How to Make “Peace” with Informality?

Informality vs. formality is a politically constructed continuum rather than a discrete status with respect to laws and regulations. In policy and scholarly debates, the general tendency is to blame land users as the perpetrators and the source of informality. At the same time, the public authority is presumed to react to the informal constructions and land uses with a limited toolbox of policy instruments. In this chapter, we provide a new institutionalist approach to informality to distinguish between actor strategies and the operating mode of the State. We build on research on the legal and policy analysis of the State&s;s reaction to informality in the built environment and focus on how policies are conveyed to the users of buildings on the formality/informality continuum. We suggest that informal land uses at the local level often arise as localised regulatory arrangements (LRAs) when public and private actors together interpret the abstract rules of laws, decrees, and ordinances into concrete “rules in use.” In an LRA, actors may informally agree on not implementing formal rules. Depending on subsequent formalisation strategies by public actors, these LRAs can remain as ad hoc agreements at the plot level or jump scales as new “rules of the game.” This institutionalist approach allows the conceptualisation of informality as a scalar phenomenon across time and space resulting from the interaction between actors and institutions. To demonstrate the value of this conceptual framework, we discuss Turkey&s;s most recent zoning amnesty, Zoning Peace , as a paradigmatic example of centrally formulated national-scale formalisation attempts targeting the built environment to analyse the policy messages conveyed to the users and their repercussions for political-administrative actors. Our findings illustrate the shortcomings of formalisation attempts to improve compliance and the challenges of transparent and accountable policymaking to legalise non-compliant land uses. This analysis of the formalisation of informality through zoning amnesty challenges the portrayal of land users as perpetrators of informality and the idea of a reactive state. Analysing informality at the scale of the resource uses and actor strategies as well as mechanisms enabling “scale jumping” provides a solid conceptual basis for international comparisons and help move beyond reproducing generic stereotypes associated with geographic binaries such as North/South, East/West, and developed/developing.