Urban Loopholes: a spatial and temporal framework for urban spatial productions under rapid change

Abstract

Whether Mumbai’s Dharavi, Nairobi’s Kibera, or Cairo’s Manshiyat Naser, there seems to be a ‘look’ to informality, where the material confirms the procedural: the receding public sectors and weak institutions coupled with neoliberalizing flows are attributed to the social inequities they manifest. More understated, governed by strong authoritarian states, and rapidly growing economically, on the other hand, the physical manifestations of often-fuzzy procedural ‘informality’ in the cities of the Global East confound the global and au-currant modes of detection. In cities like Shanghai, buildings and neighborhoods that look ‘informal’ may be exemplary for abiding to institutional frameworks, while those that look ‘formal’ may be produced in ways that could be considered procedurally ‘informal.’ Under adaptive governance and amphibiuous institutions, the distinctions between ‘informal’ and ‘formal’ are fluid, and the only certainty is uncertainty. These local nuances require a different mode of inquiry than that of ‘formal’/‘informal’ for spatial productions that fall through the gaps. For these wicked problems—processes of urban spatial productions that seem to be anomalies, divergences, or externalities—of the rapid and spectacular urban development of transition economies such as China’s, the ‘urban loophole’ as a conceptual framework is proposed. Resulting from gaps, exceptions, and ambiguities in regulations and plans, which are consequences of transitions in the political economy, urban loopholes spatially manifest the adaptive governance and amphibiuous institutions have facilitated the country’s re-globalization and transition from planned to market economy in less than two decades. They make possible the windows of opportunities in the dual markets that have maintained the privileged role of the developmentalist state. This presentation will share several examples of urban loopholes from the urban spatial productions of Shanghai to demonstrate the specificities of this framework in lieu of the ‘informal.’