Reconsidering Informality: Perspectives from Urban Africa (review)

Reconsidering Informality consists primarily of case studies taken from a variety of African cities including Bissau, Lusaka, Harare, Dar es Salaam, Nairobi, Maputo, Maseru (Lesotho), and Pointe-Noire (Congo-Brazzaville). The book contains revised papers presented at the 2000 conference "The Formal and Informal City—What Happens at the Interface?" convened by the Cities, Governance and Civil Society in Africa (1997–2002) research program. The editors define the informal city as consisting of extralegal housing and unregistered economic activities, while the formal city is defined as the city government and its agents and institutions along with rules and regulations developed to control urban space (5). These formal and informal cities are hardly discrete, intersecting at various key points such as the mobilization of regulatory frameworks in response to the shifting boundaries of informalities or the arbitrary enforcement of rules by local or national governments.

For most urban residents in the cases provided here, access to employment, shelter, and social services is precarious. Existing legal, institutional, and financial frameworks are typically inadequate to deal with ongoing urban developments on the continent. As all of the essays confirm, there is a significant disjunction between legality (as defined by the state) and legitimacy (as defined by participants). Responding to the inadequacies of the formal city arrangements and the underlying conditions of uncertainty, city dwellers have sought solutions in the informal cities that in official eyes are illegal, extralegal, or unregistered. Such practices have grown enormously over the last few decades in the face of neoliberal economic and sociopolitical reforms that have increased social inequality while removing social services that might otherwise have been available in growing urban centers. Regardless of the view of authorities, the practices are seen as legitimate by participants for the simple reason that they actually work to provide for people's needs.

Reconsidering Informality is divided into three sections. The first, "Locality, Space and Place," includes a compelling article by Karen Tranberg Hansen that examines struggles over vending space in Lusaka and, significantly, relates these to government efforts to aid investors and to opposing definitions of a "free market." The section also includes Gabriel Tati's analysis of conflicts over access and the use of space between migrant fishermen in the artisanal fisheries off the coast of Pointe-Noire and the multinational Elf Oil Company. The section entitled "Economy, Work and Livelihoods" includes Amin Y. Kamete's article on home industries and the formal city in Harare. To underscore the relevance of the issues raised: I read Kamete's article just as the Mugabe government's vicious "Clean Up the Trash" campaign began targeting people living or working in the informal city. By the time I finished the chapter, approximately seven hundred thousand people had lost their homes or employment to the campaign.

The book's longest section is called "Land, Housing and Planning" and includes Paul Jenkins's attempt to problematize formal/informal dichotomies in his analysis of land access in Maputo. Jenkins makes the crucial point that alternatives must be found to the dominant state hegemony that has defined the formal to date. His conclusion that direct reciprocity and nonstate redistribution are perhaps the most productive means of assisting the urban poor in contexts where the state and market are increasingly unable or unwilling to do so poses a key challenge for other urban analysts who approach governments and markets less critically.

Overall, Reconsidering Informality successfully achieves its goal of bringing together in one volume two primary streams of research that have generally been studied independently: studies of urban land use and housing, and studies of work and economic sustenance. The book's authors also offer insightful analyses of the local interplay of forces of globalization, including struggles over human migration and multinational corporatization.