Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses urban governance as a formal-informal assemblage. It zooms in on community leaders in the city of Recife, Brazil, who operate as political brokers between the state and the favela population. It shows how their 'assembling work' connects and entwines the formal with the informal.

Paper long abstract:

The field of urban governance contains both formal and informal actions and transactions. It comprises of official procedures and personal favors, of legal frameworks and private arrangements between bureaucrats and residents. This paper sets out to understand urban governance as a formal/informal assemblage. It ethnographically zooms in on community leaders in the Brazilian city of Recife. These leaders operate as political brokers between the state and the favela population. They claim to 'speak for' and 'act on behalf of' their fellow favelados vis-à-vis the state. Within the field of urban governance, they are active in the distinct, yet overlapping domains of participatory programs, clientelist exchanges and contentious politics. They work on a wide variety of issues, ranging from slum upgrading, tenure security and poverty alleviation to cultural expression, gender equality and crime prevention.

They bring residents' ideas into policy design and translate local meanings to bureaucratic categories, and vice versa. They connect the institutional with the personal and the official with the unofficial. I present these community leaders as connective agents in wider governance assemblages. These assemblages - amalgams of different government, citizen and corporate actors, institutions and resources - constitute temporary power structures, which are inherently unstable, incoherent and inconsistent. The community leaders are key actors in bringing together and forging alignments between the different elements of the assemblage by both formal and informal means. As special 'assemblers', they are a valuable starting point for analyzing urban governance as a formal-informal assemblage.