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

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

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

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

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

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>>

Housing and collective consumption

Social mobilisation

(In)security: popular (in)justice?

Political participation

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?

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

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