657286

research-article2016
CSI0010.1177/0011392116657286Current SociologyBoudreau and Davis

Introduction CS

Current Sociology Monograph

Introduction: A processual
2017, Vol. 65(2) 151­–166
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0011392116657286
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Julie-Anne Boudreau
Institut national de la recherche scientifique, Canada

Diane E Davis
Harvard University Graduate School of Design, USA

Abstract
This introduction briefly reviews the intertwinement of ‘informality’ and
‘modernization’ and their implications for the theory and practice of the city. The
editors identify the importance of recognizing uneven processes of informalization,
emphasizing the need to compare the quality of state–citizen–market relations
more than the quantity of ‘informality.’ In the process they ask whether and
how informal and formal practices can help to rethink modern concepts such as
citizenship, universal infrastructural access, organized resistance, and the state itself.
One way to do so is to reposition these concepts as relational processes involving
various actors, spaces, and temporalities rather than as essentialized objects. Such
epistemological moves will shed light on the extent to which basic social needs
such as the distribution of justice, the production of authority, and the regulation of
class relations are not the sole terrain of the state, but negotiated relationally. The
article concludes by proposing three epistemological devices – iterative comparison,
ambiguous categories, and the use of hermeneutics – that can help scholars avoid the
biases associated with essentialized categories.

Keywords
Comparison, Global North and South, informality, modernization

Corresponding author:
Julie-Anne Boudreau, Institut national de la recherche scientifique, 385, rue Sherbrooke Est, Montréal,
Québec, H2X 1E3, Canada.
Email: Julie-anne.boudreau@ucs.inrs.ca
152 Current Sociology Monograph 1 65(2)

Introduction
After decades of global economic restructuring, in which the shift from manufacturing to
services has produced unprecedented levels of inequality affecting employment, public
services, and livelihood in cities in the Global North, these locales are seeing an expan-
sion of informal work as a means of coping with declining formal sector employment,
and in response to the downsizing of the welfare state that in prior decades provided a
safety net to mitigate economic precariousness. Because informality has long been asso-
ciated with the poorer economies of the Global South, these transformations are generat-
ing new questions about the extent of convergence across cities of the globe. To the
extent that informality has long been considered an attribute of ‘backward’ economies
that have not yet adopted the property rights regimes and institutional capacities to pro-
vide for and regulate citizens and their activities, its spread to cities of the Global North
allows not just a questioning of the concept of modernization but also the assumed loca-
tions and forms in which it manifests. Most importantly, these transformations call for a
new empirical agenda focused on informalization and its implications for the state’s
capacities to establish social, spatial, political, and economic order at the scale of the city.
This monograph issue of Current Sociology examines global patterns of informality and
their impact on the city as a privileged site from which larger societal orders emanate and
through which new modernizing processes and conflicts over them now manifest.

Modernization and informality

Historically, the construction of the modern state combined with the requisites of capi-
talist development to give life to multiple efforts to order complex social and economic
practices, often with the aim of better controlling societies and enabling more robust
markets. This project was unevenly accomplished in various countries of the North and
South through the development of instruments of regulation such as maps, censuses,
and a legal system of land property. These instruments were usually imposed by state
authorities, allowing them to simplify complex realities by creating standard legibility.
As Scott (1998) demonstrates in his North–South comparative study of modernization,
the modern state developed two main mechanisms through which order and control
were formalized: the simplification of complex realities through legible instruments
(maps, statistical categories, etc.) and their miniaturization (i.e., the organization of
territories into smaller manageable units within which only relevant variables were
considered).
It is important however to add a third mechanism: dichotomization, that is, the discur-
sive and ideological imperative to separate the formal and the informal, the public and
the private, the traditional and the modern, or even the advanced and the backward.
Where all three formalization processes occurred successfully, the resulting modern state
was better able to centralize legitimate authority at the expense of other forms of political
authority (such as traditional chiefdom, urban guilds, or the like). As such, actions of
state actors were informed by the assumption that development occurred through the
conquest and reshaping of ‘untamed’ spaces and practices through social and spatial
integration and in the service of formalization.
Boudreau and Davis 153

On the national scale, this entailed a ‘colonization’ of national space through major
infrastructural projects like roads, water, and electricity, with the aim of integrating peo-
ple, places, and natural resources into a larger project of employment and economic
expansion. At the level of the city, architect-planners’ programmatic concerns with
rationalizing social and territorial control were manifest in the development of urban
plans with a strict spatial and social order, whose compliance was in turn regulated by the
state, whether local or national. Different parts of the city were not only preserved for
different social and economic functions and populations, there was little room for any
‘pre-modern’ mixing of land uses or informal activities in those areas designated as sites
for a modern economic and political order. As was argued for society itself (Parsons,
1937), strict differentiation of function and standardization of norms as well as their
legitimate regulation by the authorities became the hallmark of the modern city (often
leading to the coexistence of a ‘formal’ and an ‘informal city’ in contiguous metropolitan
space), while citizens themselves internalized the ethos and social expectations associ-
ated with modernity and the state’s monopoly of the institutions of coercion and the
imposition of order.
The ambitious endeavor of formalization finds its roots and justification in the
Enlightenment’s desire for regularity as well as a linear conception of history framed by
the ideas of progress and development. It was based on the presupposition that past
actions condition the calculated future, thus leaving little room for considering the con-
tingencies of present conditions. Although most clearly seen in the Global North where
modern social sciences’ adoption of rationality as the epistemological foundation of
knowledge reinforced such views and the political project of modernism more generally
(Foucault, 1980), the modernist ethos as a way of organizing society also extended its
reach in territorial scale. With the global dominance of the North, a similar ontology was
imposed on the Global South through various forms of colonialism and imperialism,
leading to uneven patterns of capitalist development (Amin, 1976, 1994).
To be sure, in the spirit of activist political economy coming from critics of capital-
ism, this ethos did not evolve without challenge. Many such responses first emerged on
the scene in the 1970s, as the world economic system was going through important
transformations, as countries of the Global South were winning independence, and as
new social claims were emerging on the streets of cities around the world (feminism,
youth movements, environmentalism). These events helped lead to scholarly and politi-
cal interrogation of these so-called modernizing processes, with much of the focus on the
economic dimensions of the extension of modernity in global space, and how it produced
uneven economic development, economic dependency, or unequal core–periphery rela-
tions that reinforced the hegemony of the Global North over the South.
Scholars argued that Northern hegemony – and the attendant theorization of the mod-
ernizing ethos of dominance through a political economy lens – was significant not just
because it created dependency of the South on the North or reinforced global inequali-
ties, but because it led to a territorial subdivision of functions and connections within
Southern countries themselves, reproducing uneven development on a variety of scales
smaller than the nation-state. Concern with the negative effects of this phenomenon was
reflected in the embrace of such notions as internal colonialism (Walton, 1975), urban
core and periphery (Timberlake, 1985), and (urban) citizen vs. (rural) subject (Mamdani,
154 Current Sociology Monograph 1 65(2)

1996), concepts which captured the ways that the imposition of the North’s modernist
projects produced a new array of spatial, political, governance, and citizenship distinc-
tions within countries of the South, primarily between cities and countryside, as well as
within cities themselves between populations more socially and spatially linked to the
elite economic and political projects of colonial domination and ‘indigenous’ residents
who migrated from a countryside ravaged by colonial extraction.

From static condition to ongoing process

Our objective in this monograph issue is to move beyond these stark distinctions between
the ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ world, and to reflect on the limitations associated with
dichotomous framings of the formal and informal, the traditional and the modern, and
their related assumptions about the nature of governance, citizenship, and urban form.
Building on Jennifer Robinson’s notion of the ordinary city (2006), as well as Ananya
Roy’s more recent efforts to rethink North and South (Roy and Crane, 2015), we are
more interested in what these activities, concepts, and locations share in common.
In order to achieve these aims, we focus on processes and mechanisms of informaliza-
tion, as well as formalization and even re-informalization, rather than on formality or
informality as objects (i.e., an economic sector, a form of human settlement, a set of
political habits). That is, we seek to explore the nature and quality, more than the mere
existence and quantity, of ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ practices. We are particularly inter-
ested in exploring whether cities with more spatially, economically, and politically
vibrant residues of informality are managing the transitional moment brought by intensi-
fying urbanization and global economic crisis differently than those more ‘modern’ loca-
tions where formal and highly regulated political, economic, and spatial practices have
been more fully absorbed into city life.
As a conceptual starting point for advancing and thinking through these aims, we use
the notion of uneven formalization rather than uneven capitalist development (or uneven
modernization), primarily because there is relative consensus about what constitutes
capitalist development (and modernization) as well as the fact that it has been identified
as operating both globally and unequally. In contrast, the discourses and practices of
informality remain shrouded in misperception and normative ambiguity, and, with a few
exceptions (see Hernandez et al., 2009; Mukhija and Loukaitou-Sideris, 2014; Wacquant,
2008; Williams and Schneider, 2016), are generally assumed to be properties of cities of
the Global South. By asking questions about the nature, extent and spread of informality
within and between cities of the Global North and South, and by analyzing such develop-
ments as ongoing and incomplete, we both acknowledge and move beyond the develop-
mental biases in conceptualization even as we are better able to theoretically accommodate
a phenomenon (informality) that may have intensified everywhere as a consequence of
recent economic transformations – whether in the North, as it faces deindustrialization
and economic crisis, or in the South, where such problems have a much longer history.
Likewise, recent developments require an understanding of the shifting and uneven
temporalities of informality. For example, although the tendencies towards standard for-
malization were particularly strong in the industrialized countries during the Fordist age
(labor laws, tax compliance, respect for the rule of law), this has changed more recently
Boudreau and Davis 155

with the profound changes brought by accelerating globalization and urbanization pro-
cesses. In less industrialized countries, the trends have been historically different and
temporally connected in the first phase to urbanization without industrialization (Arrighi,
2010 [1994]). As such, a focus on processes of formalization and informalization as they
unfold in space and time will allow scholars to shed the modernist trappings associated
with standard methods of classification and observation, by providing an opportunity to
determine the conditions under which the established rules and regulations of capitalist
development and modernization (i.e., markets, laws, property rights, democratic proce-
dures) are in fact violated or transgressed in everyday practice even when they are uni-
versally embraced or enshrined in the institutions of modern states and societies.
Such developments require us to question whether informality – understood here
through the lens of flexibility, negotiation, or situational spontaneity that push back
against established state regulations and the constraints of the law – is more widespread
than is commonly assumed. It also suggests that we ask what political requisites or tele-
ological presuppositions might account for the failures to ‘see’ informality and its par-
tial or uneven spread in space and time; and to consider whether the pursuit of such
questions can shed new light on contemporary processes of state restructuring, citizen–
state relationships, and larger patterns of social and economic development more gener-
ally defined.
Granted, there already is a very large literature on informality, focused primarily on
informal firms and work (Hart, 1973; Moser, 1978; Portes et al., 1989) in which the
assumption is that such activities emerge because cities of the Global South face difficul-
ties in ‘catching up’ with the North by providing work or establishing universal welfare
systems that guarantee health and education. Similarly, many studies of informal settle-
ments (‘slums’) have focused on the necessity to formalize property titles and to modern-
ize the state’s tools for contract enforcement in countries of the Global South (De Soto,
1989). As such, despite the fact that there remains hearty and vibrant debate over what
exactly constitutes the boundary between the formal and the informal as well as their
relationships to each other, the presence and significance of informality in cities of the
Global South is not under debate even if it is acknowledged that it is more visible in some
cities than others.
What is not nearly as well explored, however, are the shifting temporal, spatial, and
sectoral contours of informalization, whether within a single national setting, or within
and between locations in the Global North and South. The aim of this monograph is to
explore such patterns with an eye to breaking down assumptions about when and where
informality materializes. In so doing, we build on recent research that has explored a
wider range of social and political relations so as to expand the definitional boundaries
of the concept of informality beyond the purely economic (Auyero, 2007; Davis, 2012),
and in ways that profoundly impact our understanding of how city spaces are used,
developed, and reshaped (Simone, 2010).
The collection begins with a section titled ‘Cracks in the modernization process’
which showcases articles that raise questions about the relationship between moderniza-
tion and informality in contexts as diverse as the Netherlands, Mexico, Spain, and
Pakistan. This is followed by a second section that delves more explicitly into the rela-
tions between formalization and informalization in Johannesburg, Delhi, East Jerusalem,
156 Current Sociology Monograph 1 65(2)

and Sao Paulo, examining the context-specific legal, social, economic, and political
mechanisms that link these processes together in each setting. The third section and con-
clusion offer theoretical and epistemological reflections on how we might effectively
think beyond dichotomization through novel forms of comparison, a focus on circula-
tion, and an embrace of ambiguity.

Cracks in the modernization process

In this first section, we explore the ways that informality challenges, undermines,
engages, or transforms the basic modernizing principles of society. Fundamental organ-
izing structures and processes commonly associated with modernity, such as citizenship,
public services and infrastructure access, and the provision of welfare benefits to offset
the worst effects of economic crises, are put to test. In the Netherlands and Spain, Mexico
and Pakistan, the performance of modern principles does not unfold as neatly as expected.
In her study of citizenship practices in Utrecht, Verloo ethnographically explores how
bureaucrats enact statehood and interprets citizens’ margin of maneuver in the imple-
mentation of security and welfare programs. What she calls the dramaturgy of interac-
tions between formal and informal, is illustrated through a method of narrative mapping.
She describes citizens and bureaucrats’ version of a local story in order to distinguish
between tactical and strategic citizenship. Some stories, she argues, are more ‘tellable’
than others, and tensions between these diverging interpretations of problems to be
solved constitute cracks in the modern ideal of citizenship.
In its modern liberal conception, the citizen–state relationship is often seen as techni-
cal (the protective state, supplier of services, and risk manager). It is also seen as evolv-
ing within a stable framework for the expression of conflicting opinions (vote,
participation, contention). This relationship is co-constructed by citizens and the state in
order to channel political conflicts and sustain democracy. Modern citizenship is thus
defined as an ensemble of individual rights and responsibilities such as voting and
expressing opinions through institutionalized mechanisms such as public consultation,
schools, or registered social movement organizations. Verloo’s article adds to this debate
by vividly illustrating how citizenship is much more than institutionalized relations. It
also is performed at the street-level through minute everyday interactions.
The interactive nature of state–citizen relations is a recurrent theme in most of the
contributions. In De Alba’s and Naqvi’s articles, it is explored through the lens of state
adaptation strategies intended to cope with the breakdown of the ideal of universal public
access to infrastructure such as water or electricity. While De Alba offers a typology of
intermediary practices developed by the state to cope with water scarcity in the Mexico
City region, Naqvi focuses on the flexible practices of low-level bureaucrats in the elec-
tric power sector in Islamabad. In both instances, state actors (bureaucrats or intermedi-
aries) deviate from their own rules for the benefit of the public good. Such flexibility in
the implementation of the law may take different forms, but in analytical terms there is
convergence between the two cities, seen in the ways the state personalizes its interac-
tions with residents for the sake of responding to their most pressing water or electricity
demands. The result thus deviates from those articulated by formal bureaucratic proce-
dures, something Shlomo (this issue) conceptualizes as ‘subformality.’
Boudreau and Davis 157

Interactive, personalized state–citizen relations in Utrecht, Mexico City, or Islamabad

are infused with power relations. The modern state formalization project aimed at deper-
sonalizing such relations in order to prevent abuses of power. With numerous cracks in
this modernization project, however, it is clear that relations of domination and abuses of
power have not been eliminated. De Alba’s reflections on the work of state-paid interme-
diaries illustrate how clientelistic practices are morphing with the country’s transition to
democracy, and thus are not entirely eliminated. Similarly, one of Naqvi’s ethnographic
vignettes describes how the powerful take advantage of flexibility through corruption,
something also underlined by Pradel-Miquel in his study of Barcelona coping with aus-
terity measures.
Power relations is the running theme of Pradel-Miquel’s contribution to our collec-
tive reflection on cracks in the modernization process. Using the case of Barcelona, he
suggests that the severe economic crisis and austerity measures underway in Spain
have transformed another modern ideal, that of rights-claiming. Grounded in the soci-
ology of social movements, Pradel-Miquel illustrates the breakdown of the modern
ideal of organized resistance. To understand how people in the poorest neighborhoods
of Barcelona react to austerity policies, he argues, we must understand how the re-
emergence of informal practices (waste picking, squatting) are transformed from mor-
ally justified survival practices to political claims and in certain cases have led to the
co-production of new policies.
The central tenet of the sociology of social movements is that the state–citizen rela-
tionship is inherently agonistic in that it is based on competitive and often confronta-
tional claim-making. The fact that these claims most often emerge from cities is rarely
theorized. Consequently, political action beyond the formal public sphere is not recog-
nized. Yet, formal claim-making is only one way to interact with the state; negotiation is
another (for instance, bribing a corrupted official). Hiding from the state is yet another
way (e.g., squatting). Bayat (2004: 81, 94) suggests that political subjectivity comes
more in the form of a ‘quiet encroachment of the ordinary,’ which he defines as ‘noncol-
lective, but prolonged, direct action by individuals and families to acquire the basic
necessities of life (land for shelter, urban collective consumption, informal work, busi-
ness opportunities, and public space) in a quiet and unassuming, yet illegal fashion. …
the struggle of the actors against the authorities is not about winning a gain, but primarily
about defending and furthering what has already been won.’ Pradel-Miquel’s article is
filled with such examples. More so, he demonstrates how these informal practices have
become central to movements with more international exposure (such as the Indignados).
In short, these four articles invite us to rethink fundamental concepts of modern soci-
ety: citizenship, universal infrastructural access, and organized resistance. They expose
different modernities, to use De Alba’s phrase, recalling Robinson’s (2006) work on
ordinary cities. They highlight how governance is produced (as Naqvi puts it) rather than
what normative ideals are enshrined in laws and state institutions.

Towards relationality
Focusing on the how entails paying attention to processes more than fixed objects. In this
second section, we discuss informality in relational context, examining the connections
158 Current Sociology Monograph 1 65(2)

established between informal groups and other actors and institutions, including the law.
The state, the law, and the informal sector are repositioned from essentialized objects to
relational processes involving various actors, spaces, and temporalities. Indeed,
Schindler’s article argues forcefully that economic activities such as hawking or waste
picking are not inherently informal. Instead, informality is assigned to them temporally
and in certain specific spaces. This is what Tuvike, Neves, and Hilbrandt name ‘instants
of informality’ in their contribution to the third section of this monograph edition.
This set of articles not only examines the social and political negotiations and servicing
co-arrangements that informal sector actors establish with other civil society forces and/or
the state. They also assess the ways these allegiances impact the basic building blocks of
modern society: the distribution of justice, class relations, equality, and legitimate author-
ity. Samson’s article explores how the law (more specifically a court ruling) is used by a
group of reclaimers of reusable and recyclable materials in Soweto to produce new mean-
ing. Instead of defining the informal as being outside the law, Samson describes strong
‘inneractions’ with the law (i.e., relations from within rather than between two discrete
entities). Grounded in a Marxist relational ontology and critical legal studies, she demon-
strates how a court ruling took life through constant production of meaning by reclaimers.
Indeed, people rarely read or understand court judgments, but they use them in ways that
are socially significant. On the Marie Louise landfill, the court ruling is interpreted in such
a way as to exclude other potential workers and control the territory. The distribution of
justice, in other words, is not the sole monopoly of the law and the public justice system.
A similar argument is developed by Denyer Willis through a case study of the Primeiro
Comando da Capital (PCC), a justice system organized by a criminal group in Sao Paulo,
which he compares with the extensive practice of car cloning in the city. Denyer Willis
speaks of clones and facsimiles existing not simply in parallel to the public justice system;
car clones also are functional components of the same authority and practice system. Car
clones are strongly related to public authority because, if they operate in exceptional terri-
tories, it is the exception that produces the norm. Stated differently, what is considered
‘normal’ public authority exists only because something is considered ‘exceptional.’ The
normal and the exceptional, the formal and the informal, explains Denyer Willis, ought to
be considered relationally as part of a single urban system – at least in Sao Paulo, for exam-
ple, where bureaucrats themselves cannot distinguish between state-issued car identifica-
tion and cloned ones. Denyer Willis’s contribution sheds light on the fact that the distribution
of justice and authority does not emanate from a single center (the state). Instead, the state
has lost the monopoly over authority and the distribution of justice.
Schindler’s article picks up on this critique of state-centered analyses of governance.
With two examples of how non-state actors regulate wastepickers and hawkers in Delhi’s
middle-class spaces, he argues that non-state actors have an effective sanctioning and
regulating role. Middle-class associations have an effective role in regulating services
and access to their residential and commercial spaces. Schindler then asks why the state
is always privileged as the reference point of informality. He proposes instead to think in
terms of local governance regimes, which decenters the analysis from state actors and
sheds light on how class relations regulate urban space.
Recognizing the relationality of local governance regimes enables a much more com-
plex analysis of how modern cities work. Yet, we should not stay blind to the conse-
quences for equality. Equality of access to the ‘right to the city,’ including humane living
Boudreau and Davis 159

conditions, is one of the strongest, yet most contested, ideals in modern society. If flex-
ibility, adaptation, and non-state-centered arrangements may provide basic access to
public goods where none was available, it paradoxically may also require setting aside
the modern ideal of uniformity, standardization, and universality. This is what Shlomo
examines in his article on efforts to formalize the public transit system of East Jerusalem.
In this politically tense context, formalization efforts associated with Israeli state inter-
vention in historically Palestinian neighborhoods were met with suspicion and resist-
ance. Shlomo describes how planners deviated from professional norms and regulations
in order to achieve some level of formalization. In order to stabilize the urban order,
planners compromised and embarked on an irregular planning process. The result was
inferior outcomes in the East side in comparison to the West side of the city – with these
differentiated formalities, or ‘sub-formalities,’ serving to normalize marginality and ine-
quality. This mutation of modern rationality, Shlomo concludes, actually reinforces state
control, thus reminding observers that its originating aim was not to reduce inequality so
much as to solve problems of urban disorder.
In sum, the four articles in this section illustrate how basic social needs such as the
distribution of justice, the production of authority, the regulation of class relations, and
reduction of inequalities are not the sole terrain of the state. Instead, myriad governance
regimes, social interpretations of the law, irregular professional practices, and clones are
negotiated. The multiple actors of these assemblages gain their identity in the very rela-
tional and contested processes of distributing justice, producing authority, regulating
class relations, and reducing inequalities. Starting and ending points for negotiating jus-
tice, authority, power, and equity are not necessarily informal or formal; but outcomes or
roles assigned along this continuum are produced through interaction itself.

Beyond dichotomization
In the last section of the monograph, our objective is to reflect on theoretical and empiri-
cal alternatives to modern dichotomizations. Some thinkers have already attempted to go
beyond dichotomization. Marxist dialectics, for instance, is a fundamentally relational
ontology. Classes exist only in relation to one another. These relations, Marx insists, are
structurally-entrenched and conflict-ridden. It is precisely this emphasis on conflict that
can only be resolved through revolution, which has been criticized by modern demo-
cratic theorists from Rawls to Habermas. Indeed, democratic theory sees in deliberation
and negotiations a privileged channel to resolve conflict.
Crudely speaking, however, as inequalities between nations grew with the deepening
and global extension of capitalism, critical social scientists began to engage in battle
around two opposite forms of thought: structural determinism as influenced by Marx on
the Left, and radical individualism as influenced by Hayek on the Right. Both camps
sought to challenge and revolutionize social sciences, under the labels of critical political
economy, postmodernism, and postcolonialism; and they all spoke strongly against the
modern rationality dominating social sciences and radiating from Europe and North
America in the forms of positivism and structural determinism. Scholars soon began
documenting the ways in which the larger modernizing project of globalization – as both
a discourse and a material practice – was annihilating social organization and political
order at the level of the nation-state (often inspired by the earlier work of Foucault, 2004
160 Current Sociology Monograph 1 65(2)

[1977]). The use of the global scale as a key political and analytical reference point for
understanding modernization was further bolstered by simultaneous critiques that
Marxism, with its fundamentally conflictual view of the world (dominant–dominated,
capital–labor, Global North–Global South), fell into the same modernist quest for simpli-
fication and order that mainstream social sciences perpetrated, thus hiding the messiness
of reality (Latour, 2004). With the frontal challenge to Marxism, prior questions of une-
ven spatial and economic development, at whatever scale, lost much of their constitu-
ency (Roy and Ong, 2011).
The critique of modernist rationality did bring some important gains, including the
questioning of foundational or key social scientific concepts such as society, nation-state,
and wage labor. By so doing, critical voices began speaking against the modernist preoc-
cupation with formalization, although not always framed as such, and implicitly advocat-
ing for a more purposeful recognition of informalization processes and their role in social
transformations. But even with these advances, the attention to physical spaces, and par-
ticularly to the sub-global or sub-national territorial scales of modernizing processes,
slowly began to diminish. Our intent in this monograph is to reinsert a critical apprecia-
tion of scale and spaces of re(in)formalization into this larger theoretical inquiry. It
focuses its attention on how formalization unfolds in space, particularly in urban spaces,
and asks whether (and how) patterns of economic globalization, governance, and the
quotidian lived experience of contemporary urban life have mediated these processes
and challenged dichotomizations.
The privileging of urban spaces as both the site and appropriate scale for our critical
engagement with modernization theory speaks to the ‘return’ of informality in critical
urban studies (Roy, 2005). This postcolonial literature on urban informality is more
explicitly theoretical and critical than earlier work (for a good synthesis of these earlier
studies, see Schindler, this issue). Its starting point is the various manifestations of infor-
mality in urban space, from land invasions to hawking, from street violence to street art
(Rao, 2006; Yiftachel, 2009).
As early as 1970, Sennett argued for the importance of understanding how cities
make use of disorder to produce new political regulations. More recently, Magnusson
(2011) proposed a rethinking of political ontologies in order to ‘see like a city’ rather
than like a state – by this meaning that critical social sciences might more fruitfully look
into urban ways of life if we are to better understand the complex contemporary period
(Boudreau, 2010). This collection of articles builds on both sets of inquiry, asking
whether and how cities accommodate major societal transitions through informalization
and with what implications for our theoretical understanding of modernization. The
premise of this collection of articles, in short, is that the urban is where we can find
alternatives to dichotomization.
There is a growing literature on relational thought which is captured in concepts such
as assemblage or more broadly in non-representational theory. Our aim is not to directly
insert this monograph into these debates. Instead, we wish to begin from concrete empiri-
cal examples of how people living in cities think beyond rigid categories of the formal
and the informal and the power relations involved in these uses and abuses of categories.
The articles of this last section provide three different epistemological devices that help
us begin to conceive of alternatives to dichotomization: iterative comparison, the use of
ambiguous categories, and the use of hermeneutics.
Boudreau and Davis 161

In their iterative comparative endeavor, Tuvike, Neves, and Hilbrandt reflect on how
to compare differently. Using their individual research on informalization in Bafatá,
Berlin, and Tallinn, they ground their reflection in the literature on urban comparativism.
As different as these cities may be, the authors begin from the intuition that their ‘instants
of informality’ are comparable. This monograph in its entirety, moreover, proceeds simi-
larly: it begins with individual research to produce conceptual insights across a range of
urban contexts that attend to what Tuvike, Neves, and Hilbrandt call ‘multi-sited indi-
vidualizing comparison’ (see the concluding essay of this monograph for more on this).
And precisely because of the differences among the three cities, instead of focusing
on converging and diverging aspects in each city, Tuvike, Neves, and Hilbrandt proceed
through propositions that hold true in all three cases (and for the whole of this collec-
tion). Instead of positioning their cities on a development track (with more or less infor-
mality), they proceed through iteration. Comparative propositions, they suggest,
constitute conceptual premises for identifying more meaningful ‘instants’ of informality.
And epistemologically, such sensibilities are grounded in a situational approach: con-
cepts and meaning are defined through the dialogical process of comparison, not before-
hand as with a grid of comparable characteristics (see also Lamotte, this issue for a
discussion of the situational approach developed by Mitchell, 1956).
In his article, Haid offers a second device to begin thinking beyond dichotomization:
ambiguous categories, what he calls the ‘Janus face’ of urban governance. His empirical
focus, like that of Naqvi, De Alba, Verloo, and Shlomo in this monograph, is on everyday
stateness. Why, when, where, and how does the state act beyond its own rules? Haid’s
reflection is inspired by Roy’s proposal to see informality as a device to understand the
state. Through three vignettes from public parks in Berlin, Haid explores the ambiguity
of state categorization practices. He asks what is being labeled as informal, when it is
tolerated, when it is instrumentalized, or when it is repressed. In Thai Park, for example,
food vendors are tolerated, but the state refuses to grant them licenses. In Tempelhofer
Freiheit, ‘intermediate users’ are formally recognized as ‘urban pioneers’ to generate
development through creative practices. In Gorlitzer Park, informal uses are repressed
through the creation of a drug-free zone that gives more leeway to police.
Ambiguous categorization produces uneven geographies of law enforcement, as dis-
cussed by all authors in this collection. Reflections on the consequences of such practices
on modern ideals of equality ought to be taken seriously. At the epistemological level,
however, ambiguous categorization, just like iterative comparison, can prove to be as
fruitful a device for analysis as it is for action.
Finally, Lamotte’s article proposes a third device: hermeneutics. Lamotte explains
how Los Ñetas – a gang born in the prisons of Porto Rico and who circulated to New
York City, Barcelona, and Guayaquil – produce a Ñeta world. It is not only the circula-
tion of migrants that produces this Ñeta world, but also the development of a Ñeta law.
Grounded in situational anthropology, Lamotte’s analysis explains how Los Ñetas came
to create an imagined community of their own, a multi-sited global situation of co-pres-
ence which has meaning to its members. In their respective cities the Ñetas sustain vari-
ous types of relations to the formal state (legal recognition as a non-profit organization,
recipients of welfare benefits, and/or victims of criminalization). Yet, they also partici-
pate in a global Ñeta community, or world. With the concept of a ‘legal order’ developed
to make sense of the relations between indigenous law and state law, Lamotte explores
162 Current Sociology Monograph 1 65(2)

how Ñeta law functions. More than a set of rules to discipline and sanction, Ñeta law
constitutes a world vision and prescribes continuous work on the self. Ñeta members live
on a quest for perfectibility. Their choice to follow state law or Ñeta law is made follow-
ing an ethical line of conduct. And this requires constant interpretation of the law (as
illustrated by Samson as well). This is what Lamotte calls Ñeta hermeneutics.
How then can we as scholars develop alternatives to modern dichotomization? The
articles here show how state and non-state actors themselves do not act with essentialized
dichotomous categories of the formal and the informal. Instead, they think and act relation-
ally. This is an invitation for researchers to develop relational analytical devices as well.
The three devices developed in this last section of the monograph are closely connected to
the empirical categories described throughout the publication. Iterative comparison resem-
bles in many ways the practices of personalized interaction described in all the articles.
Ambiguous categorization, more explicitly discussed by Haid, also recalls practices of
adaptation and flexibility described in the other contributions. Finally, hermeneutics speaks
to the various empirical practices of interpretation described explicitly by Lamotte, Samson,
Denyer Willis, Verloo, but also in less explicit ways in the other articles.

The methodology of critique

All the articles involve some form of comparison: between social groups, between vari-
ous forms and uses of informality (and with respect to the latter, over time, within the
same city and across cities). What can be learned from these comparisons and how
should we compare across different articles to achieve larger claims? How might a cat-
egory of action, a specific practice, or an idea circulate from one place (or from one
social group) to another, and what forms of knowledge does this produce and for whom?
To a certain degree, all cases analyzed in this publication share some common (modern)
concepts: citizenship, law, state, or order. Yet local understandings of these practices and
shared concepts will vary according to local institutions and political cultures. Even so,
if the same concepts circulate and cross-feed between places and actors, are we witness-
ing the formation of a new language of urban governance in the Global North and South
(Simone and Boudreau, 2008)?
Taking a step back and pondering these questions, we suggest that more than order,
dichotomies, regularity, and standardization, the articles presented here highlight mutu-
ally-productive interactions, adaptation, and flexibility. They also, however, point to
domination, abuse, neglect, and the normalization of marginality. This suggests that any
new language of urban governance must also sustain a critical project for emancipation
emerging from both comparison and ethical interpretations (to use Lamotte’s term). The
question thus remains as to how to compare both productively and ethically.
In the last several years, a lively debate on comparative urbanism has flourished in the
fields of sociology and geography (Edensor and Jayne, 2012; McFarlane, 2010). Inspired
by various literatures, from policy mobility, planetary urbanization, ordinary cities, to post-
colonial calls for taking into account theory from the South, this debate positions the act of
comparing what seems incommensurable as a critical form of knowledge production.
There are generally two comparative approaches in this debate. First, scholars working
with overarching concepts such as neoliberalization or planetary urbanization will search
for local variations not so much in ‘quantity’ or degrees of neoliberalism, but in ‘quality’ or
Boudreau and Davis 163

forms (Peck, 2015). Second, scholars more directly located in postcolonial approaches will
insist on the need to let theory emerge inductively from a myriad of contexts.
Similarly, in this collection comparison comes as an outcome; it was not systemati-
cally projected prior to conducting research. Unlike Tuvike, Neves, and Hilbrandt’s iter-
ative and dialogical comparative experiment, not all the authors of the articles met to
discuss their work. Yet, as editors of this monograph issue, we have been able to practice
what we might call intertextual comparison. In this way, we are prone to highlight what
Tuvike, Neves, and Hilbrandt would call common ‘propositions’ emerging from the arti-
cles. Intertextual comparison reveals that cities in the North as much as in the South are
witnessing increasingly visible cracks in their modernization process: from new forms of
clientelism to the flexible and differentiated enforcement of rules, from new forms of
citizen participation and legal interpretation to (dis)organized claiming, from a mutation
of modern rationality in professional practice to the distribution of authority and legiti-
macy across state and non-state actors. What characterizes these practices is relationality,
not dichotomization. This entails that we focus analysis on processes of (re)informaliza-
tion. The texts in this publication reveal a set of interrelated mechanisms through which
such processes unfold: interpretation, interaction, adaptation, and domination.
Putting these articles together, we aim to think inductively about ways to go beyond
dichotomization (between the formal and informal, the North and the South, the state and
outside the state, the modern and the traditional, etc.). The modern habit of classifying,
comparing quantitatively or through convergence or divergence, or hierarchizing, is dif-
ficult to change.

Acknowledgements
Most of the articles in this monograph were prepared for a pair of RC21 panels convened at the
Yokohama ISA conference in July 2014. We thank Sujata Patel for attending those sessions and
suggesting that we work on the topic as a possible special issue for Current Sociology. We also
thank the anonymous reviewers and the new editorial team at Current Sociology for bringing this
publication to fruition.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.

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Author biographies
Julie-Anne Boudreau is Doctor of Urban Planning from the School of Public Policy and Social
Research of the University of California at Los Angeles. Currently Professor at the Institut national
de la recherche scientifique, Centre Urbanisation Culture Société (INRS-UCS) in Montreal, she held
the Canada Research Chair in urbanity, insecurity, and political action from 2005 to 2015 and was
Editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR) from 2010 to 2015.
She founded and directs the multimedia Laboratory Ville et ESPAces politiques (VESPA). Her work
focuses on the relationship between political mobilization, urbanization, and state restructuring pro-
cesses. Her various projects in Los Angeles, Montreal, Toronto, Paris, Brussels, Mexico City and
Hanoi interrogate this relationship from the angle of feelings of insecurity and the experience of
mobility and displacement. She works with migrants, domestic workers, motobikers, street vendors,
and youth, to explore how the city influences the formation of political subjectivities and citizenship
practices. Her most recent book is entitled Global Urban Politics: Informalisation of the State.
Diane E Davis is the Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism and Chair
of the Department of Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard University Graduate School of
Design. Her research focuses on the relations between urbanization and national development, the
politics of urban policy, socio-spatial practice in conflict cities, and comparative urban develop-
ment. With a special interest in Latin America, she has explored topics ranging from historic
preservation, urban social movements, and identity politics to urban governance, fragmented sov-
ereignty, and state formation. Current research examines transformations in cities of the Global
South produced by globalization, informality, and political or economic violence. Books include
Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century (Temple University Press, 1994; Spanish
translation 1999), Discipline and Development: Middle Classes and Prosperity in East Asia and
Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2004; named the ASA’s 2005 Best Book in Political
Sociology), Irregular Armed Forces and their Role in Politics and State Formation (Cambridge
University Press, 2003) and Cities and Sovereignty: Identity Conflicts in the Urban Realm (Indiana
University Press, 2011).

Résumé
Dans cette introduction, nous examinons brièvement l’entrelacement des processus
d’informalité et de modernisation et leurs incidences sur la théorie et les pratiques de la
ville. Nous montrons l’importance d’appréhender les processus inégaux d’informalisation
en insistant sur une comparaison qualitative des relations entre l’État, le citoyen et le
166 Current Sociology Monograph 1 65(2)

marché plutôt que d’une approche quantitative de l’informalité. Dans cette perspective,
nous nous demandons comment les pratiques informelles et formelles pourraient nous
aider à repenser certains concepts modernes comme la citoyenneté, l’accès universel à
l’infrastructure, la résistance organisée et l’État lui-même. Nous y parvenons en trans-
posant ces concepts dans le contexte de processus relationnels faisant intervenir des
acteurs, des espaces et des temporalités plutôt que des objets essentialisés. Ce renverse-
ment épistémologique permet de mieux saisir dans quelle mesure les besoins sociaux
fondamentaux comme l’administration de la justice, l’affirmation de l’autorité et la régula-
tion des relations de classe ne sont pas du seul apanage de l’État, mais sont l’objet de
négociations dans un contexte relationnel. Nous concluons en proposant trois dispositifs
épistémologiques : la comparaison itérative, les catégories ambiguës et l’utilisation de
l’herméneutique, qui sont susceptibles d’aider les chercheurs à éviter les préjugés associés
à des catégories essentialisées.

Mots-clés
modernisation, informalité, comparaison, Nord et Sud

Resumen
En esta introducción, revisamos brevemente el entrelazamiento de “informalidad” y
“modernización”, y sus implicaciones para la teoría y la práctica de la ciudad.
Identificamos la importancia de reconocer los procesos desiguales de informalización,
haciendo hincapié en la necesidad de comparar la calidad de las relaciones Estado-
ciudadano-mercado, más que la cantidad de “informalidad”. En el proceso nos pregun-
tamos si y cómo prácticas informales y formales pueden ayudar a replantear concep-
tos modernos como la ciudadanía, el acceso universal de la infraestructura, la
resistencia organizada, y el propio estado. Una forma de hacerlo es cambiar la posición
de estos conceptos y considerarlos como procesos relacionales que implican varios
actores, espacios y temporalidades en lugar de como objetos esencializados. Tales
movimientos epistemológicos iluminarán hasta qué punto las necesidades sociales
básicas, tales como la distribución de la justicia, la producción de la autoridad, y la
regulación de las relaciones de clase no son el territorio único del estado, sino una
negociación relacional. Concluimos proponiendo tres dispositivos epistemológicos -
Comparación iterativa, categorías ambiguas y el uso de la hermenéutica - que pueden
ayudar a los investigadores a evitar los sesgos asociados a categorías esencialistas.

Palabras clave
Modernización, Informalidad, Comparación, Norte Global, Sur Global