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Accepted Paper:

Building a comparative framework to study informality across Addis Ababa, Bangalore and Buenos Aires  
Valeria Guarneros-Meza (De Montfort University) Adam Fishwick (University of Akureyri)

Paper short abstract:

The paper proposes a methodological framework to identify, understand and analyse the different collective organising practices of informal workers in their everyday survival strategies under urban precarity and poverty in Bangalore, Buenos Aires and Addis Ababa.

Paper long abstract:

The paper aims to explore and begin to develop the methodological framework of the project Surviving the Informal City (StIC). This project aims to identify, understand and analyse the different collective organising practices of informal workers in their everyday survival strategies under urban precarity and poverty in Bangalore, Buenos Aires and Addis Ababa. In particular, the project puts emphasis on three aspects: workers' forms of collective organisation and knowledge; social reproduction and forms of gendered exploitation in worker's lives; and workers' engagement with state resources as well as the state's responses to their engagement. The comparison across cities this project entails has drawn attention to studies on 'relational comparison' (Robinson, 2011, 2016; Hart 2006, 2018; Streule, 2020). For this project, relationality is understood at two levels. In a social infrastructural sense, in which the relations that informal workers develop in their everyday sustain urban life, often outside formal state and market institutions (Latham & Lamont 2019; DeVerteuil & Mizuuchi 2020); and in a geographical sense, in which relations are constituted between and across places, identities or events through power-laden practices and discourses (Hart, 2006:996). The paper justifies the value of relational comparison given the aims of StIC project, while discussing different approaches on how to develop relational comparison within the project's aims.

Panel P02a
Informality: a way of surviving the post-pandemic city?
  Session 1 Thursday 7 July, 2022, -