Is there a meaningful difference between informality a state tolerates and informality a state manufactures? Ahmedabad’s ghettoisation of Juhapura proceeds through ordinary regulatory tools rather than open exclusion; Jerusalem’s informal Palestinian housing is, on Chiodelli’s account, a by-product of deliberate Israeli territorial strategy; Harare’s land allocation becomes a direct instrument of inter-party electoral competition. In each case informality is not the absence of state capacity but a particular use of it, though the politics it serves — nationalist, territorial, electoral — are not the same. A core discussion question: if the state produced the informality, can a regularisation programme that leaves state power intact actually remedy it?

Ankara’s gecekondu dwellers won repeated amnesties and titling waves but stayed tied to the next electoral cycle; Lima’s pueblos jóvenes gained rights-bearing status through a 1971 pact with Velasco’s military government, only to see neoliberal adjustment and renewed clientelism erode those gains; Seoul’s informal settlers moved from uprising to systemic claim-making to electoral leverage across three different regimes, yet each gain proved short-lived. Read together, the three chapters suggest that a bargain struck with a particular regime rarely survives that regime’s exit. The cluster also poses the deeper question of whether clientelism should be understood as the corruption of rights or as a mode of politics in its own right.

Hanoi’s residents practise what Geertman and Kim, following Bayat and Scott, call soft politics and hidden transcripts: tactics that avoid open confrontation with the one-party state; Khartoum’s displaced populations resist through the simple fact of remaining visible in a city designed to exclude them; São Paulo’s cortiços survive by staying invisible behind formal façades altogether. Each strategy avoids the risks of confrontation, but each also leaves residents dependent on a tolerance that could, in principle, be withdrawn. This cluster is best read alongside the readings on clientelism (Cluster 2), since the line between tactical silence and clientelist dependence is not always clear.

Medellín’s Encircled Garden Project shows the Colombian state using monumentalised transit infrastructure to reassert territorial control over Comuna 8; Johannesburg’s Kya Sands residents build their own water and electricity infrastructure precisely because the state will not; Cairo’s Ard al-Liwa residents reclaim public space after 2011 with the state’s authority temporarily weakened. Infrastructure, in other words, is rarely a neutral public good: who builds it, and under what conditions, is itself a political question. This cluster works well with the spatial justice framework in Rocco (2026), which treats infrastructure provision as simultaneously distributive and recognitional.

All three Brazilian cases describe occupations that invoke the constitutional right to adequate housing rather than simple economic necessity. Belo Horizonte’s post-2000 occupations are explicit legal claims; Fortaleza’s Trilha do Senhor residents used inclusionary urban policy to win standing, later facing eviction pressure from land recommodification; São Paulo’s Ocupação Marconi shows occupiers negotiating selectively with both state and market, a pragmatism that risks letting absentee building owners benefit from state buyouts intended for occupiers. Rights-based framing strengthens a claim but does not insulate it from contestation. The cluster invites the question: does the juridical turn in informal politics expand possibilities or constrain them?

Yogyakarta’s Kalijawi network is led by women who reorder a male-dominated public sphere through organisation and visibility; Mashhad’s right-to-the-city claims are inseparable from Shia religious faith and Iran’s Sharia-inflected institutions; Beirut’s Dahiye is shaped by a confessional citizenship inherited from Ottoman and Mandate-era power-sharing. None of these chapters treats informal urbanisation as a purely economic phenomenon: who can claim space, and how, is also a question of gender and religious order. The cluster challenges students to identify what theories developed in one context need to be qualified or rebuilt when applied in another.