Brokers have long featured in the anthropological literature as figures that connect disparate social worlds. Using their particular knowledge, skills and authority, they bridge gaps between populations, usually disadvantaged, and power-holders. This special issue builds on recent calls to revive the focus on brokers in anthropological analysis, most notably in relation to recent neo-liberal societal transformations and governance transitions (James 2011; Lindquist 2015). It explores the variety of brokers and dimensions of brokerage in settings characterised by rapid societal change. Focusing on brokers' work of connecting and maintaining personal ties among and across different actors, sites and rationales provides insights into development processes and generates a foundation for building theory around new social categories and changing political relationships. The contributions to this issue present studies of brokerage from South Africa, the Netherlands and Indonesia. While the specific settings range from urban to rural locales and from nature conservation initiatives to youth development programmes, all of the articles emphasise the importance of brokers as central figures who engage in blending, translating and reworking. Brokers are Janus-faced figures whose distinct faces are recognised and addressed by different actors and whose performances align with different logics and rationales. Studying the agentive practices of brokers sheds light on complex societal settings, where multiple forms of authority co-exist, statecitizen relationships are increasingly problematised and policy messages are contradictory. The brokers described in this volume shape the interactions between actors who have unequal power relations and diverging interests. They may operate as gatekeepers, representatives, liaisons, itinerant guides or coordinators, and often as combinations of these (Stovel & Shaw 2012). They may take advantage of the void left by government

This article presents an ethnography of the evolution of Prometrópole, a slum upgrading project in the Brazilian city of Recife. The project aims to improve the urban infrastructure, eradicate slums and resettle the population. We focus on the project's first area of intervention, Jacarezinho. We analyze how, from lead-up through implementation, the project gained shape and gradually became real. Participatory procedures were very important in shaping the project that for a long time did not materialize. We argue that the project manifested itself as a vehicle of modernity that evoked a dream of progress. The population, which never asked for the project, was attracted to this dream, but remained critical. We contend that, although the project partly delivered on its promises, for many slum dwellers it failed to entail a better life. We portray the project's genealogy, the compromise between different aims, and an echelon of post-project frustrations.

Providing an introduction to the special section ‘Close encounters: ethnographies of the coproduction of space by the urban poor’, this article sets out to argue that the image of ‘the informal’ as unruly, messy and dirty continues to inform urban planning around the world. As a reaction to this view, it contends that the informal and formal should be analysed as interconnected and that the informal sphere should be revalued. Urban development is studied as close encounters between established practices, with a locus and a history (tree‐like), and newly emerging, unstable and untraceable practices (rhizomatic). Contrary to the tendency in urban planning to conflate the formal with the tree and the informal with the rhizome, we argue that from the perspective of marginal urbanites, formal planning tends to be very arbitrary and frightening (rhizomatic), whereas informal practices can be very predictable and stable (arboreal). The article analyses residents of marginalized urban areas as inventive navigators who explore the changing physical, spatial and sociopolitical environment, avoiding threats and looking for opportunities, grounded in their everyday practices and life histories. The article concludes that marginal urbanites should be acknowledged as coproducers of urban space and that the right to ‘coproduce’ the city lies at the heart of the call for the right to the city.

Why has urban informality in the global North received so little attention? We suggest that this neglect can be explained in part by the tendency of scholarship to reproduce the myth of Northern formality: the widely held belief that informality occurs only in corrupt and clientelist ‘developing countries’. This myth has allowed activities and connections that would generally be framed as clientelist or corrupt in the global South to be rebranded as policy innovation in Western Europe and North America. In this brief paper, we challenge the myth of Northern formality by focusing on two empirical cases of informality in Dutch governance that demonstrate how the state frames the toleration and deliberate use of informality as policy innovations. Specifically, we focus on strategic, uncodified and non‐transparent deviation from legal procedure in order to achieve compliance and/or effectiveness. Relying on ethnographic methods and secondary sources, we discuss firstly the governance of Amsterdam's red light district and secondly participatory infrastructure projects in the surrounding province of North Holland. The first case highlights the strategic non‐enforcement or non‐application of laws, while the second case points to the use of personalized relationships and non‐transparency in participatory governance.

This article takes a fresh look at political brokerage as a complex, provisional and contested phenomenon. Although brokerage has received little recent attention, I show how it remains critical to understanding the urban poor’s involvement in electoral politics. The article focuses on how local community leaders in a Recife slum, Brazil, operate as brokers during elections. Here, they have to deal with the different interests of their patrons (politicians) and their clients (their fellow slum dwellers), and also with the latter’s contradictory views on electoral politics. Slum dwellers combine a positive image, in which electoral politics provides access to resources, with a negative image, in which it contaminates all those involved, including the brokers. Further, by showing how these slum dwellers perceive electoral politics as coming from ‘another world’, this study counters the still prevalent functionalist understandings of brokerage which depict brokers as the forgers of a shared moral universe.