World Class Aspirations, Urban Informality, and Poverty Politics: A North–South Comparison

Abstract

Under the influence of the discourses and practices of global neoliberal urbanism, municipal administrations worldwide aspire to make their cities world class spaces, where informality is an anachronism and poverty can be made history. In this essay, drawing on fieldwork conducted in Jakarta, Indonesia, San Francisco (California), and Seattle (Washington), we address the question of how a geographic relational poverty approach can help us understand, or at least expand ways of thinking about these processes by attending to urban informality and the politics of poverty. Informality, a pervasive feature of the global South and North, functions as a survival strategy whereby the monetarily poor can compensate for their lack of income through commoning. Market-driven, state underwritten urban development initiatives for housing those with wealth is limiting the conditions of possibility for the monetarily poor, and informality. This is compounded by emergent political discourses rendering informality as inappropriate, and the monetarily poor as undeserving of a right to the city. Yet long-standing more-than-capitalist and communal informal practices pursued by the urban poor remain effective and necessary survival strategies, supporting residents whose presence is necessary to the city and whose practices challenge capitalist norms.

Practices of Illegalisation

“…These forms of elite informality are often regularised and legalised by the state, including through urban planning processes (Baldwin and Crane ). Subaltern informalities, in contrast, tend to be criminalised and rendered vulnerable to eviction, demolition, and expulsion (Sheppard et al ). Writing in the context of Israel–Palestine, Yiftachel (:88) describes such processes in terms of “gray spaces”, “those positioned between the ‘whiteness’ of legality/approval/safety, and the ‘blackness’ of eviction/destruction/death”.…”

“…Here once again we must interrogate the legal production of illegality. Municipal laws governing such apparently mundane matters as disorderly conduct or nuisance abatement not only drive evictions but also criminalise poverty and exacerbate vulnerability, often stripping racialised bodies of all legal personhood and protection (Baldwin and Crane ; Sheppard et al ). From civil gang injunctions to sit‐lie ordinances, the law is deployed to target and expel bodies marked as dangerous and unruly.…”

“…We conclude by reflecting on the geographies of death that are constitutive of racialised regimes of citizenship. These practices of illegalisation are ultimately not only confined to non‐citizen migrants or even to marginalised communities at the ostensible outer edges of nation‐state territories, but in fact are replicated in the various spatial arrangements that serve the ends of subordinating and dispossessing the urban poor, including in so‐called global cities (Baldwin and Crane ; Sheppard et al ). Drawing critical energy from postcolonial critique, and in light of the examples that we examine here, this analysis of state practices of illegalisation then allows us to reconsider how neoliberalism’s “global cities” may perhaps be better understood as reconfigurations of settler‐colonial cities.…”

Cities, Racialized Poverty, and Infrastructures of Possibility

“…Nursery workers often earn below minimum wage, and disproportionately live in substandard and unregulated housing, vulnerable to illegal eviction and intimidation. In the wake of war, migrants enter a new war fighting for a right to the global migrant city (see also Sheppard et al ).…”

“…The targeted devastation and abandonment of Black and brown life in Flint, in New Orleans, in Houston, and in Puerto Rico remind us that bridges, water systems, and roads remain vital to urban studies, but we must also track the relationship between these infrastructures and people, embodied and complex (Alexandre ; Fennell ). In the past two decades, urban studies has embraced more interpersonal, collective, and embodied approaches to understanding cities and urban life (Sheppard et al ). Yet too often, cultural practice and practices of bodily survival, the ways people think through urban structures of domination and possibility, are disregarded as trivial to theory; the lives and practices of the urban poor are disappeared from urban studies, a discursive echo of racial banishment.…”