Читать книгу Housing in the Margins - Hanna Hilbrandt - Страница 11

Beyond empirical questions about housing precarity, this book wrestles with the theoretical implications of allotment dwelling and its regulation for an understanding of informality in cities that are commonly understood to regulate thoroughly, coherently, and according to fixed rules. For decades, scholars have argued that informality was a “problem” of the South, in quantity at least, if not in sheer existence. It was seen, as Auerbach et al. put it, as “perhaps the distinguishing feature of contemporary urban life in the Global South” (Auerbach et al., 2018: 262). Yet, informal housing in Berlin’s allotments can hardly be understood as a shift in the geographies of power that has fostered the growth of this allegedly Southern phenomenon in a European city – not least because it has had a century-long tradition in Berlin. Rather, an analysis of informality in a relatively rich city of the global North calls for a critical reflection of the concept of informality itself, as well as of the epistemological place and value of that concept in a more global urban analysis.⁴

Critiques of the paternalistic and colonial gaze of theorizing that prescribed informality to the South have long been ubiquitous in postcolonial urban studies (e.g. Comaroff and Comaroff, 2012; McFarlane and Robinson, 2012; Lawhon and Truelove, 2019). But the challenge of “othering” Southern cities continues to “haunt” urban studies (Hentschel, 2015: 80), enlisting cities of the global South into an alleged trajectory of development that presumes one desirable future for all cities, epitomized by the economic hubs of the global North. For the development of a more cosmopolitan urban studies, this debate has proposed forging new lines of connection through more “worldly” (Roy and Ong, 2012; McCann et al., 2013), “planetary” (Brenner, 2014; Sidaway et al., 2014), and comparative methodologies (Nijman, 2007; Robinson, 2011; Myers, 2014). In this vein, authors have attempted to “theorize back,” or to postcolonialize the global North by transmitting knowledge from the South northwards (Schindler, 2014a; Hentschel, 2015; Lamotte, 2017; Hilbrandt et al., 2017).⁵ This book follows that suggestion: it brings informality – a concept that tends to be used to research cities commonly located “off the map” (Robinson, 2002: 531) of mainstream theory-production – to Berlin, a place normally understood through conceptions of Western urbanism. Yet, this move confronts significant hurdles that may have more to do with the conceptualization of the state in understandings of informality and less with this epistemological approach itself.

As noted, today’s more prudent use of the concept of informality in most parts of interdisciplinary urban scholarship has developed a nuanced understanding of the multiple entanglements of informality and the state. First, authors have placed a spotlight on the ways in which the state itself acts informally: by the rule of exception – in other words, suspending the validity of its own order (Roy, 2009a, 2011; Wigle, 2014; Davis, 2018), and by maintaining flexibility in regulation, thereby leaving its citizens in a state of “permanent temporariness” (Yiftachel, 2009a: 90). For instance, Ananya Roy suggests that informality is not a result of planning failure but a mode of urbanization in which “the law itself is rendered open-ended and subject to multiple interpretations and interests” (Roy, 2009b: 80). Moreover, discussions of informality and the state have considered the relation between the two through questions about citizenship, insurgency, and multiple other modalities of struggle and subversion (Miraftab, 2009; Meth, 2010; Porter et al., 2011). In these debates, the state is central as the primary object of contention – an antagonistic force working through the powers of oppression and domination.

Despite their critical contributions, I suggest that these approaches do not travel well into Berlin’s allotments. In Chapter 2, I argue that the literature on informality, by casting the state in ways that tend to either underscore its flexible and oppressive use of informality or the ways in which citizens obstruct state powers by resisting it “from the outside,” methodologically has less to say about the more interactive practices of negotiation that this book is concerned with, where the roles and interests of “both sides” are more fluid and frequently merge. By constructing informality through the powers of domination and oppression, on the one hand, or insurgency and resistance, on the other, the debate tends to neglect analyzing informality through the quieter registers of change, i.e. the small-scale and incremental powers of negotiation. Housing in the Margins focuses attention on these mundane negotiations, drawing on theoretical traditions that place weight on the normative judgments and social embeddedness of those who are negotiating (e.g. Tilly, 1999; Lea, 2008; Lipsky, 2010 [1980]), the legal-material processes of regulatory enactment (Valverde, 2011; Blomley, 2014), the entanglement of institutions in social life (Tilly, 1999; Corbridge et al., 2005; Straughn, 2005), and the ways in which these processes of enactment reflect on and transform wider processes of institutional transformation (Cooper, 1998; Hunter, 2015). Examining allotment dwelling through this lens suggests three contributions to understanding the governance of urban informality in Berlin.

First, by placing weight on the normative judgments, subjective understanding, and social embeddedness of governing actors, Housing in the Margins reads informality and its regulation through the ways in which people apply their ambivalent and multiple understandings to processes of governance. For instance, this becomes apparent in Chapter 7, which focuses on the legal work upon which practices of governance rely. Utilizing critical legal studies, the chapter unravels how both regulators and allotment holders employ legal frameworks in regulatory practices to maintain, extend, or restrict outsized huts. Yet, while such frameworks of order constitute a pivotal resource in the making of order, the chapter discusses their operation in practice to understand how order is built through the interpretive mechanisms that shape how rules become “emplaced.” In this way, the book seeks a more practice-centered understanding of the interpretive work through which rules operate “on the ground.” This fosters an understanding of informality as emerging through the “ordinary stuff” of policy implementation, in which subjectivity, positionality, and individual agency are key.

Second, the case of allotment dwelling highlights that the room for maneuvering through rules lies, in part, beyond the realm of state institutions and is used, and at times coproduced, by civil and institutional actors. Chapter 6 makes this point most explicitly when considering the governance of temporary or permanent occupancy from the perspectives of different bureaucrats and allotment holders involved in the transgression and regulation of order. Through this focus, Housing in the Margins accounts for a constellation of regulating actors that exceeds the realm of Berlin’s bureaucracies and includes the gardeners themselves. Beyond common assumptions about regulatory enforcement as a process in which state actors implement rules, combining the perspectives of all governing actors allows me to consider the ways in which people within and beyond state institutions negotiate room for maneuver in implementing order. Across all chapters, I describe the production of socio-spatial order as a cooperative effort that is shaped by all parties concerned and leads, at best, to a joint although contested arrangement. At the same time, my focus on consensual arrangements raises important questions about the limits of this tolerance and the inequalities that define such a politics of negotiation. The everyday may be a site of small-scale agency, but, as I attempt to show, understanding governance at this scale also unveils the degree to which the various parties concerned with allotment gardening have asymmetric capacities in such maneuvers, and the exclusionary practices that mundane negotiations may also entail – enacted through both civil society and state actors.

Third, Housing in the Margins accounts for the minor acts of negotiation in focus here as a means of redefining how urban governance is “lived out.” For instance, Chapter 5 confronts this question in its spatial and material dimensions by focusing on the ways in which incremental adaptations of the gardens and their governance have shaped the urban development of the city and its modalities of urban change. Theoretically, the chapter traces questions about urban planning and governance, on the one hand, and coproduction and incrementalism, on the other, in order to juxtapose these forms of transformation. My aim is to unravel how these modalities are entangled in urban development and to tease out how we can understand forms of coproduction, incremental adaptation, or self-built housing in a city of the global North. Across the book, I maintain that understanding informality through the ways in which all those concerned with allotment governance shift legal boundaries and alter the city’s urban fabric at the everyday scale allows us to grasp how these practices shape the structures in and through which these practices take place.

Taken together, I suggest that the “payoff” of these theoretical propositions is that they enable us to grasp informality through the routine enactment of rules and regulations. In this view, informal housing emerges in and through a normal, not a particular, “mode of urbanization.” This understanding requires us to rethink the analytical role and significance of informality in an analysis of urban governance and state enactment. Instead of presupposing the existence of formality and deriving the concept of informality from that, placing weight on how transgression and regulation become acted out in negotiation turns the operation of formality itself into an ethnographic question.

In conclusion, Chapter 8 returns to the book’s epistemological starting point and reflects on the promises and difficulties of translating concepts from “elsewhere” to Berlin. Drawing its lessons about processes of formalization and informalization both in and beyond the case discussed, the chapter concludes that Berlin’s allotments are not an exceptional case but rather a paradigmatic example of governing irregular housing conditions through small-scale negotiations. Rather than seeing informal housing as a distinguishing feature of the global South, I maintain that despite the different analytical route taken here, conceiving of irregular housing through the lens of urban negotiation allows us to build more global approaches to housing research.