Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia (review)

This book consists of essays produced for a two-day symposium in 2001 at the University of California, Berkeley, combined with several pieces added later, and is edited by two faculty members at Berkeley who have contributed four out of the twelve pieces. The essays fall into three sections that privilege cross-regional commentary and analysis: “Liberalization, Globalization, and Urban Informality”; “The Politics of Urban Informalities”; and “Transnational Interrogation.” In practice, the three-part organization of the book is unnecessary for an appreciation of these chapters, which range from empirical excursions to methodological and theoretical inquiries. It may be more useful to follow the blurb on the back cover by Manuel Castells, who suggests that “it should be mandatory reading for courses on urbanization and on development studies.” The chapters juxtapose viewpoints on fieldwork, data structures, analytical categories, and transnational strategies that constitute, as Ananya Roy points out in the final essay, the components of a university-level pedagogy. Used from this perspective, the volume provides instructors with a series of “historicized lessons” that, taken as a whole or in part, may allow advanced undergraduate or graduate students to comprehend research on the universe experienced by perhaps one-quarter of humanity.

Several of the chapters are investigations of the informal condition’s relationship to the global economy and the state. The shortest piece, and perhaps the most impressive, is a discussion by Arif Hasan of informal housing and employment regimes in Karachi. Coming from an architectural design and planning background, taking the viewpoint of the nongovernmental organization, the author gives us short, punchy sentences portraying the forces and agencies that make inevitable the urban slum and institutionalized insecurity. Oren Yiftachel and Haim Yakobi provide an introductory theoretical envelope in their chapter on “urban ethnocracy” and “the production of segregative urban space” (212), but the heart of their chapter—an empirical description of the Israeli state’s “internal frontier” policies in the “Negev Regiopolis”—is a powerful demonstration of neoracist planning in practice. In a succinct summary of her book City Requiem, Calcutta (2003), Roy describes how New Communism uses flexible strategies of “urban developmentalism” to perpetuate informal ownership—and in a bold addendum, she attempts an analysis in five pages that shows how regimes of accumulation are regimes of gender and the family.

Some of the chapters are empirical excursions that demonstrate the feasibility of methodologies. Janice E. Perlman’s contribution rests on a series of follow-up interviews in Rio de Janeiro during the late 1990s with about one-third of the persons originally contacted in the early 1970s during the preparation of her book Myth of Marginality (1976). Her work demonstrates how oral interactions enable the assembly of impressive statistical arrays that not only describe the lived environment but also allow critiques of nomenclature positing a “new marginality” amid an intensified lawlessness and globalized consumerism. Ahmed M. Solomon’s “Tilting at Sphinxes” provides the most policy-oriented piece in this collection, describing a typology and quantifying semi-informal, squatting, and hybrid or exformal housing in Cairo and Alexandria, potentially enabling the state to regularize titles. Peter M. Ward’s piece on Texas colonias summarizes survey work presented to the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs on “quasi-formal homestead subdivisions” that may total sixteen hundred sites with more than four hundred thousand persons. This is a welcome contribution to a field that often creates a “third world” envelope around informality research—a discourse addressed (and perpetuated) at several points in this book (2, 80, 95, 308–11).

The remaining essays present category debates and theoretical language that contextualize the multidisciplinary field studying informality. Included in this group are two short, introductory essays by the editors that place the informal within an American lineage of urban studies. The following piece by Alan Gilbert continues this approach. It “applauds” Latin American literature on urbanization (13) and then provides...