CALL FOR PAPERS
The Geographies of Informality
Paper Session the RGS-IBG Conference 2011, London 31st August-2nd September
Session Convenors: Colin Marx (DPU, UCL); Paula Meth ([log in to unmask]);
Glyn Williams ([log in to unmask])
Research Group Sponsor – Developing Areas Research Group
There are many ways in which the geographies of (formal) economies, institutions
and practices are imagined and analysed. For example, a rich tradition of
economic geography has explored the spatialities of households, firms, global
production processes and divisions of labour, and their associated spatial
imaginations of cities, regions, networks, nodes, clusters and chains. By
contrast, and despite their prevalence, informal economies, institutions and
practices in the Global South tend to be imagined extensively as existing and
operating in the interstices or on the margins of formal activities,
constituting a shadow world which never quite matches the productive potential
or the legitimacy of the formal. Some of the more innovative ways in which
geographies of informality have been explored include Simone’s (2001) ephemeral
spaces of association; Dierwechter’s (2004) mapping of ‘neglected spatialities
of informal workers’; Bayat’s (1997) processes of encroachment on ordinary
spaces; and the transnational networks of traders (MacGaffey and
Bazenguissa-Ganga, 2000; Peberdy, 2000).
This session seeks to develop and explore alternative ways of imagining the
geographies of informality, with the aim of challenging the marginal or
inferior status ascribed to informal lives and livelihoods, both theoretically
and in policy terms. The questions it seeks to address include:
• Do spatial imaginaries of formal economies (e.g. networks, clusters,
embeddedness, etc.), polities, and social structures have any relevance for
analysing the informal?
• Conversely, what are the spatialities of informal social, economic and
political practices, and how can these be used to disrupt dominant geographical
imaginations?
• What are the spaces in which the informal and formal articulate or
disarticulate?
• What imagined geographies of informality exist within the state, and how do
these act to shape policy?
• How is space enrolled in processes in which the formal is becoming informal or
the informal formal?
Email expressions of interest or abstracts of approximately 250 words before
February 18th to [log in to unmask]
Dr Glyn Williams
Department of Town and Regional Planning
University of Sheffield
Winter Street
Sheffield
S10 2TN
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