Subaltern Urbanism (A. Roy)

Urban informality

"Subaltern urbanism functions through slum ontologies. Such ontological readings of the megacity and its urbanisms have repeatedly invoked the idea of the informal. Bayat (2007) asserts that informal life is the habitus of the dispossessed. Cruz (2007) sees informal habitation at the global border as an urbanism that transgresses across the ‘property line’. For Hernando de Soto (2000), the informal represents the grassroots rebellion of the poor against state bureaucracy; it is a sign of heroic entrepreneurship. Mike Davis (2004: 24) states that ‘informal survivalism’ is ‘the new primary mode of livelihood in a majority of Third World cities’. He thereby evokes an older usage of the term ‘informal’, that of Keith Hart (1973: 61, 68), who identified a ‘world of economic activities outside the organised labor force’ carried out by an ‘urban sub-proletariat’. In all such frameworks, the informal remains synonymous with poverty and even marginality. It remains the territory and habitus of subaltern urbanism.

Greenhills shopping center, inside shops
Manila, Philippines (mithunonthe.net)

Against these various interpretations, in my work I have argued that informality must be understood as an idiom of urbanization, a logic through which differential spatial value is produced and managed (Roy and AlSayyad, 2004). Urban informality then is not restricted to the bounded space of the slum or deproletarianized/entrepreneurial labor; instead, it is a mode of the production of space that connects the seemingly separated geographies of slum and suburb. The splintering of urbanism does not take place at the fissure between formality and informality but rather, in fractal fashion, within the informalized production of space. Informal urbanization is as much the purview of wealthy urbanites as it is of slum dwellers. [...] they come to be designated as ‘formal’ by the state while other forms of informality remain criminalized. For example, Weinstein (2008: 23) shows how various shopping centers in Mumbai had been ‘built illegally... by the city’s largest and most notorious mafia organization, on land belonging to the state government’s public works department’. Or, in the case of Delhi, Ghertner (2008: 66) notes that a vast proportion of city land-use violates some planning or building law, such that much of the construction in the city can be viewed as ‘unauthorized’. He poses the vital question of how and why the law has come to designate slums as ‘nuisance’ and the residents of slums as a ‘secondary category of citizens’, while legitimizing illegal and informal ‘developments that have the “worldclass” look’. Also in Delhi, Gidwani (2006: 12) characterizes the proliferation of illegal farmhouses as the ‘urban conquest of outer Delhi’, a process of ‘unauthorized construction’ that involves ‘cordoning off the few remaining agricultural tracts’."

References

Bayat, A. (2007) Radical religion and the habitus of the dispossessed: does Islamic militancy have an urban ecology? International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31.3, 579–90.

Cruz, T. (2007) Levittown retrofitted: an urbanism beyond the property line. In D. Kelbaugh and K. McCullough (eds.), Writing urbanism: a design reader, Routledge, New York.

Davis, M. (2004) Planet of slums: urban involution and the informal proletariat. New Left Review 26 March/April, 5–34.
De Soto, H. (2000) The mystery of capital: why capitalism triumphs in the West and fails everywhere else. Basic Books, New York.

Ghertner, A. (2008) Analysis of new legal discourse behind Delhi’s slum demolitions. Economic and Political Weekly 43.20, 57–66.

Gidwani, V.K. (2006) Subaltern cosmopolitanism as politics. Antipode 38.1, 7–21. Hart, K. (1973) Informal income opportunities and urban employment in Ghana. Journal of Modern African Studies 11.1, 61–89.

Roy, A. and N. AlSayyad (2004) Urban informality: transnational perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia. Lexington Books, Lanham.

Weinstein, L. (2008) Mumbai’s development mafias: globalization, organized crime and land development. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32.1, 22–39.

Roy, Ananya (2011) Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. 35.2, 223-38.