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A journey through the informal and taken-for-granted ways of getting things done across the world.

For a post-human hitchhiker, human life–with its anxiety, aging, illness, and constant need for problem-solving–may look unviable. Yet, for humans, the life struggle is softened by human touch, human emotion, and human cooperation.

The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, Volume 3 continues the journey of the two previous volumes into the world’s open secrets, unwritten rules, and hidden practices. It focuses on issues of emotional ambivalence and pressures of the digital age. The informal practices presented in this volume demonstrate the urgency of alleviating tensions between continuity and all-too-rapid change and the need to tackle the central problem of modern societies—uncertainty.

The volume takes the reader on a biographical journey through elusive, taken-for-granted, or banal ways of getting things done from over seventy countries and world regions. It offers an innovative understanding of the significance of fringes and challenges the assumption that informality is associated exclusively with poverty, underdevelopment, the Global South, oppressive regimes, or the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. It also maps the patterns of informality around the globe, identifies specific informal practices in a context-sensitive way, and documents their ambivalent impact on people engaged in problem-solving, on societies in which these problems arise, and on humanity overall.
 

An examination of the central role and political power of informal neighborhoods in Mexico City.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Mexico City was tightly bounded, with a population of about half a million people. By the end of that century, it was an unfathomable megalopolis of some 20 million. It had also become exhibit A in an “urban crisis” decried by demographers, NGOs, and the Mexican government. Mexico City’s greatest sin was its shantytowns—informal neighborhoods built in defiance of regulations and viewed as incurably disordered.

The Politics of Informality is an illuminating political and intellectual history, examining how these neighborhoods have figured in Mexican life and in the ideologies underlying urban planning. Prior to the Mexican Revolution of 1910, urban experts saw Mexico City as a tidy modern capital in-waiting. But during the interwar period, informal neighborhoods boomed, as working-class families asserted claims to housing under the revolution’s framework of citizenship and social justice. Then, amid Cold War realignments, a new cohort of urban experts pathologized Mexico City, turning it into a transnational laboratory for the study of poverty, migration, and overpopulation. Tracing a fascinating evolution, ThePolitics of Informality underscores the stubborn opposition between technocratic modernism and revolutionary, extralegal politics.