Since last year more than half of the world's population lives in cities and towns. Urbanization has been a particular rapid process in developing countries, as poor peasants have been pushed out of agriculture and went to seek employment and other livelihood opportunities in the cities. In most developing countries, formal urban employment has not grown at the same pace as the urban economically actie population. As a result, the informal sector has become the principal domain for livelihood and survival of the urban poor. Yet, informality is not restricted to the structuring of wage labour and small enterprise; it also marks other dimensions of the life of the urban poor and excluded: social networks, grass roots movements, political participation, and security. The lecture will first give an overview of this process of informalization in the cities of the South. Then, the lecturer will make an argument for qualitative and ethnographic research methods being a particularly suitable tool to conduct research on urban informality. Kees will use illustrations from four specific topical fields: wage work and microenterprise, housing and service provision, social movements and political participation, and violence and insecurity.

1. Kees Koonings (Utrecht University)
Researching Urban Informality
Lecture 6: 18-03-09
20:00-21:30 Room F
PARALLEL WORLDS LECTURE SERIES 2009

2. Researching Urban Informality:
Key Issues and Qualitative
Methodological Approaches
Kees Koonings
Utrecht University

3. Defining informal sector
• Not illegal or
criminal, but a-legal
• Not or only partly
registered
• Not (systematically)
regulated
• Not protected
• Not (systematically)
taxed

4. Diversity of informal sector
(casual work)
• Micro-entreprises
• Casual wage labour: in small
firms/in larger businesses
• Domestic servants
• Self-employed: selling or
providing a service in the
public space
• Borderline: beggars, petty
thiefs

5. Dynamics and functioning of urban informal
sector (in Latin America)
Macro-level Micro-level
• Absorbtion of surplus • Incorporated in
population household survival
strategies (alongside self-
• Cost reduction within
sufficiency, reproductive
(global) commodity chain
work, migration,
• Low cost provision of
conditional cash
goods and services to
transfers)
(lower) middle and
• Low treshold, high
working classes
turnover
• Survival sector of urban
• Under-payment and self
underclass (recent trend
exploitation
within ‘global cities’)
• Female and child labour
• Precarious conditions

6. Informality and informalization
• In general: the semi-regulated, semi-legal and semi-
serviced domains of urban social life
• Work, income, survival
• Housing and collective consumption in the urban
peripheries
• Social mobilization: democracy of the street and
‘insurgent citizens’
• (In)security: popular (in)justice?
• Political participation: deliberative democracy and
institutional innovation
• Examples>>

7. Housing and collective consumption

10. Social mobilisation

11. (In)security: popular (in)justice?

12. Political participation

13. Qualitative research: characteristics
• (Hi)stories, events, discourses, connections [variables,
scores, frequencies, co-variation]
• In-depth case studies, deliberate sampling [random
sampling, large data sets]
• Fieldwork [survey]
• Researcher is main instrument
• Face to face: research = social interaction. Rapport
• Diachronic perspective
• Subjective perspective?
• Representation and interpretation
• Generalizations?

14. Qualitative research:
key methods and techniques
• Participant observation
• Open interviewing
• Informal conversations
• Life histories
• Focus groups
• Written and printed sources
• Watch, listen, talk, read
(act), write-write-write
• Jig saw puzzle of multiple
data

15. Urban anthropology: two designs
Urban Ethnography Rapid Urban Appraisal
• Long and repeated • Short fieldwork
fieldwork • Larger number of
• Limited number of locations
locations • Indirect “rapport” through
• Direct “rapport” organizations
• Diachronic • Snapshot
Enrique Arias: Drugs and Caroline Moser & Cathy
Democracy McIlwaine: Encounters
with Violence
James Holston: Insurgent
Citizenship