Moving beyond informality-of-need and informality-of-desire: Insights from a southern (European) perspective

Abstract

In a recently published paper on Planning Theory, entitled ‘Asking “Third World questions” of First World informality: Using Southern theory to parse needs from desires in an analysis of informal urbanism of the global North’, Ryan Thomas Devlin develops inspiring reasoning about informal urbanism in the so-called ‘global North’. The author argues convincingly that the majority of academic literature on this topic is characterised by the failure ‘to critically assess the different purposes and consequences of disparate informal actions and the different political subjectivities of various informal actors. I am specifically speaking here of the differences between acts undertaken by the urban poor to meet basic needs and those engaged in by more well-off residents for convenience, efficiency, or creative expression’ (Devlin, 2018: 570). It is from this perspective that Devlin (2018) suggests identifying two categories, informality-of-desire and informality-of-need, whereby the former refers to informal practices originating from the ‘desires of middleand upper-class urban residents, and the latter represent[s] strategies to meet [the] needs of the urban poor’ (ibid.: 570). The difference between informality-of-need and informality-of-desire that emerges from Devlin’s analysis is both analytical-descriptive and political-normative. From an analytical-descriptive viewpoint, informality-of-need and informality-of-desire are factually different, primarily in terms of the players involved (the urban poor in the first case, and middleand upper-income urban residents in the latter) and the underlying reasons (need vs desire). However, the difference between these two categories is also political-normative in nature. According to the author, in fact, ‘while informality born of need has the potential to challenge dominant, exclusionary regimes of spatial