The oddity of desiring informality

Abstract

Informality has become central to urban sustainability and one of the most polemically debated topics in modern urban studies and human geography. Finn's analysis intends to bring critical geo-historical colonial research to this debate and remains an important contribution. In this essay, my main argument – which expands on Finn's work – is that informality in its current conception does not comprehend fully the colonial and neocolonial structures in Africa and fails to engage deeply enough to recognize informality's indispensability and alter existing notions and patterns of inequalities. I reflect on the embodiment of informality as Africa's urban culture and argue for its support to deliver sustainable outcomes.

Introduction

Informality has shaped, influenced, and framed mainstream urban thinking, policy, and practice for nearly half a century. Yet, its conceptual debates and practices are crowded in top-down colonial-inspired models and ideals. Frequently, accounts of urban informality are presented as a straightforward dualistic division, with formality as the ideal and informality as an aberration (Banks et al., 2020). In the early 1960s, Rostow (1960) developed the economic growth stages indicating that as a country advances in development, informality is subsumed by formality (‘modernity’). Yet, the lived experiences in the Global South today show otherwise despite considerable progress in development indicators (Azunre et al., 2022), demonstrating informality's durability and shifting provisionalites. Can we support informality to deliver sustainable outcomes rather than attempting to denigrate or eliminate it via (neo)-colonial agendas? After all, structuralist and Marxist thinkers (e.g. Castells and Portes, 1989; Moser, 1978) have persistently considered informality as fundamental to the operations of capitalist states.

While it is true that informality has become a hegemonic idea in urban development over the years, as this essay discusses, I would argue its structural dynamics are embedded in colonial and neocolonial agendas that augment inequality under the rubric of informality. Finn (2025) sets out a stimulating argument, bringing together a constructive set of both historical and contemporary resources through which urban studies and human geography research might respond and possibly trigger the development of deeper theorization of informality. The author's focus on colonization and urbanization is a welcome and useful addition to conceptual narratives for evaluating the current gaps in the different debates on informality. Finn's (2025) analysis of the structural dynamics of formal/informal dialectics in Africa (focusing on Zambia Copperbelt) is an opportune prompt for the urban studies and human geography disciplines to question the historical and prevailing hegemony of the informality discourse and its practice in African cities.

I, therefore, concur with Finn that the understanding of informality needs to be embedded in historical, structural, and multi-scalar processes, as well as neocolonial agendas, in order to properly critique and transform the trajectory towards harnessing its potential to address development gaps across African cities. However, within this context, we must be transparent and balanced in our characterization of the harms and wrongs associated with informality, and accurate in demonstrating the positive lived experiences of informality across African cities. This is important to address the ‘too often’ negative descriptions that give reason to colonial-inspired foundational notions of deprivation, inequality, and poverty. Academic works have fortunately brought several important points into the relevant discussion – many of which are cited by Finn.

In this contribution, I argue that the structure of informality that produces inequalities in African cities transcends colonial influences to include neocolonial agendas. I reflect on the unpleasant historical (colonial) framings of informality that undermine structural foundations to produce inequality and segregation, and further analyze its contemporary relationship with ‘urban sustainability’. As informality defines, shapes, and frames the urban fabric in African cities, I argue for the need to embrace and promote its growth potential to address critical urban development challenges, and question the colonial inspired agenda that creates inequalities under the pretext of resolving informality. This argument aligns with those of critical postcolonial scholars (e.g. De Satgé and Watson, 2018) that call for a southern turn to urban studies or theory production and propose to move away from importing simplistic Global North notions to reading and analyzing African cities. This argument further lends credence to the dislocation-relocation debate (see Palat Narayanan, 2022).

Informality as an expression of African urban culture: Colonial and neocolonial structural influences

I agree with the historical ontology of informality as predating colonization presented by Finn (2025). He offers important geo-historical account of colonial influences that disrupt the foundation of indigenous informality and produce spatial segregation and socio-economic inequalities to the debate. The mark of colonial production of segregation and inequalities remains prevalent across many African cities (see Azunre and Boateng, 2023). Since the advent of colonization in Africa, urban planning policies and laws have been formulated and implemented across African cities to advance and champion the pursuit of a modern (formal) city (Abdoul, 2005). In a variety of contexts, urban planning and management agendas in African cities have consistently exhibited an obsession with the pursuit of order as a sign of modernity. While this, in part, is unsurprising considering that ‘formal planning’ was introduced by colonial occupiers and planners operating across African cities who were trained with colonial-inspired planning ideals, the distortions and inadequacies of ‘formal’ planning systems in African cities are overwhelming and need to be acknowledged. Importantly, this situation transcends the boundaries of African cities. For example, Caldeira (2008: 51) presents the case of São Paulo, noting the obsession with modernity (formality) reflected in ‘the optimistic imaginaries anchored in the notions of progress, development and growth’ which have emerged as a structural hurdle to city authorities in managing the present formations of the city. Even in the twenty-first century, many African cities consistently model their urban planning regimes and systems based on the proven unworkable colonial systems (Azunre and Boateng, 2023). The conscious relegation of informality through the (neo) colonial structure of urban policy and planning practice has not led to its extinction. Ironically, informality is frequently blamed for the production of inequalities.

While this formal/informal dialectic has tended to create segregation and exclusion in the forms of production, consumption, and accumulation, generating widespread inequalities, urban informality remains dominant across African cities and other Global South regions (Finn and Cobbinah, 2023), providing opportunities for urban survival – employment, housing, transport, land governance, and environmental conservation. Grant (2021), using Accra as a case study, observes that informality has become a strategy for the state, powerful elites, and the bourgeoisie – when it conveniences them – as well as the subaltern groups, and is wired into the operations of municipalities, reflecting Banks et al.'s (2020: 234) understanding of how ‘diverse groups might exploit spaces of informality for their own ends’.

Yet, neo-colonial attempts to further discredit the relevance of informality continue to emerge in African cities. For example, the production of ‘new cities’ (Korah, 2020) – a modern city to address the growth of informality and create a formal city – has become common across cities of Accra (Ghana), Kigali (Rwanda), Nairobi (Kenya), and the Gauteng province (South Africa). Although the phenomenon of new cities has become popular mainly in the last decade, emerging research suggests that it is not addressing the problem of informality but is rather exacerbating inequalities (see Korah et al., 2020). Relatedly, Sassen's (2018) normative argument about the global city fantasy has inspired a ‘a global city allure’ in many Global South cities incentivizing city authorities in Africa to discredit, criminalize and eliminate informality.

The quest to be ‘on the map’ (Robinson, 2002) is ironically instrumentalized by city authorities to evict/demolish informality further compounding inequalities. These are all neo-colonial practices that have structurally created inequality and segregation. For instance, urban configurations emerging because of ‘new cities’ development are occupied mainly by political elites and bourgeoisies and make uncertain the survival of vulnerable urban populations. These neocolonial agendas lend credence to Finn's work, demonstrating how historical and contemporary colonial-inspired pursuits of modernity (formality) bring forward an uncaring agenda towards informality and its associated inequalities and structures. As argued by Kamete (2013: 17), it is in these exigencies and inadequacies associated with the persistent pursuit of a modern (formal) city that has tended to produce subalternity and legitimately ‘detested ways of life and modes of practice’ across many African cities.

This, of course, is not to argue that Western approaches towards informality in African cities have been negative. In fact, there are cases where informality has been recognized as an enabler of development (see Charlot et al., 2011) and programmes have been implemented to strengthen the gains of informality and reduce inequalities in poor communities. Characteristic examples include the participatory upgrading of informal settlements in South Africa (see Odendaal, 2007), and the Muqattam Zabbaleen Community Improvement Project in Egypt. Notwithstanding the motivations behind these programmes, Kamete (2013) describes these genuine attempts as socially inclusive, decentralized, participatory and democratic, contrasting the highly centralized, expert-driven, top-down authoritarian modernity (formality) agendas. However, the persistent perception of cities ‘as reservoirs of … modernity and progress amidst a host of threats from their uncivilized “outsides” (Popke and Ballard, 2004: 101), underlies the extent of disapproval towards informality. This unbridled pursuit of modernity (‘formality’), reflected in an incessant obsession with the principles of order and conformism, has produced significant inequalities in cities. Yet, the disregard of the realities of informality by city planning authorities has yielded professionalized bureaucracies connected to colonial-inspired urban modernity fantasies (Swilling et al., 2002). Some scholars have observed since the 1990s (e.g. Rakodi, 1993: 207) that planners in African cities who are at the forefront and frontline of actualizing the ideals of urban modernity (‘formality’), exhibit ‘little understanding about how the poor survive’. Perhaps, it is not a lack of understanding of how the poor live but an indication of hostile attitudes towards what they consider ‘spatialized deviance’ (Kamete, 2013: 18) which is established in colonial and neocolonial ideologies against informality.

Conclusion

In this essay, I extended Finn's argument of historical colonial narratives in the production of inequalities framed under informality by demonstrating how neocolonial agendas continue to produce structural inequalities in African cities. I argued that a positive attitude towards informality as the backbone of urban survival could become a point of reference with which to embed the discourse of the relationship between African urban culture and informality in a multi-scalar process. Second, it can be used to analyze the systemic disadvantages of informal experiences created and enforced through colonial and neocolonial agendas. Finally, support for informality embodies the assessment of the existing hegemonies of urban informality. Cultural relations, such as spiritual ties to land governance, social networks, flexible means of transport, employment opportunities, and housing, produced via informality can offer first insights into the value of recognizing and integrating informality into African urban culture. These five cultural relations are framed by processes and decisions at multiple spatial scales and demonstrate the multi-scalar character and the relational nature of informality in African cities. This understanding is important for analyzing the historical and contemporary colonial influences on the structures of informality that are embedded in the production of inequalities and segregation.

Changing the narrative of informality in relation to African urban culture has the potential to cause a cessation in the incessant negative characterizations, and address inequalities by empowering residents economically (via job creation), socially (via housing), culturally (via land management), and environmentally (via protection of important natural environments including sacred sites). The study of urban informality in Africa is in part a reflection of colonial spatial control, as Finn argues. In this sense, theorization and practice of informality cannot be apprehended as a modernist or contemporary confined condition, in which the negative descriptions such as inequalities emerge and require treatment. Rather, it is both a field of multiple relations that are embedded deeply into local culture, and an outcome of segregated colonial and neocolonial spatial practices.

Urban planning in theory is generally expected to address these structural limitations and harness informality's potential. Within this context, planning practices that unfortunately aligned with such a colonial spatial dialectic-like conception of informality need to be questioned by researchers. A rethink of the training (education) of the planners involved in the implementation of these colonially ingrained processes is also required. Accordingly, new understandings of planning for and with informality that challenge existing hegemonies and recognize urban informality as an opportunity rather than an aberration should be encouraged and developed to address colonial and neocolonial structural inequalities.