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Taking the train from Schönefeld airport, a visitor to Berlin rides through a vast area of urban allotments.¹ Still on the periphery, the train follows the East–West divide that long defined the city, if not much of the world. Straight ahead, at a distance, a passenger can spot the tip of the Berlin TV Tower – the symbol of former East Berlin that marks today’s city center. Green garden plots, seemingly endless along both sides of the tracks, are cluttered with small and colorful allotment huts [Lauben].² I have been asked if these sites are the “slums” of Berlin – or if people live in these huts. Certainly, from a distance, their spatial and social order is difficult to grasp.

This book delves into the everyday governance of housing at these sites. More particularly, it explores the gardeners’ scattered, unruly, and precarious dwelling practices as well as the multifaceted and frequently contradictory efforts to regulate them. It examines these negotiations with an interest in learning about the mechanisms through which room for maneuver is gained and constrained in the everyday (re)production of urban order and the exclusions these processes entail.

One way of approaching this task is by framing the practices under examination through the notion of informality. Since the 1970s, researchers have used this concept to describe the unauthorized construction and inhabitation of urban space, particularly in Africa, Asia, and Latin America (ILO, 1972; Hart, 1973; Hann and Hart, 2011). These themes remain, as Tonkiss writes, “a major plot-line in the story of contemporary urbanization” (2012: 55), although today, critical scholarship employs the notion of informality to consider the ambiguities of state regulation, rather than the phenomena that lie beyond the oversight of state institutions (Roy, 2009a; McFarlane, 2012). In this critical understanding, the concept provides a starting point for describing the scene above through the incoherencies of state and urban governance in regulating housing at these sites.

Another way of approaching the theme of this book is by exploring the enactment of rules in everyday practices of regulatory enforcement. Dwelling in Berlin’s allotment gardens breaches the rules of the law, but it is also marked by other forms of intense regulation. Rather than being characterized through spontaneity, the construction of allotment huts is embedded in long-standing traditions of city life. Sheds transgress building codes but are organized strictly on clearly fenced plots. Although buildings are erected without permits, they are systematically serviced with water and electricity. Their residents exceed use rights, but they comply elsewhere with registration commitments. A closer look at the housing situation in the gardens provides insights into the ways in which transgressions are accommodated in the “formal” production of urban order and thereby also points out the institutional ambiguities on which allotment dwelling frequently depends.

Housing in the Margins relates these two approaches and argues that this matters because it accounts for housing and urban governance in a Western liberal democracy in ways that challenge some of the epistemological assumptions that have long been engrained in research on cities. With informal housing playing hardly more than a marginal role in scholarship on European, Canadian, or US cities, an exploration of how allotment dwelling is negotiated in Berlin troubles the North–South divisions that underlie much production of knowledge on urban informality and raises questions about the particularity of local experiences and the universality of concepts, including that of informality. I pursue this project with empirical and theoretical objectives: studying empirically how Berliners negotiate ways of staying put in allotment gardens and how boundaries around their dwelling practices are drawn, I aim at understanding the production and governance of housing precarity in a relatively rich European city. In theorizing these processes of governance, I seek to unveil the possibilities of conceptualizing informal housing in the context of bureaucracies that are commonly understood to regulate thoroughly, coherently, and according to fixed rules.