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ILLICITIES: City-Making and Organized Crime | An Introduction - by Frank Müller & Julienne Weegels

published on 16 March 2020

The research network ILLICITIES explores the ways in which heterogeneous governance actors, including licit and illicit actors, co-produce cities. Provoked by Charles Tilly’s analogy of state-making and organized crime, we aim at a better understanding of the urban and material conditions of the crime/state-making nexus.

We will expand debates of the formal/informal dichotomy, by a) questioning moral aspects, that is, the licit/illicit in its own, literal sense; and b) granting urban things and materiality an affective, transformative, and assembling role in criminalized urbanization. The larger theoretical goal is to discuss the material-discursive dimensions of urban sovereignty, and the reliance on, collaboration with, or containing of illicit actors in urban governance.

ILLICITIES addresses the influential role of organized crime in urban planning and organization. As spaces that concentrate economic wealth and political power, cities are prone to struggles over the distribution of resources and often become arenas in which negotiations between the formal state and illicit ‘criminal’ actors, such as militia, mafia, drug trafficking and paramilitary groups, take place. As both state actors and organized crime groups “weaponize” cities, urban residents’ ability to own, manage, and access resources such as land, construction materials, apartments and urban utilities (water, electric energy and gas) may become limited. This urges to include the materiality of cities within the analysis of illicit city-making and urban governance.

The contributors to ILLICITIES take diverse empirical perspectives, ranging from the analysis of urban forms and patterns, security initiatives, urban regeneration projects, the material and architectonic production of cities’ housing and infrastructure, to prisons and public schools. All contributions share an interest in criticizing approaches to urban governance that grant urban materiality a passive role in the making of a licit, formal city. Instead, we wish to expand definitions of urban governance that are limited to social interaction, regulation, and social fields to one that approaches urban governance through the lens of urban materiality’s active role in the constitution and understanding of governance regimes.

Questions

In order to incentivize debates that address illicit governance arrangements through the lens of materiality, members of this network discuss:

Connections between licit and illicit order-making

  1. What moral assumptions underlie the threshold between licit and illicit orders?
  2. How do ‘criminal’ practices inform urban governance arrangements between state and non-state actors?
  3. Looking at criminalized urbanization in rather liberal or rather authoritarian regimes, to what extent can we identify commonalities and differences in the ways in which the licit/illicit divide relates to legitimacy?

The material conditions of il/licit city-making and urban governance

  1. How are different materialities and objects, such as urban utilities, housing, bodies/senses, technologies, and weapons tied to criminal and/or state activity and to the negotiations, conflicts or collaborations between state authorities and illicit groups?
  2. What kind of built structures favor illicit activities and economies?
  3. What patterns of urban forms, of buildings/architectures, and of infrastructures emerge out of il/licit city-making?

Effects for urban populations

  1. What kind of protection rackets can be observed in illicit city-making?
  2. Do licit-illicit orders engender more or less unequal distribution of goods and commons, as well as access to housing, infrastructures, and (public) spaces?
  3. What kind of populations’ responses to illicit city-making can we observe?

Conceptual Development

  1. What concepts do we need to understand illicit city-making?
  2. How are the thresholds between the three pairs (licit/legal/formal and their counterparts) defined? By whom, by what strategies and to what benefits?
  3. How do the pairs il/legality, in/formality, il/licity, and il/legitimacy relate to one another?

The Contributions

From April 2020 onwards, we will publish blog entries that present original research on a great variety of topics and from diverse disciplinary and empirical contexts every two weeks. Among these will be: military check points in Israel/Palestine, urban regeneration projects in Guatemala, public schools in Honduras, criminal urbanization in Rio de Janeiro, prisons in Nicaragua, housing in Northern Italy, and distributed governance in São Paulo. We hope you will stay tuned to our blog!