The Marketization of Economic Informality: Rooftops, Housing and Private Property in a Cairo Neighborhood

Join Associate Professor of Political Science Amr Adly as he explores market making under conditions of widespread economic informality, focusing on a segment of Cairo’s housing market. Drawing on rich ethnographic research with small developers who built additional housing units on rooftops of existing buildings in a middle-class neighborhood, Adly argues that marketizing informality was driven by differential embeddedness—a two-pronged process of simultaneous dis-embeddedness and embeddedness of production and exchange.

In this process, informally supplied commodities were dis-embedded from the logic and dynamics of social reproduction. At the same time, the market-oriented embeddedness of production and exchange into existing formal and informal systems of norms, identities, practices, and relations enabled the institutionalization of a fledgling market space. Much of this was propelled by the informal developers themselves through three mechanisms: adhesive legality, social legitimization, and private enforcement.