Читать книгу Housing in the Margins - Hanna Hilbrandt - Страница 18

These approaches do not offer new ways of thinking about the everyday negotiation of regulation and transgression, but they provide novel routes to approaching informality. To recall, my objective was to open up a framework that facilitates operationalizing informality, or, more precisely put, the negotiation of irregular housing practices in an analysis of urban bureaucracies in a Western liberal state. Understanding the enactment of regulations in the agentic, relational, and situated ways outlined earlier has three crucial implications for conceptualizing informality.

First, as this approach accounts for how all governing actors understand rules and how they ought to be applied, in this reading formality and informality acquire meaning in relation to the subjective conceptions through which regulation and transgression are negotiated. That these actors’ understandings of formality and informality are always constituted in specific situations makes it necessary to define and theoretically approach formality and informality in relation to these understandings “on the ground.” Resisting the assumption that regulations could always be implemented in straightforward ways moves analytical attention away from processes of compliance and toward an analysis of the ways in which rules are translated to specific urban situations, i.e. to the interpretive mechanisms that are the ordinary stuff of policy implementation. In this way, phenomena one could label as informal when analyzed at a different scale or from a different angle appear as cogent or necessary solutions – at times the only way through which rules can be emplaced. These are then not processes lying outside of the state; rather, they point to the multiple ways in which the state regularly becomes performed.

Second, this approach changes understandings of informality regarding how and by whom power is thought to be mobilized in the transgression and regulation of order. Capturing informality through the quieter grammars of power leveraged in negotiations (rather than through the powers of domination and resistance) requires us to consider all actors and their multiple and ambivalent roles in one analytical frame, i.e. to register both how civil society participates in processes of regulation and how the urban bureaucracy works by interpreting rules. In this way, studying informality points to processes of cooperation, where interests of regulators and those being regulated frequently converge. Moreover, this perspective brings everyday politics of inclusion and exclusion into the analytical frame. In contrast to conceiving of informality as “heroic” resistance against the state, accounting for the multiple roles people take up in everyday governance opens up to empirical scrutiny how processes of bordering become reproduced in state–civil society negotiations as well as between groups and individuals on both “sides.” As Chapter 6 explains at length, the power to define criteria of incorporation and exclusion – when dwelling becomes acceptable and when it crosses a line – is in part mobilized by the gardeners themselves. This approach thus facilitates exploring how the flexibility of the law and the negotiability of informal arrangements lend themselves to the further marginalization of those already multiply excluded.

Finally, the relational conceptions of state enactment presented here provide a different perspective on the potential of change through “informal” everyday interventions in processes and sites of governance. Informality is frequently associated with transgression and change. Scholars of informality regularly ask if and how these moments become emancipatory. Similarly, the relational reading perused in this book renders the state open to transformation through the work involved in negotiating regulations. In this, “little things pile up” (Povinelli, 2011) to produce continuous change, as Chapter 5 will illustrate. But my conception offers a different reading of the ways in which these “piles” emerge: it leads to an account of change wherein transformation emerges as all actors concerned maneuver through the “structures” they enact. Moreover, from this perspective, transgression is not necessarily emancipatory. Rather, the ways in which actors maneuver around boundaries depend on the power inequalities that imbue spaces of negotiation, as well as on the conditions in which negotiations are set – limiting participation for some, benefiting others, and thereby frequently reproducing entrenched inequalities.

To be sure, this approach moves my frame of reference away from informality. If we understand these negotiations as the normalcy of the state, what meaning does the concept of informality convey in a description of regulatory transgression? Instead of presupposing the existence of formality and deriving the concept of informality from it, this approach places weight on understanding the production of informal housing as part of the normal functioning of the state, i.e. as an inherent aspect of everyday governance. As it translates informality into the vocabulary of state enactment and urban governance, this thinking decenters informality in an analysis of regulation and transgression.

Instead, formality appears in the subtitle of this book. Formality, too, remains a difficult term because its use ultimately reifies a conception of both terms – formality and informality – as opposing, binary principles. However, to put the production of formality at the center of this investigation allows me to circumvent the dichotomy that defines informality through its lack of formality. The processes under scrutiny in this book are then not described as the deviant other, or the negative counterpart of an ordering principle, but as part and parcel of the making of order. As these processes depend on a multiplicity of different legal frames (including laws, government programs, contracts, and the like), numerous actors (including state agencies, civil associations, and individuals), different power relations (including social ties, networks, and political allegiances) through which all actors concerned produce a plethora of orders considered to be legitimate, I employ the term in its plural form. I speak about urban formalities because thinking about the state at the level of the municipal scale forces us to understand the density of the materialities that are being negotiated, the heterogeneity of the actor constellations involved, the multiple sites of political encounter, and the complexity of overlapping statutory frameworks in multilevel administrations.

Moreover, despite my attempt to decenter in/formality, it is crucial to remember that formality and informality are ideas that are used in the field to certain ends (although in a much wider vocabulary). Formality implies claims to the legitimacy, regularity, or efficacy of order due to a supposed alliance with institutional frames. Rather than the product of negotiation, claims to in/formality are, in this sense, a resource on which people draw to produce urban order. Thus, while my reading foregrounds the processes of negotiating regulations, these concepts remain useful in an analysis of regulation as they allow us to consider how all concerned actors use these claims in their negotiations.