Moving beyond informality-of-need and informality-of-desire: Insights from a southern (European) perspective

This paper comments an essay published by R. T. Devlin "Asking ‘Third World questions’ of First World informality: Using Southern theory to parse needs from desires in an analysis of informal urbanism of the global North", published on Planning Theory (17.4, 2018). In scuh paper, R. T. Devlin suggests identifying two categories, informality-of-desire and informality-of-need, whereby the former refers to informal practices originating from the desires of middle- and upper-class urban residents, and the latter represents strategies to meet the needs of the urban poor. In my comment I argue that the commendable conceptual framework proposed by Ryan Thomas Devlin should be made more sophisticated and detailed, to overcome the somewhat simplistic picture that might emerge from the ‘informality-of-need/informality-of-desire’ dichotomy.