11 - Informal Economies: Towards Plurality and Social Justice

Summary

Introduction

Our starting inspiration for this chapter is the work of Mary Njeri Kinyanjui (2013, 2014, 2019), an economic geographer who has written extensively on women entrepreneurs running garment stalls in Nairobi. In African Markets and the Utu-buntu Business Model (2019: xiii), Kinyanjui recounts a popular song that underscores the widespread belief that ‘markets sustain traders’ sense of their own power as well as that of their families and communities’. Important here are two strands: that social reproduction is intimately connected to the market, and that solidarities and mutualities exist between traders and the wider community. Kinyanjui refers to this business model as utu-buntu, which contrasts with neoliberal logics of individuality and competition, thus pointing to what a model of economic and social justice, rooted in alternative values, may entail. Following Kinyanjui, we ask what political possibilities emerge when we read the myriad labour practices that are grouped as ‘informal’ alongside principles of care and solidarity? (Compare Gibson-Graham, 2008; see also Chapter 4 in this volume.) What might such practices inspired by principles of mutuality in turn say about dwelling and surviving on the urban ‘margins’, and urban justice more broadly? These ideas are important to contemporary economic geographies, as they acknowledge that solidarity economies are key to surviving in and actively shaping the interlinking spheres of home and work, and the city writ large.

It would be impossible to do justice to the full diversity of work on informal economies within Geography or allied fields (see, for example, Banks et al, 2019). Instead, we organize our intervention across particular spatialities where forms of labour and dwelling take place, and which are often part of interconnected processes. We draw on recent thinking around the dissolving boundaries between re/ productive labour, and feminist economic geographers’ concerns over the unrecognized labour that takes place at home (Mezzadri, 2020). Looking at housing and labour in conjunction with one another thus cuts across ‘usual’ urban sites and scales, namely the ‘market’, the ‘street’, the ‘home’, and the ‘margins’ to understand how working across such spatialities is mutually co-constituted, and critical to subject formation. Put differently, stories of the informal economy are as much about ‘homes’ as ‘work’, contextualized within the interconnected histories of colonial and postcolonial planning, as well as contemporary processes of urban change (Roy and AlSayyad, 2003; Watson, 2009; Potts, 2020).