Short Abstract

This panel treats informality as something the state does, not something a settlement is. Authority runs through tenant coordinators, market associations, and leaders recognized at will. A discretion with colonial roots, deeply gendered. What counts as urban governance, and who is seen doing it?

Long Abstract

Urban governance across much of sub-Saharan Africa is still defined by what the state can see: formal planning, visible infrastructure, bureaucratic regulation. Yet much of the housing, infrastructure, and livelihood that makes urban life possible operates beyond municipal purview as the primary terrain through which the city is inhabited and made to function. This panel asks how that city is governed, and how the state decides, case by case, which arrangements to recognize and which to name as ‘disorder.’

Here, regulatory authority is neither absent nor monopolized but shared and contested: tenant coordinators set rents and settle disputes, market women’s associations allocate space and enforce trade norms, unelected leaders derive legitimacy from demonstrated fairness. We call this the informal state, not a shadow or parallel structure, but a spectrum of authority, from officials to market queens, that rules through ambiguity, selective enforcement, and delegated power within systems the state itself produced.

This discretion has a documented, colonial history: the categories that strip a settlement of its standing and re-narrate it as ‘slum’ are colonial technologies of property that outlived the colony. And the daily labor of this governance is heavily gendered, even as it withholds standing from the women who perform it.

We invite ethnographic, historical, legal, and comparative papers on the everyday regulation of land, housing, services, and mobility. In the spirit of African Prisms, we theorize urban order from the ground up and ask who classifies the city, and through which inherited categories.

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