Makeshift Urbanism and Improvisation as an Urban Way of Life

Abstract

Scholarly research aid writing in urban studies has increasingly drawn attention to the scale of explosive urbanization on a global scale, focusing in particular on the conditions under which extended settlement patterns have merged with unregulated self-building housing and variegated kinds of income generation. Large numbers of city dwellers live in a social world of makeshift urbanism, defined more by uncertainty and precarity than stability and predictability. Conventional urban studies scholarship has struggled to make sense of city dwellers who are excluded from the mainstream of urban life, that is, those without formal housing, regular wage-paying work, and access to decent social services (including infrastructure). Conventional urban theories have typically framed these “life in the city” under the binominal distinction between formal and informal. Recent scholarship has called into question the division between “formal” and “informal” as forces pulling in opposing directions. Scholars who have used concepts like “suturing” (De Boeck), “surrounding” (A. Simone), and “transgressive urbanism” (Cruz) have pushed the scholarly discussion in new directions. The aim of this paper is to critically unpack three enduring legacies of conventional thinking. First, it is time to replace the formality-informality categorical divide as a still relevant analytic distinction. Second, we need to think beyond the restrictive trap of treating urban residents living in auto-constructed housing and engaging in unregulated income generation as either heroic innovators who can use their entrepreneurial skills to escape their social worlds, or as hapless victims unable to extricate themselves from their straitened circumstances. Third, we need to break from the conventional developmentalist fantasy of conceptualizing a linear trajectory of urban development with its normative prescription that calls for progressively replacing the “chaotic, malfunctioning city of informality” with an orderly, coherent, legible and optimally functioning modern metropolis (Pieterse). Examples will be drawn from informal settlements in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Stellenbosch.