Spectrums of in/formality and il/legality: Negotiating business and migration-related statuses in arrival spaces

Abstract

Abstract Across global cities of the world, urban spaces of arrival tend to be characterized by a multiplicity of informal practices, and therefore also marginality, being most prevalent in relation to local economic practices, and increasingly more the legal status of foreigner migrants residing in such spaces. This article aims to understand these dynamics in arrival spaces at the margins by exploring both domains in a unique manner. Over recent decades, urban and migration studies have separately given rise to new research that is critical of the pervasive binary views around formal versus informal economies and legal versus illegal migrations. Drawing on this literature, and ethnographic fieldwork carried out in an Istanbul locality that has served as a zone of arrival for varying migration flows over several decades, this article examines how both business proprietors and migrants working and/or residing in the locality actively and continuously re-negotiate their positions within spectrums of in/formality and il/legality. It shows that arrival spaces at the margins are places of intense calculation and that the chosen direction along these spectrums depends on an evaluation of all kinds of social, political, spatial, and temporal factors transpiring at a particular moment and place. In focusing on this processual nature of in/formalities and il/legalities, the article also suggests reconsidering various other dualities, including margins versus center, exclusion versus inclusion, and arrival versus settlement, and argues that the intensity of having to manage one’s experiences of these dualities is what really distinguishes inhabiting arrival spaces at the margins in today’s global cities.