Informality and Everyday Cosmopolitan Contaminations

Catalog description

Cities are shaped not only by official policies and infrastructures but also by the informal and everyday interactions that blur boundaries between legality and illegality, local and global, self and other. This seminar will explore informality as a defining feature of urban life and globalization, examining how people navigate unregulated economies; build informal networks of care and survival; and redefine cosmopolitanism through daily acts of negotiation, adaptation, and contamination. Using a transnational and ethnographic lens, we will look at how informal economies—street vending, unregistered housing, underground labor networks—shape cities from the margins. We will also examine cultural and social “contaminations,” where urban residents of different class, racial, ethnic, and migratory backgrounds encounter and transform each other’s ways of life—sometimes in conflict, sometimes in collaboration. Rather than viewing informality as a “problem” to be solved, we will investigate how it can be a form of survival, resistance, and even innovation. Key themes include the role of informal housing and precarious urbanism, as seen in slums, refugee camps, and do-it-yourself architecture, as well as the dynamics of street economies and alternative labor structures. We will explore how migrant communities shape transnational place making; the politics of food, music, and everyday cultural hybridity; and how public space is governed, contested, and informally negotiated in cities. These intersecting themes highlight the ways in which urban life is constantly being reshaped through both structural constraints and human agency. Readings will include works by Teresa Caldeira, Asef Bayat, AbdouMaliq Simone, Ananya Roy, and Saskia Sassen, alongside ethnographic case studies of cities in Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa, and North America. Students will conduct…