Planning, informality and power

The contrast between imagined planning’s ordered futures and the everyday realities of urban populations in numerous cities around the world has pushed planners to formulate the notion of informality through which they recognize unregulated urban quarters, unrecorded transactions, or unprotected workers. Early formulations of informality typically avoided power, and typically depicted informality as either a survival mechanism or a transient condition. More recently, scholars have revisited approaches of the power/informal nexus in at least three ways. First, scholars have pointed to state power’s exclusionary role in formulating laws that respond to designers’ ideals and/or capitalist interests, criminalizing hence - sometimes deliberately - the presence or labour of those deemed undesirable. Second, scholars have demonstrated the agency of those excluded, documenting acts where city-dwellers’ power materializes in resistance (e.g., trespass, self-help). Third, scholars have expanded readings of power beyond the state/citizen relations to recognize cities as sites of power struggle among unequal actors, where law is often deployed as a site of contestation and a strategy of governance by those who can control it. As such, while the formal/informal binary reflects a power dynamic, it is insufficient to account for the multiple forms of diffuse power that seep into city making.