Transnationality: Legal Architectures

In turning to informal markets as politically contested spaces, OTHER MARKETS investigates their role in a continuous process of political ordering that draws on the power to decide on the exception to the normalised condition and its application to the transformation of national identities and sovereignties. At the heart of this restructuring are deterritorialised ethnic forms that have come to replace state government technology. These shifts have prompted the demand for new forms of governance that respond better to contemporary ‘regimes of living’ – the ongoing fragmentation of cultures and subjects and the multitude of spatially dispersed informal affiliations. To address these processes, the research looks at emerging forms of sociality that take effect at places where different cultures coincide locally and yield volatile, contradictory and contested space-time ecosystems.

What kind of citizenship arrangements are produced through the intensifying network of nodalised informality and the struggle of citizens themselves? How do the flexible assets, capacities and assemblages of informal markets prepare the ground for new claims on citizenship? What modes of participation are enabled by these processes of reterritorialisation and what kinds of models can we generate from them for urban and translocal societal interaction at large?

While dominant concepts of citizenship have been based on a binary opposition between the rights of citizenship rooted in national territories and a stateless condition outside the nation-state, contemporary flows of capital and people provoke a progressive disentanglement of citizenship claims from a territorially fixed political status. By examining the exercise and development of citizenship arrangements in and around informal market places, OTHER MARKETS traces the current shift from a ‘citizenship of borders and confines’ to diverse forms of ‘latitudinal citizenship’ associated with the exertion of lateral influence across social and political domains.

TRANS-URBANISATION

By bringing the spatial practices and the cultural mechanisms that sustain informal markets centre stage, OTHER MARKETS refers to the current redefinition of the urban system not purely as an effect of accelerated globalisation but as a field of interactions between particular emergent assemblages:

● graduated MOBILITY and its intersection with urban informalities

● the effects of novel forms of LAND USE on the emergence of transient ecologies

● interrelations between politics of TRANSNATIONALITY and legal architectures of  informal markets