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The concepts of informality and the state are inextricably intertwined, although research has defined these links in shifting and fundamentally different ways. A genealogical perspective on the epistemological history of the term “informality” readily explains some of these shifts. While its conceptualization is frequently associated with anthropologist Keith Hart (1973; see also Hann and Hart, 2011) and the work of the ILO (1972; cf. Steenberg, 2016), its first appearance in scholarship has been contested (Rakowski, 1994).¹ Yet, in these earlier conceptual formulations, informality was undoubtedly a (by)product of reading states and state governance in that particular place and particular time (generally meaning research sites in the global South in the 1970s). As it has frequently been noted, earlier, more “structuralist” understandings (Rakowski, 1994) focused on the exclusion of practices of, for instance, any trading, building, dwelling, or transport provisioning from the formal economy. They defined informal practices through their presumed “location” beyond the reach of state bureaucracies, as well as through their small scale, and the idea that they were carried out by so-called “ordinary” people. Thus, despite controversial voices (e.g. Portes, 1983), major parts of this early, more policy-oriented literature framed the concept as a problem of regulatory capacity or administrative oversight that merely concerned under-resourced populations in Southern cities. Similarly, more “legalist” perspectives (cf. Rakowski, 1994) that emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century (de Soto, 2000, 2002) focused on the “entrepreneurial dynamism” (Bromley, 1990: 330) of the “informals” but continued to hold informality to be a sphere outside of the law and, by way of equating both concepts, of the state.

These approaches also forged unhelpful analytical relations between imaginaries of informality and state modernity. Consider geographer Jennifer Robinson’s (2006: 4) understanding of modernity “as simply the West’s self-characterization of itself in opposition to “others” and “elsewhere” that are imagined not to be modern.” In this reading, the early definitions of informality I previously discussed can be seen to have strengthened the idea of Western state modernity while reinforcing assumptions about the difference of the “Southern state.” To be sure, the notion of informality as the “‘other’ of states” was derived from the idea of a “well-developed state” with modern, rational institutions – and imagined to be located in “the Northwestern quadrant of the world” (O’Donnell, 2001: 7). Yet somewhat contradictorily, researchers aligned informality with the supposedly “dis-functioning” and “traditional” states of the global South, despite these states appearing to lack all the previously named definitional characteristics of the Western state. Rather than questioning imaginaries of “Western state rationality” or aiming to understand geographical varieties in the workings of state practices, the use of the term informality in these cases thus reinforced the “othering” of what was cast as “the Southern state.”

Critiques of such teleological conceptions of informality and development have since become ubiquitous. I refer to a set of ideas that specifically address the urban dimensions of a wider postcolonial critique that prominent thinkers, such as Dipesh Chakrabarty, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak, have advanced since the 1980s. Based on the epistemological contributions of postcolonial theory and led by Robinson’s influential contribution, Ordinary Cities (2006), urbanists began to debate the essentially parochial nature of urban theory (see e.g. Watson, 2009; Edensor, 2011; Sheppard et al., 2013). Above all, this “Southern urban critique” (Lawhon and Truelove, 2019) challenges the idea of Europe as a signifier of modernity (Escobar, 1995), in relation to which all else is “coming late, lagging behind, and lacking in originality” (Mufti, 2005: 474).² In the study of cities, this “teleological imperative” (Krishnaswamy, 2005: 70) had led to a profound imbalance in the production of theory and the pretension of theoretical claims. Consequently, postcolonial urbanists have highlighted the tensions between a wider recognition of historical difference vis-à-vis the universal truth claims of dominant Western approaches while, at the same time, confronting “assumptions of incommensurability” between urban experiences in Northern and Southern sites (Varley, 2013: 125).

In line with this approach, contemporary urban research has increasingly positioned itself against binary understandings of formality and informality. By showing that social spheres are embedded in a complex network of different relations that may be formal or informal to different extents, this literature reconceptualized the nexus of informality and the state. First, accounts that outline the use of informality as a governmental tool have offered useful conceptualizations of the ways in which state institutions assert authority through the use of informality (Yiftachel, 2009a, 2009b; Bear, 2011; de Alba, 2017; Shlomo, 2017; Bénit-Gbaffou, 2018; Tucker and Devlin, 2019). Ananya Roy’s (2005) seminal article “Urban informality: Towards an epistemology of planning” was the first in a series of pivotal publications (2009a, 2009c, 2009d, 2011) that highlight the ways in which states use informality to mediate their relations with civil society by continuously rearranging the boundaries of legitimacy (see also Yiftachel, 2009a, 2009b; McFarlane, 2012). These accounts not only point out that the formal/informal labeling serves as a means through which states exert authority, but also that the maintenance of flexible and ever-shifting boundaries between formality and informality, legality and illegality ensures a continuous grip on populations. As Roy convincingly writes, “it is through this logic of informality that the state polices an arbitrary and fickle line between legality and illegality, creating a territorialised flexibility and demonstrating its political potency” (2018: 2243). Moreover, the literature illustrates how state agencies resort to illegal or extra-legal means (Goldman, 2011; Ghertner, 2018), thereby creating boundaries between “wanted” and “unwanted” populations (Ghertner, 2010) that frequently work to victimize the poor.

Second, accounts interested in the linkages between informality and state governance are complemented by literature that explore citizens’ modalities and mechanisms of claims-making (Chatterjee, 2004; Groth and Corijn, 2005; Benjamin, 2008; Hou, 2010; Elsheshtawy, 2011). In such accounts, these grounded, small-scale registers are researched as ways in which citizens resist modalities of top-down governance. The state is central to these discussions as the subject of multiple forms of subversion, resistance, or subaltern agency that are leveled against institutions, rather than through its own “agentic” qualities. In this view, informality is examined regarding what is taken to be its reformative, resistant, and subversive qualities – as “a counter strategy against dominant modes of production” (2012: 17), as Rainer Hehl frames it.

The work of Asef Bayat (1997, 2000, 2009) on the street politics of Teheran’s income poor provides an illustrative example of this perspective. Rather than framing informal practices of subversion as grassroots activism directed against state agencies, Bayat seeks to circumvent the rigid divisions between “active” and “passive,” “individual” and “collective,” and “civil” and “political” opposition (2009: 26). Those dichotomies, he argues, have restrained scholarly perceptions and limited the opportunity to comprehend those practices that stay under the radar but may precede important social transformations (ibid). Instead, his analytical key – the notion of “quiet encroachment” – thinks beyond the dynamics of suppression and protest. Focused on the continuous engagement of marginalized urban groups, “quiet encroachment” finds everyday politics in the unanticipated moments of negotiation in everyday life. These struggles, Bayat suggests, broaden the domains of what he oddly calls the “informal people” (Bayat, 1997) by improving their positions in the city, by allowing them to gain autonomy from regulatory restraints, and by advancing their access to social goods and economic opportunities.

Both perspectives have redrawn the nexus of informality and the state in crucial ways: they have been pivotal in recognizing types of agency that were previously ignored, and they have critically analyzed the forces behind forms of exclusion and dispossession that have frequently remained invisible. However, the perspective of these studies (on civil insurgency or arbitrary state governance), their empirical focus (on cities in the South), and (most crucially for the approach pursued in this book) their implicit ontological approach to the state imply that they have less to say about the ways in which informality emerges at the interstices of legal ambiguity, institutional discrepancy, and everyday state enactment in Western liberal democracies.

Let me be clear: this is neither to say that informality or the state are different per se in these sites, nor that some of the mechanisms observed in this research would not be transferable (see Tuvikene et al., 2016, for suggestions on how to approach theorization of informality across sites in the global South, East, and West). Instead, I want to point out that these views of informality lend themselves better to analyzing informality in situations in which states act “with muscles” (Boudreau et al., 2016: 2397), and when the predominant research object is the large-scale displacement of informal settlements. In fact, for showing particular injustices in the state’s dealing with informality, it might be more appropriate to think about the state in the above ways. Differently put, where the state’s governance of informality is driven by heavy-handed eviction, questions other than the small-scale negotiation under examination in this book might be more relevant to pursue – not least, for ethical and political reasons.

I thus list a number of critical points in the spirit of expanding upon these important interventions into the arbitrary and unjust dealings of the state: in such theorizations, the two approaches to informality that I previously outlined in very broad stokes continue to uphold the dichotomy between state and civil society, top-down (oppression) and bottom-up (resistance), and statutory and non-statutory sites.³ More concretely put, parts of this literature envision the state from a distance as an antagonistic force existing outside of civil realms in ways that underscore either the state’s oppressive and flexible use of informality or its encroachment by “informal people” (those outside of the state). In this way, the literature is prone to situate state officials and “ordinary” people in positions from which they respectively either foster destructive and arbitrary oppression or – being subjected to that oppression – react to the state through nonstrategic insurgency. In this reading, agency is precast depending on people’s “formalized” roles in (non)institutional sites. Thereby, “good agency” automatically becomes associated with the insurgency of people cast as “informal,” and, by way of association, the opposite occurs with “state actors.” Moreover, the literature demonstrates a tendency to operate with set assumptions concerning the sites in and through which domination (associated with state offices) and insurgency (associated with informal settlements) is to be sought out.

These points indicate that these perspectives are ill-equipped to analyze registers of power associated with negotiation; their framing implies a more general disregard of the internal workings and everyday operations of states, as well as implicit and preset (mis)conceptions of the rationalities of governing actors. In this way, these accounts leave little room to explore the motivations and rationalities of all concerned agents, including the ambivalent and individual experiences of people acting beyond presumed institutional roles in sites of governance (but see Bénit-Gbaffou and Oldfield, 2011; Radnitz, 2011; Fairbanks, 2012; Boudreau and Davis, 2017; Davis, 2018; Boudreau, 2017). Moreover, how institutional sites or practices of governance are shaped by people’s practices in dealing with informality remains unrecognized.⁴

I see two methodological reasons for these constraints: First, insights generated from research on informality have rarely spoken to adjacent fields of research that deal with potentially related concerns in urban, criminological, state, or socio-legal theory, which further hampers a more conceptual debate about the notion (see Haid and Hilbrandt, 2019, for a more detailed exploration of that argument). To my knowledge, literatures on informality have rarely attempted to undergird the concept with different conceptions of statehood or, vice versa, considered the plural ways in which informality – however conceived – plays out in different theories of the state. Rather, the conceptual vagueness of informality has led authors frustrated with the notion to forefront other concepts, such as “speculation” (Goldman, 2011), “fragmentation” (McFarlane, 2018), “occupancy urbanism” (Benjamin, 2008), or “suturing” (Boeck and Baloji, 2016) (cf. McFarlane, 2019: 2). Second, informality research remains limited regarding its geographical scope and preferred objects of investigation – with a majority of its work continuing to examine informality in Southern cities. Research that has turned to countries of the so-called global North has primarily addressed informality in relation to poverty or migration, largely neglecting questions informality poses to the routine of everyday governance (cf. Acuto et al., 2019: 5). My suggestion is thus that explicating ontological assumptions about the actors, roles, and structures of governance that undergird conceptions of informality can help to gain a better grasp of the governance of informal housing in Berlin.