to
see how, even with a formal land title, they could access credit anyway. Because the
Tanzanian banking and lending system is imbued with the values and practices of a
globalised banking system, the application process for a loan can seem very daunting for
poorer people with relatively little formal education. Indeed, the very factors which
militate against applying for a formal land title in the first place are repeated. As one
farmer in the peri-urban zone north of Dar es Salaam put it, “How can I prepare a business
plan when I can’t read or write properly?” But even for those lenders who are a little more
accommodating there are still problems associated with the creditworthiness of potential
borrowers, as well as their likely ability to repay on a regular monthly basis. For some
banks, lending at this scale offers only a small profit margin, which may be outweighed by
the risk they take in making the loan in the first place. In the same way that the land titling
process appears to favour the better-off at the expense of the poorer groups, so does the
opportunity to borrow money from banks, even if land is available to be put up as legal
collateral. The experience of some of our respondents suggests that being in possession of
a formal land title is not necessarily enough in itself to unlock credit.
In addition to this, a commonly expressed view was that many are reluctant to use their
land as collateral anyway due to the risk that they could lose their land if they default on
payments. Especially for the poor, land represents their only security. Land can fulfil the
function of a social welfare or support system if all else fails—as a last resort, food can be
grown on the land to survive. Allied to this, there remains a strong cultural and economic
affinity to land, reinforced by a strong element of risk-aversive behaviour. Research
elsewhere indicates that risk aversion is even stronger for poorer than better-off groups
(Home & Lim, 2004), and the findings in Dar es Salaam support this view. As one
respondent put it: “The risk of losing to the bank what little land I have is too much.”
Although MKURABITA may recognise a strong entrepreneurial spirit among many in the
urban and peri-urban areas of Dar es Salaam, this entrepreneurial spirit is firmly
grounded in informal economic activities where cash transactions are the rule, and where
credit and loans are not generally part of daily practice. The very different, even alien,
ways of operating in the formal sector are not attractive. Hence, if there exists a wariness,
or downright unwillingness, to engage in the formal economic sector, where is the
incentive to engage in the first place in the expensive process of formalising land title?
Thus far, the discussion has focused on the perceived opportunities which follow on
from formal land titling, but there are also potential costs. Significantly, the Property and
Business Formalisation Programme public information document sets out one of the key
drivers of the formalisation programme as being to integrate extralegal property into the
formal legal system “to boost economic growth, reduce poverty and eventually expand the
tax base” (my emphasis) (Property and Business Formalisation Programme, no date ). The
existence of a database of formal ownership which accurately records exact location and
size of holding means that people are easily traceable and hence accountable to the state.
This may have the benefit of generating a sense of business trust for formal economic
136 Interface

activity, but it also has the cost of generating a geographically specific tax framework. If
the MKURABITA report is even just reasonably accurate, then an informal business sector
valued at $2.2 billion represents a very attractive taxable sum into which the state can
tap. For people balancing the advantages and disadvantages of applying for a formal land
title, entering the tax system is an unattractive consequence.
In some countries where land titling has been introduced, there has been an increase
in rents subsequent to formalisation. In parts of Cairo, for example, the land titling
programme has resulted in the displacement of 21% of low-income tenants who could no
longer afford the rents being levied (Payne, 2001). Payne et al., (2007) also point generally
to the significant risks of rent rises taking place after formal titling, thus actually reducing
security of tenure for some residents in these areas, most of whom are poor. Until now, rent
rises following titling in Dar es Salaam appear to be less of an issue, but there is still the
need for much more careful and systematic research to confirm this.
However, in Dar es Salaam, there has been a variation on this theme in that a land
market for titled property has started to emerge, although this is seen less in the peri-
urban areas of the city at the moment, and rather more in some of the more established
urban areas. In Manzese and Hannan Asif, for example, two former squatter areas, a land
titling programme has led to an initial urban upgrading by the residents of these areas,
similar to what was reported to have happened in Peru following formalisation (Canturias
& Delgado, 2004 cited in Payne et al., 2007,) and in Rio de Janeiro (Handzic, 2010),
reflecting the residents’ greater confidence in having improved security of tenure.
However, both Manzese and Hannan Asif, because of their relatively close location to the
city centre of Dar es Salaam along the transport artery of Morogoro Road, have started to
become attractive locations for property speculators, safe in the knowledge that these
properties now have formal, legal titles. The germ of a process of nascent gentrification of
these former squatter areas has begun.
As with the surveyed plots scheme in the peri-urban zone, it is wealthier groups who
are able to take advantage and it is yet again poorer people who are being squeezed. There
is, though, an interesting twist to this. Some have actively taken the opportunity to register
their plots formally, but rather as a business opportunity, despite the expense and
bureaucracy involved, and they have done so with the explicit intention of selling the land
once formal titles have been gained. There is evidence that the proceeds of these land sales
are then invested in purchasing informal land located further out from the city centre in
the peri-urban zone, often at distances of 40 km or more, where land is cheaper. This land
is registered with the local village authority and the new owner waits for land values to
rise. This strategy is possible in Dar es Salaam, as there is still relative land abundance in
the area surrounding the city, a state of affairs which does not exist around other cities in
the region, such as Kampala and Nairobi.

Final Comments
What is manifestly clear from Dar es Salaam is that despite what might seem to be the
obvious attractions of possessing a legal land title, many people are still very wary of
getting involved. Land formalisation appears to be having different outcomes for different
population groups - the opportunities afforded by formalisation appear to be of greater
benefit to wealthier people. Many of this latter group are already embedded within the tax
system because of the jobs they hold in the government and public sectors, and
increasingly the formal private sector: being identifiable to the state holds less fear than it
does for those who are currently invisible to the state. They also have access to greater
 Interface 137

amounts of capital, either through savings or access to credit, to allow them to participate
as active buyers in the land market. Mwamfupe (2007) has noted the tendency for poorer
people to become increasingly marginalised as the land market develops and they choose
to sell their land. He has also noted that people tend to be forced to engage in economic
activities such as charcoal making, sand mining and vegetable vending, more or less as a
survival strategy, whilst those with land tend to engage in activities such as petty trading,
tailoring, carpentry, metalworking and electronic repairs, all of which become possible
with secure tenancy. Ironically, therefore, it would appear that the land titling system, as it
plays out in Dar es Salaam, tends to be of greater medium- and long-term benefit to the
already wealthier urban residents, so reinforcing economic inequalities within the city.

Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Urban Studies for making funds available to conduct the fieldwork for this
study.

References
Antwi, A. & Adams, J. (2003) Economic rationality and informal urban land transactions in Accra, Ghana, Journal
of Property Research, 20, pp. 67– 90.
Calderon Cockburn, J. (2004) The formalisation of property in Peru 2001–2002: The case of Lima, Habitat
International, 28, pp. 289–300.
Coulson, A. (1982) Tanzania: A Political Economy (Oxford, Oxford University Press).
De Soto, H. (2001) The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (London,
Black Swan).
Gough, K.V. & Yankson, P.W.K. (2000) Land markets in African cities: The case of peri-urban Accra, Ghana, Urban
Studies, 37, pp. 2485–2500.
Handzic, K. (2010) Is legalized land tenure necessary in slum upgrading? Learning from Rio’s land tenure policies
in the Favela Bairro Programme, Habitat International, 34, pp. 11–17.
Home, R. & Lim, H. (2004) Demystifying the Mystery of Capital: Land Tenure and Poverty in Africa and the Caribbean
(London, Glasshouse Press).
Hyden, G. (1980) Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania: Underdevelopment and an Uncaptured Peasantry (London, Heinemann).
Keivani, R., Mattingly, M. & Majedi, H. (2008) Public management of urban land, enabling markets and low-
income housing provision: The overlooked experience of Iran, Urban Studies, 45, pp. 1825–1853.
Kulaba, M. (2007) Property and business formalisation in Tanzania: MKURABITA as a gateway out
of poverty: A critical view of MKURABITA process and its prospects for the urban poor in Tanzania, in:
M. Brother & J. Solberg (Eds) Legal Empowerment—A Way Out of Poverty (Oslo, Norwegian Ministry of Foreign
Affairs).
Ministry of Human Lands and Settlements (no date) Diagnosis Report of the Property and Business Formalization
Program, Dar es Salaam.
Mwamfupe, D. (2007) Urban expansion in Dar es Salaam city in Tanzania: A blight or blessing for peri-urban
livelihoods?, Afrika Tamulmanyok, 2, pp. 1–14.
Nkurunziza, E. (2008) Understanding informal urban land access processes from a legal pluralist perspective:
The case of Kampala, Uganda, Habitat International, 32, pp. 109–120.
Nkwae, B. & Dumba, D. (2010) From certificate of rights to long-term leaseholds in Botswana, Habitat
International, 34, pp. 367–373.
Payne, G. (2001) Urban land tenure policy options: Titles or rights?, Habitat International, 25, pp. 415–429.
Payne, G., Durand-Lesserve, A. & Rakodi, C. (2007) Urban land titling programmes, in: M. Brother & J. Solberg
(Eds) Legal Empowerment—A Way Out of Poverty (Oslo, Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs).
Property and Business Formalisation Programme (n.d.) PBFP: Empowering the disadvantaged towards an
expanded market economy., Dar es Salaam, United Republic of Tanzania.
138 Interface

Street Vendors and Planning in

Indonesian Cities
DEDEN RUKMANA
Urban Studies and Planning, Savannah State University, Georgia USA

The resignation of President Suharto in May 1998 following his failure to address the impact
of the economic crisis marked the end of his authoritarian regime and the beginning of
profound social and political transformation in Indonesian cities. The new system of
government in Indonesia after the fall of Suharto’s authoritarian regime enacted a more
democratic and accountable institutional setting including spatial planning law.
A new spatial planning law, enacted in 2007, transformed spatial planning in Indonesia.
This new Spatial Planning Law 26/2007 reflects the new system of government in
Indonesia, particularly the new decentralization laws and the enthusiasm of Indonesian
people for a more transparent and accountable system of government. This new law
stipulates some provisions that are not included in the previous Spatial Planning Law
(24/1992). Of special relevance is the provision for the informal sector within this new
planning legal framework.
It is difficult to ignore the importance of the informal sector in Indonesian cities,
especially in employment. According to data from the Indonesian Central Bureau of
Statistics in February 2008, 69% of Indonesian workers (70.56 million people) were
employed in the informal sector (BPS, 2009). During the economic crisis in 1998, the
proportion of informal sector employment in Indonesian cities was even higher when the
closure of many manufacturing and service corporations pushed the newly unemployed
into the informal sector. The growth of the urban informal sector is also nourished by the
influx of migrants in search of work from rural regions surrounding urban agglomerations.
With the formal sector unable to accommodate such large numbers of workers, the informal
sector becomes the primary source of employment. Without the economic opportunities
generated by such activities, the poor would certainly become a larger burden for the urban
authorities.
Nearly half of the Indonesian informal sector workers work in the trade sector as
street vendors (Rice, 1997; Sethuraman, 1985). Street vendors are visible in almost every
part of Indonesian cities. As in other cities in developing countries, street vendors
are often regarded as eyesores engaging in undesirable activities. In many cases,
authorities have forcibly evicted street vendors in the name of urban order and
cleanliness. But street vendors often resist such evictions and demand space for their
businesses.
Under the new more democratic system of government in Indonesia, most city
administrations are now more flexible with the street vendors and less likely to use
repressive measures toward the street vendors than during Suharto’s authoritarian
regime. The new spatial planning law also stipulates the provision of urban spaces for the
informal sector. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the activities of street vendors in
Indonesian cities and how the more democratic system of government and the Spatial
Planning Law 26/2007 affect street vendors and public spaces in Indonesian cities.
Correspondence Address: Deden Rukmana, Department of Political Science and Public Affairs, Social Science Building 139,
Savannah State University, Savannah, GA 31404. Email: rukmanad@savannahstate.edu
 Table 1. The formal sector and the informal sector definition
Employment status

Self- Assisted by unpaid Assisted by paid Agricultural Non-agricultural Unpaid

Main employment types employed employee employee Employee employee employee employee

Professional F F F F F F INF
Chief officer F F F F F F INF
Administrative assistant F F F F F F INF
Sales worker INF F F F INF INF INF
Service worker INF F F F INF INF INF
Agriculture worker INF INF F F INF INF INF
Production worker INF F F F INF INF INF
Operational worker INF F F F INF INF INF
Manual worker INF F F F INF INF INF
Others INF INF F F INF INF INF

F, formal sector; INF, informal sector.

Source: BPS, 2009.
Interface
139
140 Interface

The Informal Sector and Street Vendors in Indonesian Cities

The importance of the informal sector in Indonesia’s employment is clear, but the
definition of the informal sector is not. The Indonesian Central Bureau of Statistics has
developed a matrix of employment statuses and main employment types in defining the
informal sectors, as seen in Table 1. However, such a definition is not widely used by other
Indonesian government institutions. The informal sector is commonly defined as a
collection of very small-scale enterprises composed of self-employed individuals or self-
employed individuals with their family as workers.
Street vendors, commonly called pedagang kaki lima (PKL) in Indonesia, are very small-
scale and mostly unregulated and unregistered trading enterprises. Street vendors occupy
many public spaces of Indonesian cities including sidewalks, streets, shopping/market
areas, parking areas, empty plots, city parks and mass transit stations (Yatmo, 2008). Street
vendors can start their business with very little or no capital and use a low level of
technology and skills.
Mobility and flexibility are the most important characteristics of Indonesian street
vendors. Yatmo (2008) identified six types of street vendors in Indonesia that can
determine the level of mobility and flexibility of street vendors. This includes three types
of stationary vendors including warung or kiosk, tenda or tent and gelaran or mat: the first is
a permanent structure and the last two are non-permanent structures. The other three
types of street vendors are ambulatory vendors including gerobak or pushcart, pikulan or
yoke, and bakul or basket. I could add other types of ambulatory vendors that use motor or
motorcycle, sepeda or bicycle and becak or tricycle to sell their goods or services.
Due to their high mobility and flexibility, street vendors are able to operate their businesses
in every part of public spaces in Indonesian cities. They can also assemble and dissemble their
activities very quickly and can move from one place to another easily. Street vendors often use
their high mobility and flexibility to play “hide and seek” with the city public order officers
(Satpol Pamong Praja) as their strategy to avoid evictions. In most cases, street vendors will
return to their locations after the city authorities have evicted them.
Most Indonesian street vendors are unregistered enterprises and they do not pay any
fees to the city administration. Street vendors can hide from the public order officers by
paying illegal levies to the thugs who regularly trawl the streets, for example street
vendors are often forced to pay “security and cleaning fees” daily to the thugs (Jakarta Post,
2010). The authorities should be aware of such illegal levies but in most cases they never
touch the thugs. In many cases, street vendors also bribe the city authorities so that they
can still operate their businesses without being evicted.
Most street vendors in Indonesian cities engage in unregulated, disordered and
uncontrolled activities and could cause urban blight. They are a nuisance and can stake a
claim in marginal locations and obstruct public spaces without paying any rent (Jensen,
2008). They are the unplanned part of Indonesian cities and become a challenge for the
practice of planning in Indonesia. Planning needs to address the challenge and prevent
blight from happening in Indonesian cities.

New System of Government and Spatial Planning Law

The resignation of President Suharto led to a new era of reformasi, or reform that
dismantles the authoritarian political structure and replaces it with a more pluralistic and
accountable system of government. The reformasi movement also seeks to get rid of
economic monopolies, fight corruption, collusion and nepotism and promote accountable
and clean government (Anwar, 2005). The reformasi movement witnessed the liberalization
 Interface 141

of political parties’ establishment and their participation in elections. After Suharto’s New
Order regime, political activities were liberalized and the freedoms of speech and
association were fully assured (Nomura, 2007).
In the first five years after the fall of the New Order regime, Indonesia witnessed
fundamental government changes. First, an extensive decentralization process was
launched. The Indonesian parliament passed a new law on regional autonomy (Law
32/2004) and a new law on fiscal decentralization (Law 33/2004) in October 2004. In the
new regional autonomy law, the head of provincial government and the head of district
are directly elected by the people rather than by the local councils. In addition, the
provincial government is authorized to coordinate the district governments.
The new laws on regional autonomy and fiscal decentralization offer a shift of several
government functions and responsibilities from central to local government and create a
greater role of the local governments, including provincial, districts (kabupaten) and
municipalities (kota), in several important functions. These new laws have the potential for
making urban planning and development in Indonesia more locally managed (Firman,
2003, 2008).
These fundamental institutional changes in Indonesia following the fall of the New
Order regime also affected spatial planning. Law at the time (24/1992) was considered to
be no longer relevant within the new institutional settings, particularly in light of
decentralization. The Indonesian parliament passed the new Spatial Planning Law
26/2007. In accordance with decentralization, this new law now stipulates explicitly the
authority of provincial governments ( pemerintah propinsi) and of district governments
( pemerintah kabupaten and pemerintah kota) in spatial planning. The provincial and district
governments have a broader authority in spatial planning than previously and can
stipulate new components in their spatial plans.
Spatial Planning Law 26/2007 also contains new provision for the informal sector in
urban spatial plans, indeed, urban spatial plans are now required to include a plan for the
informal sector. However, this law provides neither a definition nor examples of the
informal sector. The Ministry of Public Works has issued guidelines for the urban spatial
plan making process (Permen PU 17/PRT/M/2009) but a definition of the informal sector
is not available in this guideline either.
Another new provision in the Spatial Planning Law 26/2007 is the requirement of at
least 30% of urban areas for either public or private open space, with public open spaces
accounting for at least 20% of urban areas in the plans. Since street vendors use public
open space, this provision is particularly important to the informal sector.
A further new principle in Law 26/2007 is the principle of accountability, corresponding
with the enthusiasm of Indonesian people for a more transparent and accountable system
of government. This is reflected in new sanction provisions for spatial plan violations
including administrative and criminal sanctions. Nine types of administrative sanctions
are stipulated including a written warning, temporary activity termination, temporary
service termination, location closure, permit revocation, cancellation, building removal,
land-use reconversion, and administrative charges. The criminal sanctions in this
law include imprisonment up to 15 years and penalties up to Rupiah (Rp) 5,000,000,000.00
(approximately US$500,000).
Finally, another important feature of the new law is the validation of the importance of
public participation in spatial planning. The new law provides more detailed regulations
than the previous spatial planning law including rights, obligations and the forms of
public participation in spatial planning. Such provisions correspond with the more
participatory system of government after the fall of the New Order regime.
142 Interface

Implementation and Effects of the New System

There are two important ways of looking at the implementation and effects of the new
system of law and government for spatial planning and informality. This section will look
firstly at street vendors in local areas, and then look at the more strategic scale of spatial
planning implementation.
During Suharto’s authoritarian regime period, most city administrations used
repressive measures to evict street vendors from urban parks, sidewalks or other public
spaces. Local public order officers and local police were often used by city administrations
to forcefully evict street vendors from the public spaces where the street vendors
conducted their businesses. Local public order officers often confiscated the belongings of
the street vendor without a clear procedure for the street vendors to get their belongings
back. In most evictions, the local public order officers clashed with the street vendors who
refused to be relocated. Under the authoritarian system of government, city
administrations could easily suppress the resistance of the street vendors.
In the more democratic and accountable system of government, city administrations are
using less repressive measures in dealing with the street vendors. They cannot simply
suppress the opposition from the street vendors due to the issue of human rights. The city
administrations are likely to use more persuasive approaches when they need to relocate
the street vendors.
The prominent cases of persuasive street vendor relocations are in the city of Solo. In
2005, the newly elected mayor, Joko Widodo, relocated 989 street vendors from the elite
urban monument park of Banjarsari to Klitikan traditional market (Tempo, 2008). Mayor
Jokowi, as the mayor is popularly known, persuasively convinced the street vendors of a
plan to restore the monument park of Banjarsari and offered the street vendors a new
place for their activities in Klitikan traditional market. After seven months of negotiations,
the street vendors agreed to relocate their businesses. The city administration waived the
business permits and license fees and only asked the street vendors to pay Rp. 6,000
(US$0.60) per day for the rent. The Solo city administration had calculated that the
payments from the street vendors would pay off the city spending approximately Rp. 9.8
billion (US$ 980,000) for building Klitikan traditional market in eight and a half years. In
the meantime, the monument park of Banjarsari has been restored as a beautiful and
pedestrian friendly monument park (Jakarta Post, 2008).
After the successful relocation of the street vendors from the monument park of
Banjarsari, the Solo city administration replicated the programme to other locations
frequented by street vendors including Manahan stadium, Langen Bogan and Mayor
Sunaryo Street. The Solo city administration has also renovated several traditional
markets including Nusukan, Kembalang, Sidodadi, Gading, and Ngarsapura (Kompas,
2009). The street vendor relocations to the traditional market can also be seen as the
transformation of the street vendors from the informal sector to the formal sector.
The success of Mayor Jokowi’s approach to street vendor relocations has also been
replicated in other Indonesian cities. The shift to a more decentralised system of government
in Indonesia has resulted in local leaders such as Mayor Jokowi having the authority to
manage and empower street vendors as partners of the city administration to carry out city
plans.
Another area of implementation of spatial planning for informality in Indonesia is
through strategic spatial planning and I will review the draft 2030 Jakarta spatial plan
(DKI Jakarta, 2010) which reflects the Spatial Planning Law 26/2007 and includes
provision for the informal sector by stipulating it as a distinctive land-use designation.
 Interface 143

The plan provides for informal sector activities in offices, trade, services and industrial
areas, integrating the informal and formal sectors in the same spaces. The informal sector
areas are designated to promote small-scale enterprises. The provision of the informal
sector was not stipulated in previous Jakarta spatial plans. Each district in Jakarta (Central
Jakarta, West Jakarta, East Jakarta, North Jakarta and South Jakarta) now has several areas
that were designated as informal sector areas in the draft 2030 Jakarta spatial plan.
Neither the Spatial Planning Law26/2007 nor the guideline for urban spatial plan
making process (PermenPU 17/PRT/M/2009) provides the definition of the informal
sector, but the draft 2030 Jakarta spatial plan specifies the activity types of the informal
sectors. The informal sectors in the draft 2030 Jakarta spatial plan include street vendors,
small food home industry and other small-scale industries that are located in the
residential areas and are said to pollute the neighbourhoods.
The street vendors are not groups who have failed to enter the economic system in
urban areas. They are one of the modes in the urban transformation that cannot be
separated from urban economies. They are one component of the urban economy that will
benefit urban development. The provision of the informal sector in the draft 2030 Jakarta
spatial plan is expected to allocate designated urban spaces to street vendors and integrate
them with the formal sectors.
The informal sector should be seen as a logical explanation for the process of urban
transformation that does not emphasize its dichotomy with the formal sectors, but
understands that the informal sector comprises an important part of the economic
structure. Informality is a mode of urbanization that connects various economic activities
and space in urban areas. The understanding of the concept of informality and the full
enforcement of the new spatial planning law are needed to ensure an availability of urban
space for street vendors.
Full enforcement of the new law is still weak in ensuring the availability of urban space
for street vendors. The spatial planning practices during the New Order regime indicate
that the poor law enforcement caused the ineffectiveness of the previous Spatial Planning
Law 24/1992. Regulations were interpreted liberally and restrictions were deemed flexible
such that spatial planning was subservient to the interests of large developers
(Dharmapatni & Firman, 1994). Firman (1997) revealed that land-use planning was
simply ineffective during that time because almost no sanctions were imposed against
plan violations. Spatial plan violations before the Reformasi are mostly associated with the
central government power, particularly with President Suharto’s extraordinary powers
that benefited his family, friends and business partners. In contrast, spatial plan violations
after the Reformasi are mostly associated with local governments using their decentralized
powers and exploiting their natural resources more intensively. After the Reformasi,
Firman (2008) has indicated a tendency of local authorities to behave like “little kings”;
they think they can do anything including violating spatial plans in order to maximize
their respective localities incomes.
Therefore, without strong law enforcement, the Spatial Planning Law 26/2007 will be
unable to transform the spatial planning practice in Indonesia into a more democratic and
accountable one and ensure the availability of urban space for street vendors.

References
Anwar, D.F. (2005) The fall of Suharto: Understanding the politics of the global, in: F.L.K. Wah & J. Ojendal (Eds)
Southeast Asian Responses to Globalization: Restructuring Governance and Deepening Democracy (Singapore, NIAS
Press).
144 Interface

BPS (2009) Sensus Ekonomi 2006: Analisis Ketenagakerjaan [2006 Economic Census: Employment Analysis] (Jakarta,
Biro Pusat Statistik).
Devi, R. (2009) Inilah tips Joko Widodo menata PKL di Kota Solo, [Tips from Joko Widodo for Arranging Street
Vendors in the City of Solo], Kompas, 18 June. Available at http://nasional.kompas.com/read/2009/06/18/
17353368/Inilah.Tips.Joko.Widodo.Menata.PKL.di.Kota.Solo (accessed 1 September 2010).
Dharmapatni, I.A.I. & Firman, T. (1994) The challenges to sustainable development in Jakarta Metropolitan
Region, Habitat International, 18(3), pp. 79–94.
DKI Jakarta (2010) Draft 2030 Jakarta Spatial Plan. Available at http://www.rtrwjakarta2030.com/wp-content/
plugins/downloads-manager/upload/Raperda.pdf (accessed 5 August 2010)
Firman, T. (1997) Land conversion and urban development in the Northern Region of West Java, Indonesia, Urban
Studies, 34(7), pp. 1027–1046.
Firman, T. (2003) Potential impacts of Indonesia’s fiscal decentralization reform on urban and regional
development: Towards a pattern of spatial disparity, Space and Polity, 7(3), pp. 247–271.
Firman, T. (2008) In search of a governance institution model for Jakarta Metropolitan Area (JMA) under
Indonesia’s new decentralization policy: Old problem, new challenges, Public Administration and Development,
28, pp. 1–11.
Jakarta Post (2008) Joko “Jokowi” Widodo: Changing the face of Surakarta., 29 October. Available at http://
www.thejakartapost.com/news/2008/10/29/joko-%E2%80%98jokowi%E2%80%99-widodo-changing-face-
surakarta.html (accessed 1 September 2010).
Jakarta Post (2010) Vendors pay up to Rp. 2m in illegal fees., 30 August. Available at http://www.thejakartapost.
com/news/2010/08/30/vendors-pay-rp-2m-illegal-fees.html (accessed 1 September 2010).
Jensen, R. (2008) Make street space for PKLs, Jakarta Post, 15 November.
Lima, W.K. (2008) Joko Widodo, walikota Surakarta wali kaki lima [Joko Widodo, Mayor of Surakarta mayor of
street vendors], Tempo, 22 December. Available at http://majalah.tempointeraktif.com/id/arsip/2008/12/22/
LU/mbm.20081222.LU129061.id.html (accessed 1 September 2010)
Nomura, K. (2007) Democratisation and environmental non-governmental organizations in Indonesia, Journal of
Contemporary Asia, 37(4), pp. 495–517.
Rice, R.C. (1997) The Indonesian urban informal sector: Characteristics and growth from 1980 to 1990, Journal of
Population, 3(1), pp. 37–65.
Sethuraman, S.V. (1985) The informal sector in Indonesia: Policies and prospects, International Labour Review,
124(6), pp. 719–735.
Yatmo, Y.A. (2008) Street vendors as “out of place” urban elements, Journal of Urban Design, 13(3), pp. 387 –402.

Informal Urbanism in the USA: New

Challenges for Theory and Practice
RYAN DEVLIN
Department of Public Administration, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, USA

In cities across the USA, particularly in low income immigrant communities, informality is
a growing issue. This is not to say that informal modes of urbanization are practices
imported along with immigrants from the global south, but rather, points to the ways in
which the informal emerges under conditions of extreme inequality. Nor does informal
urbanism in the USA occur at the same scale or take the same forms as the street markets
or squatter settlements of the global south. Yet it is present. This is particularly a concern in
immigrant communities with large undocumented populations, where a lack of legal
status means their entire existence in the city, from work to living arrangements and social
life, takes place “off the books”. Unlicensed street vendors ply their trade in low-income
Correspondence Address: Ryan Devlin, Department of Public Administration, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, 445
West 59th Street, Room 3521, New York, NY 10019
 Interface 145

neighborhoods. Neglected parks are transformed into community gathering spaces, often
against park rules or food services regulations. People double or triple up in small
apartments, or illegally subdivide units in order to meet housing needs, in violation of
housing safety and fire codes. These activities, I contend, are similar in nature, if not in
form or scale, to informal urban practices in the global south. They are instances of the
urban poor, under conditions of extreme inequality, producing the urban in ways that
help them survive day-to-day in the city, even if these survival strategies violate local laws
regulating urban space.
Unfortunately, the theory and practice of planning in the USA has not responded
effectively to this increasingly common set of issues. Part of the reason for this deficit is the
fact that planners in the USA lack the conceptual and practical tools with which to deal
with the issue in effective ways that forefront the needs of low-income immigrant groups.
On a practical level there is often very little flexibility available to planners to deal with
problems of informality. The options are usually either to turn a blind eye to the practices
and hope for the best or to roll out strict enforcement. There are rarely provisions in laws
and rules that allow for contextual flexibility and incremental upgrading, leaving planners
and urban administrators with few options.
On a conceptual level there are two major deficits. The first is a failure to view the
informal as a mode of urbanization made necessary by increasing inequality and
neoliberal regimes of urban governance either unwilling or unable to address basic
employment, housing, and other needs of its poorest residents (Al Sayyad, 2004). Rather,
cases of informal urbanism are usually viewed as discrete problems. They are treated
narrowly as lapses of enforcement or as the product of cultural differences of new
immigrants unadjusted to spatial norms of the global north. This last point is related to a
second deficit: that even when planners and urban administrators try to deal with issues
of informality in progressive or sensitive ways, informal practice is often seen as a product
of culture and the focus revolves around multiculturalist notions of respecting diversity,
rather than the structural inequalities that led to practices in the first place.
There is a growing need for US planners and urban administrators to think about
informality in a broader sense. I argue that planners in the USA have much to gain from
turning towards theories and concepts of informal urbanism produced in the context of
the global south, for if, as it has been shown, informality is primarily a product of
inequality and state retrenchment rather one of underdevelopment or cultural difference
(Castells & Portes, 1989), then one would expect that as inequality in US cities grows,
many problems once thought endemic only to the global south will continue to emerge in
urban environments of the north. As Yiftachel argues,
new concepts [developed in the context of the “south-east”] may not only be
relevant to their own regional settings, but may also become a source of
“reverse flows” of theoretical knowledge, as north-western cities increasingly
face “south-eastern” phenomena such as urban informality, “deep” identities,
open urban conflicts, and mass poverty. (2006, p. 216)
The US planning toolkit is bare when it comes to tackling these issues. In what remains
of this paper, I will address in more detail some of the gaps in planning theory when it
comes to addressing issues such as informality by examining both classic planning
approaches and more participatory multiculturalist approaches. I will then present a case
study which reveals in practice many of these gaps, and finally, suggest a way forward.
146 Interface

Classic/Modernist Approach
City planning is a professional practice charged with shaping the urban environment,
primarily through enacting municipal laws and regulations to restrict private activity in
order to achieve broad public benefit (Fulton, 2005). Planning activity is relatively
centralized in the hands of specialized professionals, who utilize a combination of public
input and technical expertise to shape urban space. By its very nature, informality seems
in many ways to be irreconcilable with mainstream planning theory. It is a form of
urbanism that, though not always completely spontaneous and unplanned, nevertheless
occurs from the ground up, outside of laws regulating space.
It has been argued that the modernist underpinnings of the rational planning approach
hinder the capacity of planners working under this framework to think creatively about
issues such as informality. Traditional planning seeks to mitigate differences and
irrationalities in the urban environment, and as Sandercock observes, “diverse cities and
regions are a challenge to planning systems, policies and practices...[and consequently]
difference comes to be seen as a problem” (2000, 277). Additionally, the modernist framework
of rational planning has been critiqued for failing to consider the “ethnographic present”, the
heterogeneity of lived experience (Holston, 1999). Rather, modernist planning’s “notion of
alternative futures is based on absent causes and its methods rely on a theory of total
decontextualization” (Holston, 1999, p. 158 ). Classic planning approaches, due largely to
their modernist underpinnings, cannot recognize informal space claims as valid adaptations
of low-income immigrants to harsh socio-economic conditions. Informality is simply
conceptualized as rule breaking, with only a limited number of possible resolutions—either
better enforcement of rules or the enactment of new rules to bring informal actors into
compliance. There is very little room for creativity under this framework.

The Multicultural Turn in Planning Theory

There are, of course, serious efforts in planning theory of the global north to move beyond
modernist notions of planning and attempt to reconcile planning with developments in
postmodernism, post-colonialism, and gender studies among others (Sandercock, 1998).
The multicultural turn in planning theory calls on planners to be culturally inclusive, to
“positively and equitably respond to cultural diversity” (Thompson, 2003, p. 276).
Planners have a pivotal role in the multicultural city, they must embrace difference and
allow “participants to embody their ethno-cultural traditions and values even as they
participate in the public sphere as equal democratic citizens” (Burayidi, 2005, p. 261).
Planners should encourage discussion of cultural differences and help to foster respect for
difference and inter-cultural understanding (Baum, 2000). As in the case with
communicative planning, much responsibility falls upon the planner to shepherd citizens
through an inclusive participatory planning process. Also, like communicative planning,
the multiculturalist school places process at the centre of analysis, implicitly assuming that
good process, in this case, a culturally inclusive process, will ultimately lead to just results.
Upon first glance, the literature on multiculturalism seems to provide planners with
intellectual and practical tools to address issues of informality in contemporary cities.
Much like the modernist approach, though, informality becomes a condition inscribed
upon the actor his/herself, but here, instead of being a backwards cultural practice in need
of elimination through better regulations, it becomes a cultural expression which should
be understood, embraced, even celebrated. For instance, numerous urbanists somewhat
romantically point to the supposed reenergizing of public space brought to the cities by
Latino immigrants (Banerjee, 2001), even for serving as “important constituencies for the
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preservation of our urban commons” (Davis, 2000, p. 65). Putting aside the question of
whether there is something endemic to Latino culture which propels social life into the
streets, or whether this is more a product of economic need and lack of private space,
praise and admiration alone does not address the fact that much of these public practices
such as vending unfold outside laws and rules regulating public space, and that, if we
truly value them, changes must come at the level of legal structures.
The multiculturalist planning approach tends to forefront the politics of individual and
group identity at the expense of a rigorous structural analysis of economic conditions and
class conflict. This is a common critique of postmodern theory from whence
multiculturalist planning approach draws its inspiration (Harvey, 1990). It is no surprise
then, that this school would locate the condition of informality at the level of the
individual or social group. And it is precisely this tendency which leads planners to
assume that conflicts over informality are primarily the product of cultural
misunderstanding or of culturally insensitive planning practice.
The multiculturalist approach obscures differences in political power and economic
resources which underlie the issue of informality. For instance, in many immigrant
neighborhoods, merchants who complain about informal street vending are of the same
ethnicity as the vendors themselves. Informality in this context has little to do with cultural
misunderstanding, and much more to do with conflicting economic interests. No matter how
laudable a social goal, respect for diversity and fostering of multicultural understanding
alone cannot resolve conflicts which arise primarily from structural factors endemic to the
contemporary neoliberal city. Nor does a focus on planning process and cultural
understanding address the fact that, without serious reconsiderations at the level of
legislation and rule-making about how space is regulated and how rules are enforced, calls
for multicultural understanding remain simple rhetoric, rather than a real pathway for
resolving issues of informality. In what follows, I will present a case of urban administrators
struggling to deal with informal urbanism in Brooklyn, New York, and demonstrate the ways
in which their inability to view the informal as an alternative urbanism led to uneven
solutions and an unnecessarily stressful and costly process of upgrading and formalization.

The Case of Brooklyn’s Red Hook Park

Sitting on a short peninsula in northwestern Brooklyn, Red Hook is one of New York
City’s more isolated neighborhoods. In its heyday it was a major shipping hub; its
waterfront dotted by cranes, grain elevators and warehouses, with the modest row houses
for working class residents employed at the port lining the streets further inland. Today,
Red Hook is a neighborhood in transition, with large retailers such as Ikea replacing
abandoned warehouses along the waterfront and a trickle of gentrification inching up the
neighborhood’s main commercial streets. Yet the area is still dominated by abandoned
industrial and shipping facilities, run-down row houses, salvage yards, trash transfer
facilities and other hallmarks of industrial urban decline.
Red Hook Park shines amid the squalor. It consists of 52 acres of well-kept soccer and
baseball fields spreading out from under the shadow of a massive abandoned grain
elevator. On the weekends, the fields are used by numerous men’s soccer and baseball
leagues, with team members hailing mostly from Latin America. For nearly as long as the
leagues have been playing in the park, people have been preparing and selling food to
players and spectators. This practice started out on a relatively small scale in the 1970s. By
the mid 2000s, it had evolved into a veritable outdoor festival of Latino cuisine. Vendors
selling food from Mexico, El Salvador, Chile, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic
148 Interface

cooked on-site under large blue tents. Picnic tables were set up and ranchera and cumbia
music blared from stereo speakers. Sometime after 2000, the demographics of the crowd at
the ballfields started to shift noticeably. Latino families still dominated, but they were
being joined by an increasing number of non-Latino patrons—mostly young, mostly white
residents traveling to the ballfields from all corners of the city.
By 2005, the Red Hook ballfields were a culinary destination, hailed in food blogs and
newspaper reviews across the city. New Yorkers searching desperately for “authenticity”
in a quickly gentrifying city found what they were looking for in Red Hook Park. For
years, officials at the Parks Department and Department of Health (which regulates food
safety issues) were aware of the vendors, but did little to address the issue. This approach
was tenable as long as the vendors were relatively unknown to the New York mainstream.
But once the New York Times began writing reviews of the vendor market and the vendors
started appearing on nationally televised cable television food shows, the hands of the two
city agencies responsible for regulating park activity were forced.
In the summer of 2007 the Parks Department and the Department of Health (DOH)
mobilized against the Red Hook vendors, suddenly declaring the entire thriving operation
illegal and a threat to the health and safety of New York’s citizens. The Parks Department
claimed vendors were operating in violation of permitting laws for park concessions.
Because they were selling food in a park, they would need to apply for a concessions
permit. In addition to the permit issue, the city’s Department of Health instituted a crack
down on the vendors’ food preparation practices. In August of 2007 health inspectors
descended on the informal marketplace. City Council member Sara Gonzales, an advocate
of the vendors, learned of the planned inspection in advance and was present to monitor
DOH officials during inspections. Thanks largely to the presence of sympathetic local
politicians and press, DOH officials issued “suggestions for change” rather than citations
or orders to shut down. Vendors would have two weeks to address a few “critical”
outstanding issues but DOH promised that as long as minimal compliance was met, the
vendors would be allowed to remain in the park until at least the end of the summer.
In order to resolve the permit issue, the Parks Department also demonstrated initial
flexibility in their approach. Instead of putting the permit to run park concessions up for a
competitive bid where the permit went to the highest bidder, they used a process which
utilized various other criteria in addition to the dollar amount of the bid to evaluate
proposals. The criteria used to judge proposals were favorable to the Red Hook vendors,
and vendors were basically assured they would get approval. In the end, they were the
only bidders, and won a six year Parks Department permit to run concessions in the park.
The initial response by the two agencies was a good example using flexibility and
incremental compliance to approach issues of informality. The problem here was that this
flexibility was not built into the law, leaving DOH for instance, to simply “bend the rules”
when issuing suggestions for change rather than citations. The unofficial policy of
minimum compliance was not sustainable beyond the final few months of the summer
2007 season. Though it was the politically popular thing to do, one could also raise
questions about the fairness of the Parks Department’s approach to issuing the permit.
Things may have become particularly complicated if there had been another competitive
bid for the site. Both practices were more of quick fixes than long term strategies for
dealing with informality. Additionally, the Red Hook case is exceptional in the sense that
the vendors had a tremendous amount of support from the public and local politicians.
High profile politicians such as Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz and US
Senator Charles Schumer, neither of whom had direct jurisdiction over the issue,
nevertheless threw their public support behind the vendors and their cause. Most cases of
 Interface 149

informal urban practice are not under such heavy scrutiny and there is much less incentive
for city agencies to act creatively and in a manner sensitive to the needs of informal actors.
Ultimately vendors were allowed to stay in the vicinity of the park, but faced major
changes due to the Department of Health insisting on full compliance for the 2008 summer
season. Vendors were forced out of the actual park space and into DOH approved mobile
food vending trucks which would line the perimeter of the park. This move not only
altered the character of the operation, it put a heavy financial burden on vendors, many of
whom went into debt to purchase trucks. The insistence on mobile food trucks delayed the
vendors’ opening for nearly the entire summer of 2008, meaning months of lost revenue.
The vendors returned to the sidewalks surrounding the park in the summer of 2009, and as
of the summer of 2010, the vendors are still operating at the park. Most view the process of
formalization a success, including some of the vendors themselves. Yet, the way
formalization took place, through a mix of temporary rule bending and political pressure,
does not provide a replicable model for addressing informality more broadly. Despite the fact
that the vendors were able to remain in the park, the Red Hook case brings up two key flaws
related to the tendency in the USA to treat informality as a narrow problem of legal
compliance or as cultural artifact of immigration. First, from the beginning, much of the
vendors’ own claim to space, and the supporting voices of their advocates, relied on a
rhetorical connection between Latino identity and the practice of selling and eating food in
public space. This was especially true for their non-Latino supporters, who were drawn to the
park precisely because the vendors exuded such a feel of cultural authenticity. Much of
the advocacy focused on portraying the vendors as cultural treasures, particularly in the
sense of sharing culture through food. The economic need of the vendors remained in the
background, leading to a situation where the retention of vendors and their food was deemed
by many the sole criterion for a successful process. But as Roy argues, formalization can be a
moment when inequalities are deepened, and “secure rights can be more insecure than
informal claims” (2005, p. 154). This is certainly true in the Red Hook case, where inflexible
demands of DOH that vendors sell from trucks made vendors more vulnerable economically,
thanks to the debt burden of the trucks and the uncertain viability of the new set-up.
This leads to the second point. In part because of the way laws were written in a “one
size fits all” manner, administrators within the Parks Department and the Department of
Health were forced to focus primarily on legal compliance, rather than the economic or
social needs of vendors and park-goers. In fact, during interviews conducted for this
study, officials within one of the city agencies involved in this conflict expressed
frustration with the inflexibility of options available to them and the liability they would
face if they did get creative with how rules were enforced. This points to the need for a
more flexible legal regime which allows for gradual upgrading of spatial practice and
takes into account the economic and social inequalities that make informal urbanism a
necessary strategy of the poor in cities of the global north.
In the US context this shift would of course bring up difficult questions related to
equal treatment under the law. One could argue that allowing legal flexibility
establishes two analogous systems of health and safety regulations: one for mainstream
society and one for the poor; though one could also argue that this is already
happening, only in an unofficial way. The Red Hook case provides a perfect example of
this: for thirty years their practice was ignored by regulators, only when their clientele
shifted to non-minorities and non-immigrants did the machinery of regulation kick into
place. Nevertheless, institutionalizing different standards for different groups presents
important questions which need to be wrestled with seriously. Different treatment
can obviously produce and maintain inequality, yet equal treatment and standards,
150 Interface

when they ignore social and economic realities on the ground, can deepen inequality as
well (Holston, 1999). As Holston argues, fair inclusion into society can be defined, “on
the basis of rights to different treatment with equal opportunity” (1999, p. 9).
Increasing inequality in US cities, coupled with large populations of undocumented
people with few formal rights means that planners and urban administrators are faced
with new problems that raise difficult questions, some of which cut to the core values of
US society. Rather than continuing to ignore these issues and questions, planners and
urban administrators must confront them head on if they hope to develop creative,
empathetic and just solutions to problems presented by informality.

References
Al Sayyad, N. (2004) Urban Informality as a “New” Way of Life, in: A. Roy & N. Al Sayyad (Eds) Urban Informality:
Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America and South Asia (Lanham, MD, Lexington Books).
Banerjee, T. (2001) The future of public space: Beyond invented streets and reinvented places, Journal of the
American Planning Association, 67(1), pp. 9–24.
Baum, H. (2000) Culture matters, but it shouldn’t matter too much, in: M. Burayidi (Ed.) Urban Planning in a
Multicultural Society (Westport, CT, Praeger).
Burayidi, M.A. (2005) The multicultural city and planner’s enigma, Planning Theory & Practice, 4(3), pp. 259– 273.
Castells, M. & Portes, A. (1989) The world underneath: The origins, dynamics, and effects of the informal
economy, in: A. Portes, M. Castells & L. Benton (Eds) The Informal Economy: Studies in Advanced and Less
Developed Countries (Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press).
Davis, M. (2000) Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US City (London, Verso).
Fulton, W. (2005) A Guide to California Planning, third edition (Point Arena, CA, Solano Press Books).
Harvey, D. (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Social Change (Malden, MA,
Blackwell).
Holston, J. (1999) Spaces of Insurgent Citizenship, in: J. Holston (Ed.) Cities and Citizenship (Durham, NC, Duke
University Press).
Roy, A. (2005) Urban informality: Towards an epistemology of planning, Journal of the American Planning
Association, 71(2), pp. 147–158.
Sandercock, L. (1998) Towards Cosmopolis: Planning for Multicultural Cities (Chichester, Wiley).
Sandercock, L. (2000) When strangers become neighbours: Managing cities of difference, Planning Theory &
Practice, 1(1), pp. 13–30.
Thompson, S. (2003) Planning and multiculturalism: A reflection on Australian local practice, Planning Theory &
Practice, 4(3), pp. 275–293.
Yiftachel, O. (2006) Re-engaging planning theory? Towards “south-eastern” perspectives, Planning Theory, 5(3),
pp. 211 –222.

Engaging with Citizenship and Urban

Struggle Through an Informality Lens
VANESSA WATSON
School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics, African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, South Africa

Exploring planning issues across very different contexts, particularly in places where they
are only beginning to emerge as major planning concerns, is a worthwhile effort for two
reasons. The first is the potential to share insights and ideas across different economic and
Correspondence Address: Vanessa Watson, School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics and the African Centre for Cities,
University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, 7700, South Africa. Email: Vanessa.Watson@uct.ac.za
 Interface 151

socio-political regions, and in this case to draw on extensive and long-term work on
informality in the global south to shed light on more recently discovered informality
in cities of the global north. What this allows us to do, as Porter explains in the opening
essay, is to question taken-for-granted assumptions which are so often generalised from
liberal democratic countries to all others. For example, on matters such as relationships to
land and concepts of property ownership, both Porter’s and Briggs’ papers critique the
highly influential “De Soto thesis” which assumes that in all parts of the world poor
families will be willing and able to trade current use value of land for market value, with
all the risks and social conflicts which this brings with it. There is now extensive research
in the global south (and Briggs’ study adds to this) to show that this assumption rarely
holds. Unfortunately, as the Lombard and Huxley paper points out, this research did not
come to the attention of the authors of the 2009 UN Economic Commission for Europe
Report on informality in the European region. That report takes a legalistic and
formalizing approach to dealing with the informal sector and leans strongly on the De
Soto thesis.
The second reason (drawing on the work of Connell, 2007) is that working
comparatively at a world scale allows us to uncover the global material and political
relationships which continue to structure—in this post-colonial period—flows of trade,
resources, policy positions and mental constructs. An investigation (Horn, 2009) into the
effects of the 2008 global financial crisis on informal workers in ten countries in the global
south shows just how dramatic the impact has been on the incomes of waste pickers,
home-based workers and street vendors. This study challenges previous misconceptions
that informal workers were in some way cushioned from crises which affect the formal
economic sector, and highlights the importance of understanding informality within a
context of world-wide processes.
But beyond this, planning perspectives from one part of the globe have shaped a
dominant and persistent planning rationality which in turn sets standards of “normality”
regarding “proper” living environments in clean, orderly, and “modern” cities. The
Rukmana paper, which suggests that street vendors in Indonesia engage in unregulated,
disordered and uncontrolled activities which cause “urban blight”, is a good example of
such imperial influences on planners’ perceptions. This European and modernist concept
of desirable urban environments is, however, directly at odds with the reality of socio-
spatial dynamics and practices in cities in the global south, but increasingly everywhere.
These practices, which find expression in informality, in “dis-orderliness”, and in
“violations” of rules and regulations, come about as people have to step outside of the law
in order to survive and secure shelter and income.
In a different vein, the celebration of cultural difference in multicultural planning ideas
has been appropriated into urban policy to support the characterisation of informality as
traditional and therefore needing to be preserved as urban cultural heritage. This has also
been viewed as commodification of urban culture and heritage, and styled as part of the
neo-liberal urban project (Kipfer & Keil, 2002). The Devlin paper shows how, in New York
City, informal food sellers at Red Hook Park were tolerated as long as they could be
considered a local expression of Latino cuisine but were declared illegal and in need of
formalising once they became sufficiently popular to be considered part of the mainstream
economy. The same characterization of informality appears to have been behind the
relocation of traders from a central location to the Klitikan traditional market in Solo,
Indonesia, as Rukmana’s paper describes). Comparing similar processes across very
different contexts draws attention to international flows of people and ideas as well as the
152 Interface

range of exclusionary measures which governments use to repress and contain

informality.
Casting informality as a mode of urbanisation (as Porter does in the opening essay) is
a useful way of framing informality, but the Kıyak and Islam paper points to another,
more disturbing, dimension to this: state response to informality as an expression of
ethno-racial domination. The use of urban renewal to destroy a Romany neighbourhood in
Istanbul resonates with Yiftachel’s (2009, p. 88) concept of “grey spaces”: growing urban
informality positioned between the “whiteness” of legality/approval/safety, and the
“blackness” of eviction/destruction/death. Yiftachel (2009) suggests that these spaces in
contemporary cities reflect the emergence of new types of colonial relations, managed by
urban regimes and facilitated by the tools and technologies of planning. Manifesting in
cities in both the global north and south, grey spaces are often occupied by migrant or
minority groups existing partially outside the gaze of the state.
Other recent work on theorising informality also situates it within broader political
processes, and adds to a growing body of ideas which argue that planning needs to find a
way to function meaningfully in circumstances of perpetual and irresolvable conflict. Roy
(2009) draws attention to the need to see informality and insurgency as linked processes.
The blurred boundary, in most cities, between the legal and illegal, the acceptable and the
unacceptable, the planned and the unplanned, frequently propels those living or working
informally into direct conflict with the state and/or formal market, giving rise to the
mobilisation of resistance and hence conflict. She draws attention to the work of James
Holston (2009) who argues that a fundamental characteristic of new democratizations in
the global south is the unequal nature of citizenship and access to its supposed benefits.
This in turn gives rise to new inequalities which are challenged through acts of extreme
and usually organised, urban-based violence. Holston (2009) argues that struggles around
labour issues (usually the basis for societal conflict in the global north) have been replaced
in the global south by struggles around access to urban land and housing. The difficulty of
securing these, experienced by the vast majority of urban poor, not only locates much of
what they do as inevitably illegal (or informal) but also precludes them from accessing a
range of other urban rights which are assumed to be part and parcel of citizenship.
By suggesting that resistance to categorisations of illegality is now the contemporary
mode of mobilisation for the urban poor, Holston puts the concept of informality at centre
stage in the debates on citizenship and urban struggles, and opens up exciting new areas
for research and action in this field. Conventional state responses to informality as
attempts either to remove or marginalise informal actors or to formalise them (as reflected
in most of the papers in this Interface), are interpreted here as an aspect of much broader
political struggle around issues of rights and democracy. Rather than dismissing planning
as inevitably an instrument of land-use control, complicit in the repression of those
fighting for urban rights, Holston urges planners and urban theorists to
detect new sites of creativity in the vastness of the contemporary metropolis
[and to]...bring to the surface the possibilities for alternative futures among the
many conditions that exist as potentials in the city. (Holston, 2009, p. 28)

References
Connell, R. (2007) Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science (Sydney, Allen & Unwin).
Holston, J. (2009) Dangerous spaces of citizenship: Gang talk, rights talk, and the rule of law in Brazil, Planning
Theory, 8(1), pp. 12– 31.
 Interface 153

Horn, Z. (2009) No cushion to fall back on: The global economic crisis and informal workers, Inclusive Cities Study,
Available at www.inclusivecities.org (accessed 6 March 2011)
Kipfer, S. & Keil, R. (2002) Toronto Inc? Planning the competitive city in the new Toronto, Antipode, 34(3),
pp. 227–264.
Roy, A. (2009) Strangely familiar: Planning and the worlds of insurgency and informality, Planning Theory, 8(1),
pp. 7–11.
Yiftachel, O. (2009) Theoretical notes on “gray cities”: The coming of urban apartheid, Planning Theory, 8(1),
pp. 88–100.

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