Decolonising the Informal: Discourse, Everyday Life, and the Politics of Urbanisation in Windhoek, Namibia

In contemporary post-colonial Namibia, the concept of informality is widely applied with reference to the ‘informal economy’ and ‘informal settlements’, which are rapidly overtaking formal urbanisation processes inherited from colonial times. All the while, conventional professional spatial practices remain structurally elitist and seem ineffectual in settings of ‘urban informality’, which largely overlap with the lived experience of the black urban poor. Urban theory continues to reinforce a binary conceptualisation in which ‘informality’ remains framed as the non-formal, emphasising what it is not rather than providing a conceptual framework for what it is. This study is threefold: firstly, I investigate understandings of ‘informality’ throughin-depth interviews with professional spatial practitioners in the governmental, NGO and private sectors. Secondly, I reconceptualise ‘informality’ as everyday spatial practice based on participant observation at the “Herero Mall” ‘informal market’ in Windhoek. Thirdly, I give account of my involvement in a co-productive spatial intervention at the Herero Mall with local traders. Through these three approaches, I found that the temporal overlap between Namibia’s decolonisation (from the late 1970s until Independence in 1990) and the mainstreaming of the concept of ‘informality’ in urban theory provided the conditions of emergence for ‘informality’ to become a discursive practice. By discursively constructing the world of the ‘informal’ as the binary opposite of what is considered formal and legitimate, its actors and practices are delegitimised and thus continue to be structurally excluded. At the same time, I argue that the ‘informal’ everyday spatial and economic practices of the subaltern is a form of resistance to formal enclosure, weaving together fragments of colonial urbanisation into a decolonising urbanism. I argue that this form of alter-urbanisation provides a point of departure for an alternative professional spatial practice, the outlines of which I trace through reflecting on a co-productive spatial intervention at the Herero Mall.