Urban Informality: A Persistent Matter of Concern
By Dr. Jayde Lin Roberts & Jae-Young Lee
In Myanmar, formal institutionalisation does not necessarily correlate with justice, transparency, efficiency or societal benefit. Since the country’s second coup in 1962, the military government has used law and order rather than rule of law (see Cheesman, 2015) to impose regulatory mechanisms in arbitrary and repressive ways. As such, informal economies play a crucial role in the daily survival of many and actively reshape Yangon’s cityscape.
On the streets of Yangon, vendors and customers alike navigate the intricate web of pricing, territories and services through local and relational networks. Known as nalehmu (the notion of understanding in Burmese), this relational logic knits together mutual obligations and trust established through long-term interactions. Unlike formal contracts, nalehmu assures accountability and access through personal relationships rather than relying on the imagined consistency of legal systems.
This issue of SPACE TALKS critically explores how the neglect of informality as a concept can obscure complex mechanisms of urban life at the theoretical margins in the Global South.
From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern
In academic discourses, the concept of informality is increasingly discarded: Caught up in a static formal-informal dichotomy, it is widely critiqued for its ahistoricity, lack of precision in describing new phenomena, and limitations in diagnosing complex power dynamics between various actors that defy universalised theorisation. As a consequence, it is often substituted by concepts of peripherality and marginality that focus on wider spectrum of power dynamics.
Latour’s ruminations on scientific critique (2004), however, encourage us to examine the apparent inadequacies of informality as matters of fact that need to be transformed into matters of concern. By questioning the given-ness of informality through controversies (scrutinising its meaning and ability to act on the world), we can analyse informality not as mere case studies or an outdated concept but rather as a dynamic riddle, an enticing black-box that demands our nuanced and place-specific attention if we are to understand these pervasive and persistent phenomena. Analyses of informality are easily dismissed as regional anecdotes of urban poverty or weapons of the weak (Scott, 1985), when they might, in fact, disguise long-standing, complex and non-hegemonic spatial heuristics hiding in plain sight. In our case, this concerns the postcolonial and complex urban logic of Yangon, Myanmar.
Informality as de-centering practices
Since independence from British colonial rule in 1948, Myanmar has experienced ongoing political upheaval and state violence. The brief transition to partial civilian rule between 2011 and 2021 saw manifold development initiatives aimed at modernising and formalising Yangon, almost always according to Global North models of good governance. Funded by international donors, formalisation processes emphasised rule of law and transparency but failed to consider Myanmar’s relational networks of mutuality and reciprocity – nalehmu.
In 2015, the since toppled civilian-led government attempted to modernise and formalise street vending by establishing a completely new night market along a major arterial road in Yangon. Funded and supported by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), this car-dominated street was not pedestrianised, but vending spaces were marked out on the edge of the road using an unclear allocation system that accommodated less than half of the hawkers in the city. Vendors complained that poor hawkers were excluded and all were displaced, uprooting all sellers from long-established neighbourhood-based spatialities and ecologies of street vending. To maintain their place-based relational connections in the face of displacement, some vendors labelled their stalls according to the street or block they were once located, not only to maintain their previous customer base but also to identify themselves as belonging to that specific place.
During the Covid-19 crisis and following the 2021 coup, nalehmu practices have continued through street stalls full of food and donations – becoming the only secure lifeline amid state-imposed shortages. Today, Yangon’s inhabitants still rely on nalehmu networksin their immediate neighbourhoods to survive under military induced precarity.
These accounts reflect internal and external power relations among street vendors, Yangon residents, and the state at four different scales: the neighbourhood street, the city-wide night market initiative, the Myanmar national objective to modernise, and international aid-based development as represented by JICA. These relations are embedded in a postcolonial setting of actors, spaces, and goods (see also Cobbinah, 2025), which shape urban life through entwined practices of intimacy and economy that adapt quickly in response to the volatile uncertainty of life in Myanmar.
Myanmar’s path towards formalisation and capitalist modernity has rendered private, domestic and “informal” spheres non-productive matters of fact. Yet in Yangon, intimacy and informality, as evident in street vending, remain central pillars of society and the economy. They are flexible frameworks, anchored in space and time, that respond to immediate needs while sustaining long-term communal networks of mutual aid. In this regard, the logic of nalehmu in Yangon’s street vending represents long-standing, culturally specific, and historically grown practices of an intimate economy (Wilson, 2004). These practices superimpose, contest, complement and therefore affect the implementation of formal regulations. Yet, they also persist beyond formal and often externally imposed systems of objectification in Myanmar’s postcolonial urban landscape.
Call to Concern: Figuring out Informalities
Informality has become a loose and dismissive catch-all term for diverse, non-formal practices and social dynamics unfolding in urban frontiers (Bunnell et al., 2012). Labelling these practices as merely informal without critically examining the normative associations of illegitimacy, smallness, and poverty risks omitting the extensive non-hegemonic socio-spatial elements they embody. Unearthing such new heuristics – particularly in postcolonial settings across the Global South, where concepts from the Global North are far too often uncritically transferred – is therefore crucial if we are to aspire to a more pluralistic understanding of space.
Looking across the theoretical margins, the Chinese concept of guanxi – a more extensively studied form of informal social order – offers a helpful comparative lens. However, guanxi and nalehmu are surely not isolated exceptions. They are part of a wider landscape of culturally embedded relational epistemologies and practices across the Global South, often overlooked or flattened by stagnant concepts of informality. To recognise the significance of such practices, these theoretically marginalised concepts must be studied in greater contextual depth and compared, despite the difficulty of discerning universal categories. Doing so allows us to understand how they interact with the structural dynamics of contemporary global processes and systems.
In this light, what is often dismissed as informal may in fact reflect a deeper heuristic and epistemological blind spot within dominant systems of knowledge and global standardisation. As such, we argue that informality should not be treated as a residual category but rather reclaimed as a collective matter of concern – one that demands critical attention, theoretical openness, and a commitment to epistemic plurality.
Figurations of Informality:
From Burmese nalehmu to Chinese guanxi to Korean jeong
In some ways, informality as a concept could seem like a debate about semantics. What does informality really mean? How can we better understand its complex relationship to formality beyond a dichotomy? What can it tell us about matters of postcolonial, non-hegemonic, and place-specific modes of operation that constitute space and sustain socio-spatial practices?
To research societal logics across scales and beyond the vagueness of the informality term, it is helpful to approach other relational concepts of spatial logic that are illegible to universalism and are therefore often overlooked as ephemeral, purely personal or other denotations far removed from political relevance.
Burmese nalehmu, Chinese guanxi and Korean jeong all describe concepts of place-specific social mechanisms that share common traits of deepening interpersonal relationships based on trust, reciprocity and prioritising common gain. In their respective contexts, they underpin large parts of everyday life, from the scale of the urban economy down to the private, which contest, superimpose, complement and even shape formalised procedures. What can these concepts tell us, in turn, about our streamlined understandings of space and its legitimate epistemologies and heuristics?
What embodied practices can we find in our immediate surroundings that have evaded our epistemological investigation?
နားလည်မှု
The Burmese concept of nalehmu (နားလည်မှု) derives from the notion of understanding (naleh) and denotes mutuality and reciprocity between individuals that facilitate social interactions which can promote communal cohesion. It involves recognising and accommodating each other’s needs and circumstances based on mutual respect and concern, predicated on the establishment of long-term relationships. Practices of nalehmu enable access to goods, services and information, and is negotiated fluidly across intimate and public spheres (Roberts and Rhoads, 2022).
關係
The Chinese concept of guanxi (關係) explains a system of strategic relationship-building based on implicit social values such as trustworthiness, mutuality, and proper conduct. While often associated with corruption in state-entanglements, guanxi fundamentally underpins long-term relationships, structuring societal interactions through obligation and reciprocity (Yang, 2002).
정
Similarly, in Korean society, the concept of Jeong (정) describes a culture-specific relational affect that fosters deep, long-term social bonds and feelings of interconnectedness. It is rooted in a Buddhist emphasis on compassion and interconnectedness and Confucian notions of filial piety. Jeong develops over time through shared experiences and mutual care and encompasses feelings of attachment, empathy, and loyalty among individuals (Chung and Oh, 2025).
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Authors
Dr. Jayde Lin Roberts is a spatial ethnographer of the built environment who focuses on Asian Urbanism, Critical Heritage Studies, Myanmar, Southeast Asia, and the Chinese diaspora. Based at UNSW Sydney, she combines historical and ethnographic research to better understand Asian cities in the Global South.
Jae-Young Lee is an architect and researcher at the CRC 1265 and the Leibniz-Institute for Research on Society and Space. Her work explores grassroots dynamics of platform ruralisation and practices of insurgency between Chile, South Korea and the Thai-Myanmar border.
The SPACE TALKS ZINE is based on a digital lecture series at the CRC 1265 “Re-Figuration of Spaces” during the winter semester of 2024/25, organised by Lucie Bernroider, Francesca Ceola, Sung Un Gang, Jae-Young Lee, Indrawan Prabaharyaka, Margherita Tess.
Funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) – SFB 1265 Re-Figuration of Spaces (project number 290045248).