collected snippets of immediate importance...


Tuesday, December 1, 2009

urban informality, ananya roy (2005)

(1): "My goal is not so much to evaluate these policies as it is to highlight some of the distinctive challenges and paradoxes that they present for planners. Three are of particular importance:
  1. how planning modalities can produce the "unplannable"—informality as a state of exception from the formal order of urbanization;
  2. how this state of exception can in turn be strategically used by planners to mitigate some of the vulnerabilities of the urban poor;
  3. and how dealing with informality requires recognizing the "right to the city"—claims and appropriations that do not fit neatly into the ownership model of property."
(2): "Such frameworks yield many problematic corollary propositions. The first is the equation of informality with poverty. Neither frame recognizes how informality might be a differentiated process embodying varying degrees of power and exclusion. Second, both frames conceptualize
informality, and poverty more generally, as caused by isolation from global capitalism... Third, within such frames it becomes possible to devolve responsibility for poverty to the poor themselves." [whatever we might want to say about her larger arguments, this second point is particularly important. holism is quite critical.]

(2): "As Jessop (2002) argues, at a moment of neoliberalism, when states are pursuing austerity policies, such models of neocommunitarianism legitimate the agenda of privatization." [absolutely]

(3): "Both forms of housing are informal but embody very different concretizations of
legitimacy. The divide here is not between formality and informality but rather a differentiation within informality." [informality as something that can be used by the wealthy/elite, too]

(3): this, really, is the key point-- informality not something 'outside' the state, but something in which it is wholly complicit: "This in turn means that informality must be understood not as the object of state regulation but rather as produced by the state itself... The planning and legal apparatus of the state has the power to determine when to enact this suspension, to determine
what is informal and what is not, and to determine which forms of informality will thrive and which will disappear. State power is reproduced through the capacity to construct and reconstruct categories of legitimacy and illegitimacy— such as in the American welfare efforts to sort out the "deserving" from the "undeserving" poor." [recalls the left amendment to popular narratives about neoliberalism]

(4): critique of in-situ upgrading: "I have argued elsewhere that such an emphasis on the physical
environment is an "aestheticization of poverty" (Roy, 2004), one that equates upgrading with aesthetic upgrading rather than the upgrading of livelihoods, wages, political capacities."

(6): on principle, perhaps--but the example given is so obviously constrained by the geopolitical constraints in which it operates, that might as well, itself, be rhetorical: "The shift from aesthetic considerations to the politics of shit, I would argue, is a useful policy epistemology. It recognizes the importance of infrastructure but indicates that the provision and distribution of infrastructure is not a technical issue but rather a political process. The politics of shit also disrupts models of expertise, making it possible to generate knowledge about upgrading and infrastructure from a different set of experts: the residents of informal settlements."

(6): problematizing formalization: "The process of formalization is never as straightforward as simply converting informal documentation into formal titles. Usually there are numerous types of informal documentation, of varying legitimacy, and there are often multiple claims to a single plot of land."

(6): well-put--"But I will underscore Schaefer's blunt statement about the difference between wealth transfer and wealth legalization. De Soto's ideas are seductive precisely because they only guarantee the latter but in doing so promise the former."

(7): "Indeed, following Braudel (1982), it can be argued that capitalism itself is a system of monopolies rather than a free-flowing circulation of capital,'" a point that De Soto misses despite his declared affinity to Braudel."

(7): hmm--is it possible that this is more cute, than meaningful?--"I am now arguing that it
is possible to strategically use the state of exception to frame policy. There are two forms of exception that are worth noting: regulatory exceptions and regularity exceptions."

(8): important point to interrogate: arguing for 'scale-jumping', given that the local is intertwined with the global. but this is more bluster than substance -- it doesn't get to the core point, which is really the revival of radical political practice. "I would like to suggest that the issue of scale jumping is less about particular institutional actors like NGOs and more about a strategic engagement with multiple sovereignties.... Recently, Narmada dam activists have been pressing the World Bank, rather than simply the Indian government, for accountability." [she's aware of the pitfall, certainly. and i don't think she would go so far as to argue, at all, that these are anything more than auxiliary strategies. surely we are not abandoning the terrain of the nation for this petition-driven mishmash?]

(9): clear flaws: "They each require working through rather than against institutions of power—be it the market, or the state of exception, or supranational organizations that supersede national sovereignties. Is it possible to be subversive when there is such complicity with the system?"

(9): yes--"borrowing Krueckeberg's important insight, it can be argued that the more fundamental issue at stake in informality is that of wealth distribution and unequal property ownership, of what sorts of markets are at work in our cities and how they shape or limit affordability. In this sense, the study of informality provides an important lesson for planners in the tricky dilemmas of social justice.

the 21st century metropolis, ananya roy (2009)

(820): assimilating davis into those who see 'first world' cities as the model, and 'third world' cities as the error -- this is what she is inveighing against, but it's not clear, to me, that davis is doing anything wrong in outlining the gravity of the situation that confronts us. at the very least, this critique is way too easy, and meaningless: "Davis’s apocalyptic imagination of the Global
Slum is only the newest variant in the high-pitched narration of the crisis of mega-cities."

(820): a critique of neo-orientalism, she thinks (well, here we ought to bring in aijaz ahmed's splendid deconstruction of said): "As the parochial experience of EuroAmerican cities has been found to be a useful theoretical model for all cities, so perhaps the distinctive experiences of the cities of the global South can generate productive and provocative theoretical frameworks for all
cities."

(821): critique of sassen, though not particularly forceful or thoroughly convincing, i don't think...

(822): again--this is a 'sexy' suggestion, but it's unclear, to me, that this gives us very much, that is substantive. "It is not enough for one’s understanding of the 21st-century metropolis
simply to make visible the cities of the global South. It is not even enough to exceed the visibility of crisis and catastrophe. It is instead necessary to view all cities from this particular place on the map."

(822-824): trying to invert area studies, in a sense -- give it a different theoretical spin. but this is not an instructive technique. it is a mish-mash that threatens to eschew universalism, it seems. though it's worth noting she is aware of this danger: "How can regionally produced concepts be deployed as ‘strategic essentialisms’, simultaneously located and dislocated? How can the theories embedded in ‘area studies’ retain their geographic coordinates but also cross borders and travel as dynamic vectors of new theoretical conversations and exchanges?"

(824): important, critique of sassen--"Such forms of ‘worlding’ are crucial because they move urban theory from the mapping of ‘world cities’ to the historicized analysis of ‘world systems’. The global/world cities framework asserts a hierarchy of cities but is unable to account fully for the materialization of such a hierarchy, and even less so in relation tothe long histories of colonialism and imperialism. Space is a ‘container’ in these theoretical reports; its ‘production’ remains unexplained (SMITH, 2002). For example, TAYLOR (2000), following Braudel, rightly
notes that capitalism is a world of multiple monopolies and that global/world cities represent a ‘monopoly of place’. This is a refreshing recalibration of the rather
simplistic narrative of ‘agglomeration economies’."

(825): this, i'm sorry, is just jibberish, and theoretically (and especially politically) nonsensical: "Such forms of ‘worlding’ move one away from simple core–periphery models of globalized urbanization. Instead, one is left with what ONG (1999) terms ‘differentiated zones of sovereignty’. The 21stcentury metropolis arbitrates this geography of multiplicity and differentiation. And in doing so it is, as Abbas would have one imagine, a ‘para-site’. It is dependent on the circuits of global capital and yet it also produces and mediates these circuits."

(825): ok--"This is not to say that this analysis is not applicable to the cities of the global South. Indeed, it is highly relevant. The argument is less about transnational relevance and more about the scope and range of analysis."

(826): coming close to playing native informant--"By being embedded in the EuroAmerican urban experience, this theoretical work bypasses some of the key ways in which the production of space takes place in other urban and metropolitan contexts. Further, this ‘other’ experience has considerable relevance for EuroAmerican city-regions and can provide insights into hitherto unexplained processes in these cities. One such mode of the production of space is highlighted: informality. ‘First World’ urban and metropolitan theory is curiously silent on the issue of informality. Or there is a tendency to imagine the ‘informal’ as a sphere of unregulated, even illegal, activity, outside the scope of the state, a domain of survival by the poor and marginalized, often wiped out by gentrification and redevelopment. But a large body of ‘Third World’ literature provides a sophisticated and rather different understanding of informality."

(826): potentially interesting distinction, between political society and civil society -- "Similarly,
CHATTERJEE (2006), writing about Indian cities, makes a distinction between ‘civil’ and ‘political’ societies. For him, civil society groups make claims as fully enfranchised citizens, a ‘bourgeois governmentality’ if you will. Political society on the other hand are the claims of the disenfranchised and marginalized, what APPADURAI (2002) has termed ‘governmentality from below’."

(827): i really have trouble understanding what is gained by this amendment--"The Africanist debates about agency, subjectivity, and politics defy the easy categorizations of power and resistance. Under conditions of crisis, the subaltern subject is simultaneously strategic and self-exploitative, simultaneously a political agent and a subject of the neoliberal grand slam."

(827): the postborder city?

(828): how is it more than this? this is absurd! she is getting off playing the native informant game. "It is surely an ‘evil paradise’ of ‘fear and money’, a ‘dreamworld of neoliberalism’ (DAVIS, 2006; DAVIS and MORK, 2007), but it is also an articulation of an Arab modernity where more is at stake than what DAVIS (2006, p. 53) designates as the ‘monstrous caricature of futurism’. It is the place at which the distinctions between the black economy and global finance capital are erased, where city and nature are violently fused, and where the feudalism of an emirate meets up with an open cosmopolitanism."

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