Assembling Formal and Informal Urban Governance: Political Brokerage in Recife, Brazil
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article approaches urban governance as an assemblage of formal and informal practices, comprising official procedures and personal favours, of legal frameworks and private arrangements between bureaucrats and residents. Within such assemblages, I show how community leaders of low-income neighbourhoods in the city of Recife, Brazil, operate as brokers between the state and their fellow residents. The community leaders are key actors in forging alignments between the different elements of the assemblage, using both formal (for example, participatory programs) and informal means (for example, clientelist votes-for-favours exchanges). Combining the anthropology of brokerage with recent assemblage-based work from urban studies and development studies, I conceptualise these local leaders as special "assemblers". I argue that they are a valuable starting point for analysing urban governance as a formal/informal assemblage, an analysis that provides insights that contribute to recent debates on the informal dimensions of urban governance and, more generally, the interconnections between the formal and the informal. A focus on their connective practices contributes to theorising urban governance as a piecing together of different actors, institutions and resources that is productive of power structures that become manifest in concrete formal and informal acts of assembling.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it