Inventraset assemblages: The spatial logic of informal street vending, transport and settlement

Urban informality remains a central challenge for those engaged in understanding and transforming global South cities. There have been calls to develop new conceptual language geared to this challenge and much debate around the degree to which it might be subsumed within global urban theory. We argue that theories of informal urbanism need to be grounded in an understanding of how it works to sustain livelihoods, moving beyond studies of informal settlement, street vending and transport to understand the synergies, interrelations and interdependencies between them. Informal vending and transport provide employment and produce cheap goods and mobility; informal settlement produces affordable housing in key locations with access and mobility. ‘Inventraset’ is a portmanteau concept that links informal vending, transport and settlement into a dynamic urban assemblage that is inventive, transgressive and settled. This model is demonstrated through an empirical study of the spatial logic of the inventraset triangle within the megacities of Manila and Jakarta. Here the informal is normal, whether displayed in the intensities of transit nodes and street markets or camouflaged within zones of exclusion. This is not an ‘informal city’ but one where informal street vending, transport and settlement are geared to formal spatial and governance structures in different ways in different neighbourhoods − an assemblage of informal/formal and of vending/transport/settlement without which the urban economy would collapse. This is a call not simply to rename the informal but to understand it as a mode of production that is more than the inverse of the formal.