Ananya Roy: The State Can Also Be Informal

The state can also be informal is the thesis with which the planner Ananya Roy, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, dismantled the idea that urban informality is what happens outside the law and far from institutions. Two constructions break a similar rule: one receives tolerance and ends up integrated into development, the other receives surveillance and may be demolished. Why we call one informal and accept the other is the question Roy posed in her 2005 article on informality as an epistemology of planning and in Why India Cannot Plan Its Cities (2009), and her answer is that the state produces informality by deciding selectively which uses it recognises, which it tolerates and which it pursues.

The selective geometry of power: tolerate, authorise, demolish

The mechanism begins with the capacity to classify. An urban practice, occupying a plot, building without a permit, selling on the street, can receive authorisation, tolerance or intervention, and that difference produces informality itself: it is not a feature of the place but a relation with power. Roy calls it the selective geometry of power, and her Indian example is eloquent: the luxury farmhouses of Delhi's elites built outside the rules are regularised while the settlements of the poor are demolished as illegal, and the state itself acquires farmland through informal procedures to promote new towns. The law is applied as a resource, not as a rule.

Why India cannot plan its cities

The consequence for planning is profound. If informality is produced by the state, planning is not its antidote but one of its instruments: master plans that leave zones unregulated, ambiguities of land tenure, exceptions and rezonings are the tools with which institutions manage what can be done and by whom. Roy argues that India cannot plan its cities precisely because deregulation is the way the state governs territory, and that informality from above, that of elites and agencies, is more decisive than informality from below.

Calcutta and poverty: who has the authority to name the informal

Poverty thus stands at the centre. A settlement is defined as informal, and that label seems to describe an objective situation, but Roy forces the question of how it was produced and who has the authority to name it. Her work on Calcutta, in City Requiem (2003), showed families occupying land on the margins with the tolerance of parties that use them as electoral clientele and evict them when the land gains value. Informality, she concludes, is a mode of urbanization that distributes security and risk unequally, and titling or zero-tolerance policies fail because they treat as a technical problem what is a political relation.

Counterargument and proposal: equal rules and protection first

The counterargument is that cities need rules and institutions must distinguish what is permitted from what breaks the norm, so that speaking of state production of informality would exaggerate. Roy does not deny the need for rules; she notes that their application is selective and that this selection produces inequality. Her proposal is a planning that recognises its own informality, makes exceptions transparent and protects first those with the least capacity to negotiate with the state, through security of tenure, neighbourhood upgrading and participation in decisions about land.

Roy's lesson is that the decisive question about informality is not where the state is missing but how it acts and which inequalities it produces through its different ways of regulating. A city that demolishes the poor as illegal and regularises the rich for convenience does not have an informality problem but a justice problem, and seeing it that way changes the object of urban policy: not ordering the informal but governing with rules applied equally to all that protect those who need it most.