This project is part of the New Geographies, New Pedagogies project at the Institute of International Studies; UC Berkeley. Funded by the Ford Foundation.

Urban Informality

A Transnational Perspective

Introduction

If the previous fin-de-siecle was marked by rabid discourses about the chaos of the First World metropolis, then at the turn of this century, the Third World metropolis has emerged as the trope of social disorganization and unfathomable crisis. And if urban planning emerged as a 19th century drive to rationalize the city, then now the ideology of "civil society" -- a celebration of grassroots movements and self-management by the urban poor -- bears the new millennial promise of taming the urban crisis (United Nations, 1996; Douglass and Friedmann, 1998). However, this idiom of crisis, and the pendulum swing to a utopian recovery of Third World urban communities, are both deeply problematic. Very simply, they close off the need for historical investigation and fail to take account of the diverse trajectories of urbanization and development that characterize the contemporary Third World.

The proposed project seeks to develop an analytical framework for serious investigation of the historical specificities of Third World urbanization -- what Roberts (1995) terms "sources of diversity." The starting point of the project will be a well-established genre of research on urban informality,¹ much of it conducted in Latin America in the 1970s and early 1980s. The project will seek to restock this Latin American toolkit by developing a transnational framework of urban research that would draw upon South Asian and Middle Eastern experiences. There is of course the rather obvious need to rethink the generalized use of Latin American concepts (AlSayyad, 1993). But there is also the less obvious, but equally vital, imperative to take account of the changing nature of informality under conditions of liberalization. While there is burgeoning research on this matter in Latin America -- for example, the study of ejido refomms (Jones and Ward, 1998) -- it is our belief that the South Asian and Middle Eastem contexts have much to contribute to this issue. And it is here that the question of a transnational perspective becomes of crucial importance.

We emphasize the idea of a trananational rather than comparative framework because we do not intend to search for regularities between different Third World experiences. Instead, we envision a project that would take account of the specific global connections that mark this historical moment of Third World urbanization. Indeed, this attempt to globalize the local and localize the global would be greatly enlivened by the intersection of Latin American/South Asian/Middle Eastern experiences.

There are two specific elements to this project. First, much of the most rapid and volatile urbanization in the Third World is taking place at the rural-urban interface, often through the informal subdivision of agricultural land and expedited by liberalizing reforms. Taking account of these processes requires theorizing the "agrarian question" in tandem with the "urban question." We believe that this possibility is afforded by the ongoing South Asian debates on agrarian structure and sectoral diversification. Second, the process of liberalization requires paying renewed attention to state power -- euphemized in the policy debates as "state capacity." The Middle Eastern context provides a gamut of political regimes, from settler politics in Israel to authoritarian liberalization in Egypt, that raise provocative questions about the tremendous variations in political economy that shape urban process.

Here, our intent is not to transplant concepts from one context to another. In fact, we emphasize that translations are always "faithless" rather than "faithful" appropriations (Tsing, 1997). We instead intend to engage in transnational interrogation: using each context to pose questions of the other. The resultant analytical framework, we hope, will allow theorization of the ways in which "differentiation, particularity and perhaps uniqueness arise through the interdependencies between objects or places, between the whole and the local."(Sayer, 1991: 297-8)

Informal Urban Development in the Era of Liberalization

The first round of path-breaking research on urban informality was conducted in Latin America in the 1970s and early 1980s and involved a wonderful diversity of political scientists, anthropologists, and sociologists (Collier, 1976; Perlman, 1976; Eckstein, 1977; Portes and Walton, 1981; Castells, 1983; Gilbert and Ward, 1985; de Soto, 1989). These studies not only brought to light the crucial role of informal processes in shaping Latin American cities, but also situated informality firmly within the larger politics of populist mobilizations and state power. This Latin American legacy is tremendously useful when used not as a repository of universalized models, but instead as the source of analytical concepts, the precise meanings of which can only be fixed in historically specific settings. It is in this sense that these ideas have been reworked in the crucible of some Middle Eastern (AlSayyad, 1993) and South Asian (Roy, 1999) contexts.

However, contemporary processes of informal urban development require restocking this analytical toolkit. Starting in the 1980s, and in much of the Third World, the illegal subdivision of agricultural land seems to have become the largest source of informal urban development (Smart, 1986; Payne, 1989). This process implies some important breaks with earlier forms of urban informality, two of which are particularly relevant for this project. First, these new forms of informal urban development are taking place at the rural-urban interface -- liminal zones of middle-class suburbanization and transnational real estate investment that are being created by complex, and often bizarre, intersections of rural and urban restructuring. The rapid transformation of the ejidos on the outskirts of Mexico City (Jones and Ward, 1998), the incredible volatility of land transactions on Calcutta's eastern fringes (Roy, 1999), and the upscale gated communities in theme-park like settings on Cairo's sandy edges (Mitchell, 1999) are a few examples. Second, these emerging patterns of informal urban development are often taking place on private or privatized, rather than public, plots of land. In other words, they involve new and shifting configurations of actors: real estate developers, transnational investors, liberalizing government officials, bourgeois urbanites, and peasants with de facto land rights.

These issues signal the importance of investigating liberalization as a process of socio-spatial restructuring, manifested in such things as informal urban development and negotiated through elaborate legal and extra-legal systems of regulation. Such an examination becomes even more imperative given the recent celebration of urban informality in a whole spectrum of policy positions. From the World Bank (1991; see also Baross, 1990) agenda of "enabling" informal urban development to new-found enthusiasm for self-help strategies of the urban poor (Douglass and Friedmann, 1998), there is a growing consensus on the benefits of harnessing the efficiencies of urban informality. It is important to keep in mind that these catchwords of "enablement" and "community" reinforce, rather than challenge, the austerity agenda of neo-liberalism (Roberts, 1994), euphemizing power and politics in the guise of "governance" and "state capacity."

The proposed project will seek to create an analytical framework for the critical investigation of informal urban development in the era of liberalization. As detailed in the following sub-sections, there are exciting research -- and policy -- possibilities afforded by the intersection of South Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latin American experiences.

1. The Rural-Urban Interface

The tremendous expansion of informal subdivisions, through the illegal urbanization of agricultural land, necessitates a renewed attention to the long-standing question of peasants in the city. This issue has always required theorizing the classical "agrarian question" (Kautsky, 1899; see Watts, 1996) in tandem with the "urban question" (Castells, 1977), often through an examination of migration and (semi) proletarianization, and Latin American theorists are well-versed in this research. However, liberalization seems to require a somewhat different focus -- the spatial interface of rural and urban structures manifested on the suburbanizing fringes of metropolitan regions (Roberts, 1989). In the Asian context, some geographers have speculated about the emerging spatiality of worker-peasantries: thus McGee's (1995) idea of desakota regions or Koppel's (1991) talk of a "middle ground." While these ideas are a starting point in thinking about these 1iminal zones -- the possible sites of new forms of informal urbanization -- they tell us little about the political economy of rural-urban linkages.

A more rigorous intellectual framework is afforded by ongoing South Asian debates about agrarian structure and rural-urban linkages (Harriss and Moore, 1984; Breman and Mundle, 1991; Harriss, 1991; Saith, 1992; Byres, 1994). These studies point to the specificities of agrarian relations as well as to the possible changes being wrought by liberalizing reforms (Varshney, 1995; Breman, 1996). They thus afford the potential of relating urban informality to the changing political economy of peasamtnes, includmg the restructuring of rural emd urban regulations such as land ceilings. Hart's (1998: 333) critique of the post-Fordist debates applies equally to the research on urbanization: "the key question is how to come to grips with the multiple, nonlinear, and divergent trajectories through which industrial capital in various guises encounters and intersects with enormously varied agrarian conditions."

We believe that the South Asian debates can help pose and answer this key question. Precisely such issues are being thrown up by the ejido reform controversy in Mexico and by the rapid loss of agricultural land in Egypt. In both cases, the rapid retreat of the state from long-standing agrarian reformism is shaping the dynamics of urban informality and reconfiguring the structure of political and social entitlements.

The South Asian perspective thus raises two sets of interesting issues about informal urban development under conditions of liberalization, particularly in light of the empirical resonances with Latin American and Middle Eastern contexts: What transactions and struggles make agricultural land available for informal urbanization? What are the forms of vulnerability that are being engendered by these processes of informality?

2. Political Regimes

Perhaps the most obvious way of thinking about the connections between liberalization and urban informality is through the idea of "urban developmentalism" -- the entrepreneurial imperatives of a transnational capitalism as wel1 as the institutional context of neo-liberal policy-making. And yet, it is also becoming clear that in most political contexts, urban developmentalism is being carefully balanced with older populisms -- and that there are tremendous variations in how these complex alliances are being managed on the ground.

Both Latin America and South Asia have rich traditions of theorizing about the structures and mechanisms of state power. However, the Middle East experience has rarely been incorporated into this discussion (Richards and Waterbury, 1990). For example, the Egyptian case highlights how religion is increasingly invoked in urban struggles. Whether it is the sprawl of informal districts that surroumd Cairo or the pubIic housmg projects that have been appropriated by residents, there can be no denial of the rise of a populist fundamentalism and its challenge to the state (Elkadi, 1988). Urban informality in the context of wartime Lebanon points to the crucial role of ethnic politics (Nasr and Hanf, 1987). This is also true in the case of Israel/ Palestine where the informal land rights of settlers have been intensely ethnicized to the point that they are now a major hurdle in the peace process (Yiftachel, 1995, 1998). The Israeli state, having prevented the Paleshnians from building legally, left them with no alternative but to expand informally (the Gaza strip can be considered the largest squatter settlement in the entire world). That same state now finds itself in the position of having to declare its own citizens "squatters" to justify their forced removal as a part of political compromise (NY Times, Nov 10, 1999).

Indeed, a Middle East perspective raises another set of interesting questions not fully studied in the Latin American and South Asian contexts: What role does ethnicity play in urban informality? How does the discourse on religion and ethnicity frame some of the basic rights of citizenship, e.g. access to land?

Outcomes

Aside from the inherent value of such a transnational perspective, participants in the project would be able to take away with them a fresh approach to the study of informality in the era of liberalization. At the core of the Crossing Borders initiative is the belief that area studies scholars can indeed transcend the borders of both their disciplines and their areas. However, scholars interested in comparative and transnational work always approach such exercises with the hope of extracting lessons from other regions to apply to their own. If the Crossing Borders were to achieve its objectives, then this traditional strategy has to be reversed. It is our intention to get the South Asianists to contribute that unique insight which may potentiaUy explain an issue within the rural-urban continuum in the context of the Middle East, or to get the Middle East analyst to be the translator of a condition of ethnicity in a Latin American or South Asian context. It is our hope that this Crossing Borders proposal will contribute to unsettling the landscape of potentiaUy regimented area studies.

Proposed Activities and Timeline

The proposed project has two components: a two-day symposium and a graduate seminar. The two-day symposium will involve ten invited speakers all engaged with questions of urban informality in Latin America, South Asia, and the Middle East, but from different disciplinary perspectives. The following are the proposed phases of this element of the project:

Symposium Preparation (Sprlng 2000}

This preparatory phase will involve the articulation of sub-themes, panels, choice of speakers, invitations to speakers, and publicity. A particularly important component of this phase will be the choice of speakers -- the list of names below is quite tentative.

Symposium (Fall 2000)

The symposium will most likely be held in September 2000. It wil1 be organized around a few panels with a total of ten invited speakers (most likely four South Asianists, four Middle East experts, and two Latin Americanists). The first day of the symposium will be open to the public. The second day will be a closed workshop devoted to discussing analytical and methodological issues within a transnational framework. It wil1 be informed by the broader spirit of building a community of scholars interested in collaborating on these issues and in possibly contributing to an edited volume based on the symposium proceedings. We see this edited volume as a potential second phase of this project to be pursued in Spring 2001. Some possible speakers include the following.

	Scholar	Discipline	Site of Specialty
South Asia	Jan Breman Ashwani Saith John Harriss T.G. McGee	Anthropology Development Studies Anthropology Geography	India/Java India/SE Asia India South/SE Asia
Middle East	Ismail Serageldin Oren Yiftachel Galila Elkadi Saad ed-din-lbrahim	Urban Planning Political Geography Urban Planning Political Sociology	Middle East/ North Africa Israel Egypt Egypt and the Gulf
Latin America	Peter Ward Bryan Roberts Manuel Castells	Urban Sociology Urban Sociology Urban Sociology	Mexico Mexico/Latin America Latin America

Graduate Seminar, Fall 2000

The second component of the project is a seminar to be co-taught by AlSayyad and Roy, primarily directed at Ph.D. students conducting urban research in various disciplines. It will be offered in both the departments of City Planning and Architecture and already has approval from the respective chairs of those departments. We envision a course firmly rooted in a transnational approach to urban issues, a framework that will be set up early in the semester by the symposium.

Note on the Collaborators

We both personally have tremendous enthusiasm for such a project. AlSayyad has written and taught about issues of urban informality within a comparative and interdisciplinary framework for the last ten years. He is currently engaged in researching housing reforms in various Middle Eastern/ North African states. Roy recently completed a dissertation project on Calcutta's informal urbanization in the context of a liberalizing socialist government. She has taught, and is currently teaching, courses that are explicitly organized around a transnational approach to issues of urbanization and development. AlSayyad and Roy have worked together earlier as Executive Director and Executive Coordinator respectively of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments (IASTE) -- an interdisciplinary research organization that is based in the Department of Architecture -- and have extensive experience organizing conferences and related publications.

1. By urban informality we are referring to research that directly takes on informal processes as manifested in the urban built environment. While there are obvious continuities and overlaps with the informal economy, we are restricting our discussion -- and this project -- to informal urbanization.
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