Across cities shaped by uneven regulation, weak public provision and everyday survival outside secure wage labour, ‘informality’ has become a dominant way of naming how people make life workable.
Urban life theorist AbdouMaliq Simone treats informality less as an object in the world than as a designation that sets the terms of visibility and permits official disregard. The designation produces a doubled partiality: partial in its incompleteness and partial in its availability to specific functions and agendas.
Informality is routinely treated as if it names a sector or a residue awaiting incorporation into formality, but the more consequential work lies in how it organises a pragmatics of recognition that grants value and use only by shrinking lives to forms legible to institutions. Misrecognition here names this reduction: lives are acknowledged only through narrow measures of usefulness, while their wider conditions remain uncounted.
In many cities of the Global South, things repeatedly hold together without doing so through recognised planning or design. The result is not order in a formal sense, but a fragile continuity detached from the procedures meant to anticipate or govern it. ‘Formal’ and ‘informal’ thus function less as opposed domains than as pragmatic cuts through dense relations, deciding which relations can be rendered contractual and which must remain unclear and continually recalibrated under shifting modes of exploitation and regulation.
In this context, informality is not simply marginality, not merely a position outside the city’s recognised order or economy, although the production of such outsides is one of its effects. Informality names a mode of existence produced through sanctioned disattention to particular realities, and also a strategic ruse through which practices judged dangerous or illegible remain generative in inhospitable circumstances. Misrecognition and partial visibility enable people to continue operating by forming temporary ties across different systems without converting those ties into formal organisations or binding contracts. The city holds together through these provisional compositions, not as a romance of improvisation, but as the ordinary labour of making life workable under selective and extractive forms of recognition.
Organised manifestations gathered ‘informality’ are not an economy in reserve, not a compensatory sector awaiting recognition and not a shadow convertible into a formal mirror. They are organised contestations over the foundations of social wealth: how wealth is produced and distributed, standards of worth and authority to assign value. These contestations unfold through situated articulations, how bodies and materials are related, which relations can be rendered contractual, and through forms that emerge outside contract while still sustaining circulation and reproduction. Informality is therefore better grasped as a question rather than an entity, a question carried by negotiation, concession, resistance and accommodation to the state and to shifting modes of exploitation.
The shift from informality to popular economies specifies this terrain without domesticating it. Popular economies are the practical arrangements through which people sustain life, work, money, repair, exchange and care, simultaneously within and outside formal rules. Popular economies name the promiscuous forms of organising production, repair, distribution, use and social reproduction that occur both within and outside formal capitalist production. The popular is not a synonym for community virtue and not a euphemism for marginal survival.
This frame situates Pakistan’s argument about informality in proportion, as the dominant public language treats informality as a problem of compliance. Revenue shortfalls, low registration and weak documentation are repeatedly folded into a moralised account of evasion, and the standard policy response follows the same grammar: wider documentation, tighter withholding, more audit power, more licensing and more coercive visibility.
Last year, a defence offered by economists Nadeem ul Haque and Shahid Kardar rejects the civic morality of that story and insists that informality in Pakistan is sustained by punitive regulation, weak public services, unreliable courts and policy volatility that makes visibility dangerous. The refusal is useful, but the horizon remains managerial.
The international version of this managerial horizon is the formalisation doctrine associated with Hernando de Soto, a Peruvian economist, in his famed book ‘The Mystery of Capital’, and widely circulated through the IMF and donor common sense. In De Soto’s rendering, informality is cast as the point where assets fail to translate into capital, formal title is positioned as the mechanism of translation and credit is elevated as the route to development, collapsing a contest over value into a technical deficit of paperwork.
Formalisation then appears as neutral inclusion even as it compresses heterogeneous relations into administrable forms that are actionable for taxation, repossession, discipline and selective enforcement.
This intervention refuses both the moralism of compliance and the developmental romance of formalisation. People still dispute what counts as value and who receives the benefits, and city life is held together by fragile arrangements that persist despite the systems intended to govern it.
The writer is a political geographer and editor.
