The Invisible City: Informality, Hegemony, and Transformative Democracy

In this paper I explore the intricate relationship between public administration, informality, freedom, power and democracy. Generally democratic participation comes in two broad forms: top-down ‘governance-driven democratization’ instigated by administrative agencies to include citizens and other social partners in addressing wicked problems, and bottom-up initiatives in collective problem solving by citizens who feel abandoned by the state. Both encounter serious practical problems, having to do with the hegemonic understanding of informal citizen practices as irrelevant to public administration and urban governance. In this paper I argue for a ‘redescription’, in Tully’s words, of our understanding of the role of citizen participation in democratic governance. This ‘redescription’ is grounded in notions of informality. Measured against our shared understanding and appreciation of electoral-administrative democracy, informality - informal modes of organizing space, livelihood and citizenship - is generally regarded by governing elites as a lesser social practice, an exception to the formal domain of urban governance. I argue that these everyday informal practices should be seen, instead, as spaces of freedom, in which alternative understandings and practices are hatched from which new, creative solutions to intractable urban problems may emerge. I propose a broader conception of agonistic democratic governance that aims at collectively addressing wicked public problems and includes constantly shifting alliances of actors, each with their own capacities, skills, and responsibilities – and, no less important, their own interests, experiences, identity and perspective. The significance of these ‘practices of freedom’ is that they allow us to go beyond the two usual forms of democratic participation, and open up the prospect of a transformative form of collaborative, participatory urban governance, that I call ‘civic capacity’. I use examples of ‘social production’ by citizen collectives to illustrate this form of civic capacity.