This chapter explores the connection between informality, migration, and precarity and how urban villages are formed in China. It discusses the contribution of the book and the fieldwork methods and introduces the readers to the structure of the book.

In Egypt, by the mid-1980s, as a result of a deep economic crisis, thousands of Islamic voluntary associations managed to develop a parallel economy and a parallel welfare system. In some instances, these modes of informal organizations translated into an Islamist-inspired challenge to the state. The rise in political influence of the Islamic Investment Houses dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood aided that organization in its recruitment programs that expanded its membership. Moreover, where radical Islamic groups were able to exploit informal financial networks and procure informal labor contracts for their supporters, particularly in the informal settlements around Cairo, they used these as bases of power and influence. Using private sources to establish social networks in defiance of state regulations, organizations such as the militant Islamic Group (al-jama’at al-Islamiyya) have sought to build, literally, a “state within a state.”

In Egypt migrant remittances and the flow of petrodollars in the era of the oil boom provided capitalization of Islamic banks and a host of Islamic investment companies that operated outside the system of state regulation. Such bankers drew on the rapidly growing wealth of those businessmen with long-standing connections in the Gulf, including, most importantly, members and sympathizers with the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). This boom in labor export and remittance flows also helped shape Egyptian national economic functions, out-migration and the burgeoning informal economy afforded the Egyptian state enough “relative autonomy” to allow it to expand the private sector and begin to decentralize the country’s economic system. It enabled the Egyptian state to relax foreign exchange regulations to stimulate a foreign capital influx. However, the unintended consequences of these policies were opening the door for Islamic financial institutions, which helped finance and popularize the middle class-based Islamic movement.

Chapter 23 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet is the third in a four-part exploration of the Greatest Acceleration from 1945 to the present. Its focus is on spaces of consumption and production, the ocean hopping “value chains” that connect shops with factories, and the growing role of virtual spaces in the global spread of those environments. The proliferation of massive shopping malls, the attraction of urban land, and the global tourist industry are all pieces of this part of the Greatest Acceleration. To produce the goods and increasingly the “experiences” that elicit these desires, manufacturing spaces have exploded in size, notably in East Asia, even as they have declined in many of the “Global North” urban heartlands of the industrial revolution. The chapter visits the largest factory in the world in Shenzhen, China and smaller sweatshops. It also notes that a majority of workers in the global economy do unsung work such as urban transport, construction, and household good sales that makes the growth of cities (and tourist experiences) possible, and in care work in homes, essential to making all other work possible.

In Egypt, by the mid-1980s, as a result of a deep economic crisis, thousands of Islamic voluntary associations managed to develop a parallel economy and a parallel welfare system. In some instances, these modes of informal organizations translated into an Islamist-inspired challenge to the state. The rise in political influence of the Islamic Investment Houses dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood aided that organization in its recruitment programs that expanded its membership. Moreover, where radical Islamic groups were able to exploit informal financial networks and procure informal labor contracts for their supporters, particularly in the informal settlements around Cairo, they used these as bases of power and influence. Using private sources to establish social networks in defiance of state regulations, organizations such as the militant Islamic Group (al-jama’at al-Islamiyya) have sought to build, literally, a “state within a state.”

In Egypt migrant remittances and the flow of petrodollars in the era of the oil boom provided capitalization of Islamic banks and a host of Islamic investment companies that operated outside the system of state regulation. Such bankers drew on the rapidly growing wealth of those businessmen with long-standing connections in the Gulf, including, most importantly, members and sympathizers with the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). This boom in labor export and remittance flows also helped shape Egyptian national economic functions, out-migration and the burgeoning informal economy afforded the Egyptian state enough “relative autonomy” to allow it to expand the private sector and begin to decentralize the country’s economic system. It enabled the Egyptian state to relax foreign exchange regulations to stimulate a foreign capital influx. However, the unintended consequences of these policies were opening the door for Islamic financial institutions, which helped finance and popularize the middle class-based Islamic movement.