On the Paraguay side of the Paraná River in Ciudad del Este, smugglers load up small boats with things like electronics and cigarettes bound for the opposite shore and eventually for consumers in Brazil, bypassing tariffs (or bribes) that would need to be paid on the International Friendship Bridge that serves as the official crossing between the two countries. Nearby, in Ciudad del Este’s downtown, gleaming glass shopping malls, symbols of development and modernity in this small Paraguayan border city, heave with goods imported from global manufacturing centers in East Asia, smuggled merchandise mixing on shelves with legitimately imported products. In the shadow of these modern buildings, street vendors ply their trade on crowded sidewalks, many also selling a mix of contraband imports and legal goods. All of this activity, this complex flow of goods within the city and across international borders, takes place not in the shadows, away from official attention, but rather exists in a complex relationship with official power, as political and economic elites and lower-income residents alike utilize the informal spaces of commerce and urbanism in Ciudad del Este to manage, move, hide, accumulate, and dispose of goods and financial capital.
One might be tempted to dismiss the web of illegalities that underlie the economy of Ciudad del Este as a typical Latin American story of corruption and poor governance—a story of a lawless border town at the edges of the global economic system. But in Outlaw Capital (2023, Liverpool University Press), Jennifer Tucker argues that what happens in Ciudad del Este is, in fact, connected and integral to mainstream international capital flows and trade networks, as well as indicative of patterns of urbanization and development more broadly, which operate through various kinds of informalities. Ciudad del Este shows that, in order to function, on either a local or a global scale, capitalist development and urbanization requires gray spaces where contradictions can be smoothed through informal practice, management, and governance.
In exploring the ways in which the informal urbanism of a small city in the Global South can inform our understanding of urban governance, Tucker’s book responds to calls from scholars like Jennifer Robinson who argue for building theory from “off the map” (Robinson 2002). By this, Robinson means using a variety of cities, not just those at the “core”, as mechanisms to understand and develop theory about urban processes. Far from being irrelevant outliers, cities like Ciudad del Este can help us see more clearly how phenomena like gray spaces, informalities, and transgression are fundamental both to the accumulation of capital and to governance regimes at the local, national, and global scale. What we see in Ciudad del Este is not a failure or bastardization of global capitalism, but a fundamental and useful node in broader flows.
One of the most seductive fictions that neoliberal capitalism constructs about itself, whether at the urban or global scale, is that it is an elegant, self-regulating system, free from contradictions and hypocrisies. When things do not function as they are expected to, it is the fault of bad actors, intrusive or inept governments, or the personal deficiencies and irrationalities of everyday actors. Thus Ciudad del Este, with its smuggling networks, informal street economies, and opaque, seemingly arbitrary forms of governance, might seem like capitalism’s alter ego. But through in‑depth participant observation, interviews, and fine-grained ethnographic methods, coupled with sophisticated theorizing and sensitive self-reflection, Tucker successfully argues that these seeming deviations from the norm are fundamental to the reproduction of neoliberal capitalism.
One of the mechanisms through which this occurs is the production, cultivation and use of “gray spaces”—the informal space between laws as stated and written and laws as enacted and experienced. Often dismissed as corruption, criminality, or a symptom of state incapacity, it is, in fact, a critical zone of mobility and flexibility, one where many of the contradictions of capitalism and its governance are smoothed over. Tucker shows how this gray space, through the use of class, nationality, and race-based narratives and framings, gets systematically “whitened” or darkened, with the informal practices of the poor criminalized by city leaders and development interests intent on producing a more modern urban image, while the rule-bending of well-connected elites is effectively ignored or naturalized by a state apparatus complicit in and receiving benefit from these elite informalities. For instance, both the shopping malls and the street stalls of vendors are sites of contraband merchandise, but malls, often financed and owned by powerful local property investors, get held up as examples of formal development, despite the fact that goods are moved informally through their storefronts and, as Tucker shows, many of the land deals and planning decisions made during construction were technically extralegal as well. Meanwhile, vendors, despite some holding government-issued licenses, despite having longstanding presence on the streets, and despite being important conduits of goods, get portrayed by local elites as rulebreakers and markers of illegality and disorder and are targeted for exclusion from public space.
Tucker’s description of these processes in Ciudad del Este is an important part of a broader set of interventions that argues that urban informality is not simply a trait of the urban poor unable or unwilling to conform to laws, but rather a mode of urbanization, intrinsic to urban life and its governance. The informal is generative, a sort of grease in the gears of the city, one that can provide opportunities of action, and can facilitate tactics, gambits, schemes, and improvisations that keep urban life going. A prime example of this is the story Tucker shares about a parcel of land in downtown Ciudad del Este known as the Nine Hectares. In a valuable location near the International Friendship Bridge, the land, which had previously been in the hands of cronies of the former dictator, Alfredo Stroessner, was designated for public benefit when democratization came in 1990. Yet 30 years later, when Tucker was undertaking fieldwork, the land still existed in limbo. Through both formal policy and informal strategies, the local state used the Nine Hectares as a sort of pressure relief valve, at times promising it to vendors as a space for a market and at other times looking to well-connected elites to develop it for shopping malls, in contravention of its purported mandate of public benefit. Ultimately, vendors occupying spaces in and around the area were criminalized, while the local state was able to ignore its own rules to enable private mall development on the site. Through this and other examples, Tucker shows how the ability to take advantage of this zone of flexibility is not equally distributed. As she argues in a key sentence, “… both suspension and transgression of the law enable action in a blurred zone of indifference that is more accessible to the powerful than the marginalized” (p. 58).
Once understood as a strategy of urban practice and a mode of urbanization, the informal no longer becomes something easily corrected or eliminated through rote strategies of formalization. Tucker shows how, in Ciudad del Este, the zone of informality is neither inherently progressive or regressive. Gray space is used by both elites intent on finding opportunities for profit-making and the urban poor striving for livelihoods. The informal, she argues, can be thought of as a productive zone of “useful transgression” (p. 162). It is perhaps, then, unsurprising that, given the integral nature of informality to city-making, formalization efforts have rarely worked in Ciudad del Este, perpetually frustrating dreams of a rational, orderly city. As Tucker argues, this is because formalization ends up killing the very vitality that makes the city work in the first place. The city is produced through its ability to strategically make use of spaces of transgression, and formalization efforts struggle precisely because they dismantle the delicate informal and provisional infrastructures that make the city possible. As Tucker clearly states, “formalization sought to eliminate the very practices that made the city work” (p. 159).
Tucker points us towards pro-poor epistemologies that might engender planning, governance, and advocacy that conceptualizes the informal city as a productive commons, a space of livelihoods that operates through logics other than the rabid individualism and accumulation-by-dispossession of urban neoliberalism. She argues that planners should recognize and value the spaces that street vendors and other informal workers create, claiming that, “rather than formalization, we need ways forward that center the power and knowledge of informal workers, ways that target the subjectivities and actions of planners and policymakers more than workers” (p. 180). I would argue that this points planners to a deeper form of participatory planning, one that sees the everyday strategies of informal workers as a form of communication through practice.
Tucker convincingly demonstrates how the differentiation of various kinds of informality operates through discourses of class and race, leading her to literature on racial capitalism to analyze these processes. But at times she tries a bit too hard to fit the racial politics of Paraguay into a US‑centric framework of racialization. Tucker is an expert on Paraguay, and knows the specific racial history of the country, but the sometimes unnuanced way she deploys US‑centric scholarship on race and Blackness comes at the expense of more discerning analysis of class, race, and indigeneity particular to the Paraguayan context.
This minor quibble aside, Tucker’s book is a masterful piece of work, deeply informed by rigorous research. Tucker makes important theoretical contributions as well as providing conceptual building blocks for practical interventions into the urban that might lead to a more just, equitable city. Finally, the book is, quite simply, a good read. Tucker is a skilled narrator, sensitive to the human condition and introspective about her own place as a researcher in the city. Through her vivid and compelling writing style, she takes us with her on her journey through government offices, activist meeting halls, sidewalk stands, and malls heaving with licit and illicit goods. She immerses us in the dynamic, sometimes surreal, urbanism of this small border city at the edge of a small country, with lessons that resonate out from from the frenetic sidewalks of Ciudad del Este to the wider world.
Bibliography
- Robinson, Jennifer. 2002. “Global and World Cities: A View from off the Map”, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 26, no. 3, pp. 531–554.
