Who Governs the 'Ungovernable'? Examining Governing Relations in Urban Informality

Abstract

For several decades now, Metro Manila's Baclaran district has been home to thousands of street vendors who have capitalised on its functions as a commercial centre, a transport node, and a Filipino Catholic devotional site. This presence of informal hawkers, which some government officials consider as an urban blight, has generated a range of policies that seek to manage, if not eradicate, the informal hawkers. Years of street occupancy, however, have enabled the tenacious vendors to enforce grassroots mechanisms to appropriate streetscapes. I refer to this interplay of state interventions and grassroots practices as the formal-informal interface. Seen from an urban planning perspective, the Baclaran context offers an opportunity for scholarly inquiry into how the complex spatio-political ordering and socio-economic realities unsettle the essentialist formal-versus-informal categories of work and state interventions. In sum, these findings reveal how understanding the formal-informal interface contributes to the evolving conceptual and empirical conversations on worlding cities. The Baclaran case shows how worlding practices arise from the interplay of global North-oriented planning ideals and policy approaches, the unequal socio-spatial relations, and the continuing struggle of marginalized street vendors in the global South. These issues require rethinking of policy direction and planning trajectory.iii

Mobility nodes and economic spaces: Links, tensions and planning implications

“…Based on the conceptual and empirical insights presented in the previous section, we employ a post-dualist approach (Recio, Mateo-Babiano, & Roitman, 2017;Recio, 2018) to analyse how urban informality issues like street vending are linked to transport and land use. A post-dualist framing builds on an enmeshed reading of informality issues, evident in the work of Roy (2005), Yiftachel (2006), Donovan (2008), Porter (2011), andDovey (2012).…”