The Political Potential of Urban Informality in the Global North: A Rancièrian Perspective

Abstract

In recent years, a growing number of scholars have highlighted the presence of urban informality in the Global North. Although we applaud this development, we deplore that this body of literature is characterized by analytical ambiguity and fragmented discussions. More specifically, the literature often reduces or repudiates the political potential of urban informality by (a) integrating it into the formal, (b) mobilizing it for policy purposes, and/or (c) designating it as a “policy problem.” In this article, we examine the existing literature and rethink the concept of urban informality by discussing it in relation to Jacques Rancière’s distinction between “police” and “politics.” This distinction enables us to highlight the political potential of urban informality in the Global North.

Introduction

In recent years, scholars in anthropology, urban studies, and other disciplines have increasingly highlighted the presence of urban informality in the cities of the Global North. Emerging from Hart’s (1973) conception of the informal economy, the term “informality” has since been expanded to all aspects of social life, broadly referring to those practices that take place outside of the officially sanctioned channels and institutions or “ways of getting things done that precede formalization” (Koster & Smart 2019; Ledeneva, 2018, p. 1). Originating from urban studies of the Global South, the concept of urban informality has since been extended to the Global North, in what can be viewed as an instance of Roy’s (2009) “worlding of concepts.” ¹ Although earlier studies already pointed at informality in the Global North (see, e.g., Duneier, 2000), recent years have seen an outburst of literature that critically engages with urban informality in the Global North, accommodating a multitude of different perspectives. ²

Although we applaud this development, we also observe that the debate on urban informality in the Global North is characterized by analytical ambiguity and fragmentation. Urban informality, as a concept, has become somewhat of a container term, used to refer to a wide variety of different phenomena, while it is interpreted in different ways by different scholars in different contexts. In addition, there exists a “thematic bias,” in the sense that studies on informality in the Global North tend to focus on “pockets of poverty” or on the practices of subaltern populations (Haid & Hilbrandt, 2019). This has generated a need for clarity by means of more productive theoretical frameworks. In addition, as we will show, current conceptualizations of informal practices tend to run the risk of considering such practices as either political or apolitical. This, in turn, gives rise to a situation in which the actors engaged in such practices are too easily turned into either revolutionaries or passive victims. In this context, we propose a different approach to urban informality in the Global North by drawing on the work of the post-Marxist philosopher Jacques Rancière. His distinction between “police” and “politics” (Rancière, 2006) enables us to rethink the current debates on urban informality in the Global North and revalue the political potential of informality.

In this article, we will, first, provide an overview of the recent debates on urban informality and demonstrate how the concept has traveled from the Global South to the Global North and with what consequences. Second, we develop a more balanced view of urban informality in which we draw on Rancière’s distinction between “police” and “politics” to emphasize its political potential. Next, with this background, we critically assess the literature on urban informality in the Global North and show how this political potential is often reduced or repudiated by (a) integration of the informal into the formal, (b) the mobilization of the informal for policy purposes, and/or (c) the designation of urban informality as a “policy problem.” Finally, building on Rancière’s distinction between “police” and “politics,” we highlight the political potential of urban informality. Throughout the article, we shall illustrate our theoretical argument with numerous empirical examples.

Urban Informality: The “Worlding” of a Concept

Current imaginations of cities in the Global South as informal, deregulated, and mainly poor serve to set apart these cities from the more formalized, controled, and wealthier cities of the Global North. While these representations have generated a wealth of valuable information (see, for instance, Ahmed & Meenar, 2018; Milgram, 2011), urban scholars have demonstrated how cities of the South have been muted in terms of their own self-representation and have come to be known through foreign imaginations. The most dominant imagination of these cities suggests they are riddled with poverty, danger, exponential population growth, and general decline (Roy, 2011). Early postcolonial thinkers, such as Said (1978) and Spivak (1990), have repeatedly pointed to this power of representation, that is, the capacity of foreigners to speak on behalf of others and to construct an authoritative image of others and other places.

It is against this historical backdrop that Robinson (2002, p. 548) argues urban theorists have failed to incorporate the important insights provided by postcolonial critiques. This is largely because they have continued to take the ideal-typical “global city” as the norm to which all cities are compared. As a consequence, other cities, mainly those in the Global South, have come to be seen as simply “underdeveloped,” or worse, as exemplars of all that can go wrong (Roy, 2009, p. 820). In contrast, postcolonial scholars have opted for a more inclusive genre of urban studies: one in which authoritative knowledge on the urban condition is not solely based on a handful of cities in the Global North.

As Devlin (2018b, p. 530) notes, such a project demands not only that we enrich the literature with the urban experiences of hitherto excluded cities in the Global South, but also that we reconsider what we know, or thought we knew, about cities in the Global North. To do so, Roy (2009) proposes a “worlding” of concepts: a worlding in which we build theories on local urban experiences, yet leave open the option of whether they tell us something about “all cities” (Roy, 2009, p. 820). In this way, then, we can hope to arrive at a flow of concepts that, rather than merely travel southward, interconnect all cities around the world.

Following this strand of thought, urban informality has increasingly been recognized as a concept that, although originating from studies on cities in the Global South, can also be of value in the study of cities in the Global North. Indeed, more and more scholars emphasize that urban informal practices are not restricted to the Global South (Roy, 2011). Instead, they argue that informal practices are also an integral part of the dynamics of cities in the North, even though these practices often tend to be overlooked or, as Jaffe and Koster (2019) demonstrate, rebranded.

Against this background, we provide a brief overview of the growing body of literature on urban informality in the North since it unequivocally demonstrates that there is indeed little reason to doubt the presence of informal practices in northern cities. Yet, the richness and variety of the literature makes it very difficult to arrive at a clear understanding of northern informality. This is largely because the studies tend to differ on three aspects: the informal practices under study, the actors who undertake these practices, and finally, their deep-seated nature.

First, we note that scholars working on urban informality in the Global North have focused on a wide variety of informal urban phenomena. These include, for example, informal settlement camps (Picker, 2019; Solimene, 2019), squatting (Di Feliciantonio, 2017; Maestri, 2019; Pradel-Miquel, 2017; Pruijt, 2013; Sparks, 2017), unlawful (re)construction and renting (Chiodelli, 2019; Lombard, 2019), community gardens (Certomà & Notteboom, 2017; Eizenberg, 2011; Hou, 2014; Purcell & Tyman, 2014), street vending (Devlin, 2011; Ha, 2015; Vallianatos, 2014), leisure (Lara-Hernandez et al., 2020), and specific policies and governance (Jaffe & Koster, 2019). ³ This variety gives rise to a highly fragmented landscape of informality that, at times, hampers a clear and unambiguous understanding of the concept.

Second, the literature on urban informality in the Global North tends to be biased with regards to the actors involved: it suffers from what Haid and Hilbrandt (2019, p. 522) call a “thematic bias,” since the majority of these studies focus on the informal practices of immigrants and the poorest of the poor. ⁴ It is for this reason that we are sceptical about the capacity of those involved in these studies to abandon the boundaries that are usually drawn between the North and the South. There is the risk of portraying urban informality as something that only concerns a small and vulnerable proportion of society, or worse, as something that is foreign to the North but has been imported through immigration from the South. This is paralleled by the argument that theories on cities in the Global South have become more useful for understanding the Global North (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2012). ⁵ Although we highly value this dialogue, we also think it still entails a risk of representing informality as “deviant.” As Lombard (2019, p. 574) illustrates, public discourse on informal housing practices in the North often stresses “agentic” factors and therefore, blames the marginalized for the very existence of such informal practices.

Fortunately, researchers have increasingly acknowledged that informal urban practices are present in all strata of society across the globe. The study on informal housing in Italy by Chiodelli et al. (2021), for example, illustrates that informality is part of the urban experiences of many different actors, including the ethnic Roma people, the urban middle classes, and the state actors. In a similar vein, Lombard’s (2019, p. 572) study of the so-called shed-housing in the UK demonstrates that informal housing is not just a strategy of the poor to meet their housing needs, but is also deliberately pursued by landlords, since it allows them to rent lower quality housing to a larger number of tenants.

Third, and most importantly, most of the literature on urban informality in the North tends to argue that informal practices are, at least to a certain degree, a means to meeting the needs and desires that cannot or can only marginally be met through formal channels. Viewed in this way, informality enables poor Americans to achieve homeownership (Ward, 2014), middle-class Italians to build second homes (Chiodelli et al., 2021), Chicago’s immigrant street vendors to meet survival needs while facing the lack of formal employment opportunities (Martin, 2014), and so on. This view resonates with Bayat’s notion of “quiet encroachment,” which he developed in his study of popular politics in the Middle East. It refers to,

the noncollective but prolonged direct action of dispersed individuals and families to acquire the basic necessities of their lives (land for shelter, collective consumption or urban services, informal work, business opportunities, and public space) in a quiet and unassuming illegal fashion. (Bayat, 2010, p. 45)

Bayat argues that

when the state cannot provide adequate housing or jobs for the poor (and when the possible conventional legal channels, like lobbying, to achieve these goals are not trusted or get frustrated by state bureaucracy), the poor resort to direct squatting on land and shelters or illegally spreading their street businesses. (Bayat, 2010, p. 25)

In Bayat’s view, such encroachments take place in the ‘escapes, spaces, and uncontrollable holes’ where the state fails to exert its control and forsakes the population and their needs and desires.

Regarding the political nature of urban informality, Bayat demonstrates how these practices, although emerging from necessity, may accumulate and, through their sheer number, gain a political impetus that mobilizes and achieves societal change. Devlin (2019, p. 138), who refers to Bayat’s work in the Middle East to understand informality in the USA argues, “these actions, though primarily pragmatic and practical, can turn into a more recognizable progressive urban politics.” This potential political impact is what we see in many analyses of informality in northern cities. Informal practices, in such an understanding, may serve as a corrective to formal planning and its neglect of, or failure to recognise, bottom-up planning desires (Certomà, 2016; Meijer & Ernste, 2019). As a consequence, individuals are considered to informally organise themselves to meet their needs or desires by taking matters into their own hands, as well as by collaborating with formal planning institutions. At the same time, even more radical political interpretations of informality have emerged; in these readings, informal practices are a form of resistance against formal institutions. Practices such as squatting (Di Feliciantonio, 2017) and community gardens (Purcell & Tyman, 2014), for example, have been labeled as a form of resistance to the neoliberal city and its tendency to privatize, commodify, and marketize urban space: space that, as the authors imply, should be managed by the people rather than the state or market forces.

This brief overview of the study of urban informality in the Global North is by no means exhaustive and does not pretend to fully capture the many nuances in the debate. It does demonstrate, however, that the literature on urban informality in the Global North runs the risk of turning the concept into a catch-all term to the extent that it has come to encompass both practices that are permanent and those that are temporary, which are undertaken by a wide variety of actors ranging from the poor to the elite and from residents to state actors, and that are driven by need, desire, convenience, political motives, or a combination of these factors. This overview further illustrates the dichotomous conception of the political nature of urban informality, in which informality tends to be conceived as either a fairly apolitical attempt at meeting the needs and desires that formal institutions do not deliver or as a form of political resistance to the state and its exclusionary planning and regulatory practices.

This review of the literature demonstrates how the fragmented nature of the emerging discourses about urban informality impedes the concept’s critical edge. On the one hand, viewing urban informality as non-political or even apolitical tends to overlook socio-economic inequalities and may, therefore, strengthen the idea that informality is little more than a rather passive response to structural marginalization. On the other hand, conceiving of informal practices as (c)overt acts of resistance turns the people involved into political actors, whereas their informality might well be an expression of limited political agency. In the next section, we set out to transcend this dichotomy.

A Rancièrian Perspective on Urban Informality and “The Police”

In the previous section, we showed how urban informal practices tend to be analyzed either as political or as an apolitical means of survival. According to Devlin (2018a), in the Global North the politics of informality is either ignored or understood in the narrow sense of practices that deliberately defy the authorities. In what follows, we reflect on existing studies and move the analysis of urban informality beyond this either/or distinction.

An important observation is that various studies demonstrate how particular informal practices are legitimized while others are not. For example, Chicago’s gourmet food trucks owners are encouraged by the local authorities, while those of immigrant street vendors of food are not (Martin, 2014). Likewise, the unauthorized housing of Italy’s middle-class families are tolerated, while the informal housing of Roma people are deemed illegal (Chiodelli et al., 2021). In a similar vein, in the 1970s and 1980s, the authorities of Amsterdam tolerated informal, illegal sex work in the city’s famous Red Light District, while fighting such illegal activities in other parts of the city (Jaffe & Koster, 2019). ⁶ In New York City, unofficial “dollar vans” informally connect parts of the city and its people. These vans serve the needs of lower-class, immigrant urbanites who live in areas that are underserved by public transport. Some vans have received a license that comes with highly restrictive rules that forbid them to pick up passengers along New York City’s official bus routes (Reiss, 2014). Of course, the informal food trucks, the unauthorized housing practices, the sex work in Amsterdam, and the unofficial vans in NYC differ in certain respects, yet, as Roy (2011, p. 233) points out, one is essentially no more legal than the other; and no more informal than the other either.

What seems to be the largest difference between informal practices such as those mentioned above is that they are selectively legitimized: some are allowed to exist or even flourish, whereas other practices are criminalized and controled. To transcend this distinction, we draw upon the work of the French political philosopher Jacques Rancière and his so-called aesthetic perspective on politics. In his approach, society is home to a dominant order; an order that Rancière calls the “partition of the sensible” (Rancière, 1999, p. 28). In this order, all people, practices, and materiality are assigned a “proper place.” For certain groups, this means that they are seen, deemed beautiful, and are not just heard but also understood. At the same time, others may be physically present yet doomed to be invisible or considered ugly, while their utterances are interpreted as little more than incoherent and inappropriate noise; they are, in the words of Rancière (1999, pp. 29–30), “part of no part.” This order, then, determines who is seen, heard, and understood—hence, they are “sensible.”

For Rancière (1999, 2006), such an order, and the institutions, activities, and laws that protect and prolong its existence, constitutes the “police.” This use of the term “police,” however, refers not to “the truncheon blows of the forces of law and order,” but the polis of the city or civilization (Rancière, 1999, p. 28). In this way, urban planning can be considered both a reflection and an agent of the order that determines what spaces can be used by whom and for what ends (Grange & Gunder, 2019, p. 398). Take Martin’s (2014) study of street vending, for example, in which she shows how Chicago’s city council applauds the informal practices of some and criminalizes those of others. The practices of white, middle-class gourmet food truck holders are deemed legitimate because they are considered “beautiful” and a welcome addition to Chicago’s “world-city” image (Martin, 2014, p. 1874). Conversely, immigrant street vendors are ignored and their practices rejected because their practices provoke “ugly” images of backwardness and “Third World-ness” (Martin, 2014, p. 1872).

What Rancière argues, then, is that practices that are generally considered to be political, such as city council elections, collaborations between citizen and state, and discussions in planning departments, are, in fact, the police (Dikeç, 2002; Rancière, 1999, p. 31). This is because these practices do not, and cannot, challenge the order that divides society into two groups: one with and one without a political voice. After all, the struggles of the latter category of people and their demands are not seen, heard, understood, or taken seriously. As a corollary, in Rancière’s view, politics exists when the part that has no part in the dominant order contests and challenges the “ruling aesthetic sensibility” (Van Leerzem et al., 2016, p. 866). He defines democratic politics as “an act of political subjectification that disturbs the police order by polemically calling into question the aesthetic coordinates of perception, thought, and action” (Rancière, 2006, p. 84). In other words, a democratic politics takes place when those who are invisible and unheard openly contest the police order and make themselves visible and their words, suffering, needs, and demands acknowledged (Metzger et al., 2015, p.11).

Rancière’s work has inspired many critical urban scholars working on different themes (e.g., Dikeç, 2002; Grange & Gunder, 2019; Iveson, 2013; Nicholls & Uitermark, 2017; Swyngedouw, 2009). We argue that his theory also contributes to a better understanding of urban informality. Using a Rancièrian lens, we can transcend the dichotomy in which informality is either political or merely a means of survival, and recognize the political implications of informal practices. In the next section, we will further elaborate how a Rancièrian framework may contribute to improve the understanding of urban informality in the Global North.

Critically Assessing the Literature

We propose to use Rancière’s (1999) perspective of the fundamentally conflictual nature of politics to shed a new light on the debates about urban informality in the Global North. According to Rancière, at the heart of politics is “conflict over the existence of a common stage and over the existence and status of those present on it” (Rancière, 1999, p. 26). Urban informality becomes political to the extent that it gives rise to some form of confrontation. In other words, it is potentially political, not political per se. In many cases, this political potential is reduced or negated in one of three ways: (a) through the integration of the informal into the formal, (b) through the mobilization of the informal for policy purposes, and/or (c) through the designation of urban informality as a “policy problem.”

One way in which policymakers and planners have responded to urban informality in both the Global North and the Global South is through its formalization, that is, by formally accepting particular forms of informal practice as desirable (Chiodelli et al., 2021; Clough Marinaro, 2019; Martin, 2014). Although this “selective tolerance” of particular informal actors and practices may provide informal agents with certain benefits associated with the formalization of their practices (Vallianatos, 2014), it reduces the insurgent potential of the practice by restricting it to that which has been authorized. In other words, incorporating such practices into the formal sphere tends to “neutralize” them and rob them of their disruptive potential.

As Koch (2016) shows in his comparative study of licensing laws and street food vending in New York City, Seattle, and Portland (Oregon), the selective inclusion of street food vendors functions as a “key means of distinguishing what sorts of activities and objects are deemed appropriate in the shared spaces of the city” (Koch, 2016, p. 1247). Similarly, Ha (2015) shows how the formalization of street vending in Berlin has turned it into a very narrow and highly regulated form of employment. In other words, it has turned street vending into a practice that may exist but only if it follows strict guidelines. As a result, the informal practices of certain groups—mostly immigrants—have been regulated as a result of their formalization and frequent auditing (Ha, 2015, p. 89). Celata and Coletti’s (2018, p. 19) study of Rome’s community gardens reveals that the city council’s appreciation and recognition of these informal gardens permits them to say what these gardens should look like, where they may exist, and what the gardeners can do—which gardens meet the police aesthetics and which do not.

A second response to urban informality has been the mobilization of informal practices toward policy ends. Here, the political potential of urban informality is redirected toward the achievement of formally sanctioned goals. Rather than being granted formal status, in this case, the informal practices are recognized and even praised, but they are redirected to meet policy ends (Jaffe & Koster, 2019). In their analysis of the emergence of community gardens in Ghent, Belgium, Certomà, and Notteboom (2017) are critical of the prevailing view of urban gardening as a form of “counter-planning.” Instead, they outline the emergence of a new mode of planning, where “traditional” institutional arrangements are complemented by an “informal” mode of planning, emphasizing the ways in which this form of inclusion of informal practices gives rise to novel forms of governance. By analyzing these developments from a Rancière (1999, p. 31) point of view, we can understand such “co-productions” of in/formal planning as a manifestation of the police order. The actors on both ends need to see, hear, and acknowledge one another in order to be able to collaborate. Consequently, such collaborations at best fulfil the needs, desires, and wishes of those who are included—acknowledged—but not those who are not given a voice, who are a “part of no part.” As a study of informal initiatives in the Netherlands demonstrates, most of the successful initiatives are those initiated by “elderly, male, highly educated citizens, with good access to […] networks”; in other words, by those who are already acknowledged (Meijer & Ernste, 2019, p. 12). In these collaborations, as we see it, informality becomes incorporated in the functioning of the police order.

Thirdly, urban informal practices are frequently integrated into the urban-political landscape and designated as a “policy problem” to be solved through the formulation and application of policies. In this case, the strategic employment or transformation of informality is not the main goal; rather, the existence of informality is viewed as a fundamental problem that needs to be eradicated. The existence of urban informal practices is, in this context, often referred to as a “crisis” (Dikeç, 2002) and, in Rancière’s aesthetic terms, as ugly or unsightly. Policies aimed at the elimination of informal practices are generally framed in terms of upgrading (Roy, 2005).

Here, informality acquires the status of a problem, one that needs to be “solved” by means of policies. To illustrate this third type of negation of the informal, Solimene (2019) shows how the presence of the Roma people and the informal settlements in which they reside have come to be framed as an emergency or crisis situation (Solimene, 2019, p.4). What is important here is that the rhetoric of crisis and emergency serves to hide certain structural problems or, in other words, the so-called crisis locations are considered the problem rather than the consequence of certain structural problems. These framings may, on the one hand, serve to turn structural problems into personal and spatial ones, while, on the other hand, they enable formal institutions to gain public legitimacy by intervening in the problem areas—which often involves eradication (Solimene, 2019, p. 5).

In sum, analysis of the literature on urban informality demonstrates how the political foundation of urban informal practices is ignored, transformed, or reduced through these three different modes of practice. For that reason, many expressions of urban informality confirm Rancière’s partition of the sensible, since they are given a “proper” place in the order of all things.

The Political Potential of Urban Informality

In the previous section, we have outlined three ways in which the political potential of urban informal practices is marginalized or neutralized: through the formalization of urban informality, through the political mobilization of urban informality, and through the framing of urban informality as a “policy problem.” This analysis might lead one to conclude that in a Rancièrian perspective a genuine form of political urban informality is impossible and all urban informal practices are inevitably stripped of their political potential and subsumed under the police. This, however, is not what a Rancièran viewpoint on informality suggests. For Rancière, no police order is all-encompassing and can never foreclose the possibility of being contested from the “outside” (Metzger et al., 2015, p. 11). As already indicated above, we do view informality as capable of such contestation—that is, of being political—when it challenges the police order. As such, urban informality is political insofar as it strives for a fundamentally new partition of the sensible, with a different distribution of places and practices.

Maestri (2019) provides a valuable example of the fulfilment of a true aesthetic politics in her analysis of Roma people squatting in Rome, Italy. Here, this ethnic group is deemed to be “different from economic migrants and asylum seekers or refugees” (Maestri, 2019, p. 932), and as a consequence, they do not qualify for affordable housing. Maestri, however, cogently argues that Roma squatting does not just serve to fulfil their urgent housing needs. Rather, their involvement in the housing rights movement is a form of aesthetic politics, which unsettles the police order and destabilizes the established discourse in which they are depicted as Roma-nomads, who are different and can, therefore, also be differently treated. In fact, they use their squatting activities to posit themselves as being equal to others in need of housing and, in doing so, they also demand they be regarded and treated as such (Maestri, 2019, p. 936).

Another instance in which urban informal practices can be viewed as giving rise to a conflict with the police order and thus, as expressions of a political nature, comes to light in Karaliotas and Kapsali’s (2021) analysis of the Orfanotrofio housing squatters in Thessaloniki, Greece. Here, the influx of refugees during the 2015 “summer of migration” had led to the emergence of several temporary accommodation centres (TACs) that served to spatially compartmentalize the refugees’ presence in pre-designated areas (Karaliotas & Kapsali, 2021, p. 8). In response to the refugees’ exclusion, a group of activists occupied a vacant building near the city-centre to informally provide for the housing needs of the migrants and refugees. The squatting lasted for 7 months, involving both migrants, as well as refugee solidarity activists and members of various NGOs, and resulted in the creation of a collective political project in the hostile context of the Greek refugee crisis.

As Karaliotas and Kapsali (2021) show, the Orfanotrofio housing squatting actors—that is, migrants, refugees, and activists—contested the logic of the police in several ways. Firstly, by squatting in a building in an urban centre, they “disrupted the dominant ordering of the ‘refugee crisis’ that sought to keep refugees invisible and away from everyday life in urban centres” by placing them in the TACs (Karaliotas & Kapsali, 2021, p. 12). By refusing to remain in their “proper place,” the refugees proclaimed their own visibility. In a similar vein, the activists encouraged the refugees to assert their visibility in public life by walking around the city centres, using public transportation, and cycling in the waterfront: “acts through which the newcomers refused to stay in the place assigned to them” (Karaliotas & Kapsali, 2021, p. 13). This housing squatting managed to provide a home for refugees and, in doing so, the squatters erected a “city of solidarity” against the “city of exclusion.”

Finally, the creation of community gardens in New York City provides another valuable case in examining the dynamic politics of urban informality in the Global North. In the 1970s, prompted by the proliferation of vacant lots throughout the city as a result of an economic recession, a group known as the Green Guerrillas began to reshape these lots into bottom-up managed community gardens (Purcell & Tyman, 2015). Interpreting the emergence of these community gardens from a Rancièrian perspective allows us to see how the police order of the city was radically challenged by the creation of a “commons,” one that is “collectively produced by residents” and that “belong[s] to nobody and hence, to everybody” (Eizenberg, 2011, p.765). Formulating this in terms of Rancière’s partition of the sensible shows how the city and the way it is perceived can be reshaped through the creation of an egalitarian space and logic, which challenges the hegemonic distribution of places and practices.

We should be wary, however, of undue optimism: in this case, the “commons” were eventually destroyed by the “Green Thumb” program implemented by the city government of New York City (Purcell & Tyman, 2015), as well as by the eventual commercialization of the community gardens and their resulting integration into the city’s neoliberal order (Eizenberg, 2011). Importantly, however, the activities of the “Green Guerrillas” had lasting effects on the political management of space in New York City. A rather naïve view of the subsumption into the police order, in which bottom-up political activity is entirely eradicated by the all-consuming state project, is thus not appropriate. We argue, instead, that attention should be paid to the dynamic nature of the politics of urban informality. This politics is not a pre-given attribute and it arises from the particular ways in which it engages with the police order. Accordingly, urban informal practices are neither political nor apolitical by default. Instead, urban informality represents a potential politics that is realized only to the extent it gives rise to an aesthetic politics that radically challenges the dominant order’s partition of the sensible.

Conclusion

The increasing scholarly attention given to the presence of urban informality in the Global North has given rise to a wide variety of theoretical perspectives on the topic. Although the current literature helps us to understand informality in both the Global South and North, it also contributes to theoretical confusion and erroneous assumptions. We have reconceptualized in this article some of the existing literature on urban informality in the Global North. Moreover, we have proposed a Rancièrian theoretical perspective on urban informality in the North. This perspective sheds light on how the political nature of urban informality is not necessarily self-evident but relates to the extent to which urban informal practices are generative of conflict, that is, of reshaping what Rancière refers to as the dominant partition of the sensible.

Viewed from this perspective, many urban informal practices to which political sentiments are attributed, turn out to be a (re)confirmation of the dominate police order, since they have been either formalized, integrated into policy agendas or designated as a “policy problem.” Indeed, a Rancièrian perspective shows us how urban informality is, in many cases, depoliticized. We do not intend to imply that urban informality is never truly political, but instead advocate for a different view of the political nature of urban informality. In a Rancièrian view, urban informality, in its avoidance and reworking of laws, its creative negotiations with state representatives, and its questioning of what is considered beautiful and civilized, constantly challenges the established order. These confrontations have a political potential and may even have the promise of radical democracy. This perspective, we have argued, provides a space for rethinking informality in the cities of the Global North, as well as the Global South.

Reconceptualizing informality may also be useful for planning professionals, especially those who pursue progressive agendas that are oriented toward promoting social justice. As this article has shown, the relationship between informal actors and formal planning bodies is a complex one and even the most well-meaning attempts at formalizing informal practices may bring about adverse effects, as their inclusion may, ironically, hamper their attempts at claiming a voice or fulfilling a need.

Viewed from a Rancièrian perspective, the inclusion of practices that challenge the police order into that very police order can lead to the co-optation of these practices, which silences their protest, defuses their resistance, and removes their political potential. This, of course, is not to say that there are no scenarios in which formalization may lead to improvement: rather, it urges planning professionals to be aware that their interference may rob the informal practices, as much as the actors who undertake them, of their disruptive political potential.

Finally, the last decade has produced multiple, insightful accounts of informality and its political potential: some pointing to the revolutionary potential of informal actors, and others revealing informal practices to be a form of (c)overt everyday resistance or providing successful responses to urgent necessities. Approaching these different manifestations of urban informality from a Rancièrian perspective attunes us to their radical political potential. This perspective also shows how the polis tries to keep urban informality out, eradicate it, and dismiss it as uncivilized or mobilize and formalize it to assign it to a place within the dominant order.