Learning from Informality? A Case Study to Rethink the Misfit Between Formal Policy Strategies and Informal Tactics of Citizenship

Dutch disadvantaged city neighbourhoods face a wide variety of policy strategies to regenerate housing and public spaces, integrate migrants, support families, and make these urban areas safer and more attractive to the middle class. Residents in these areas, however, reveal very different tactics to make their living environment more equipped for their lives. They perform tacit and informal practices to deal with experiences of threat and develop community activities from the bottom-up. Informal practices – like everyday routines, tacit use of public spaces, and interactions at a square – tell much about the urban experience. Socio-economic disadvantages and a lack of linguistic skills make it hard for residents to engage in formal participation schemes. They experience the state through street-level interactions, but their stories do not find acknowledgement in the public sphere as governments hold on to formal repertoires. Recent needs for welfare cuts and a growing fear for violent escalations make local governments eager to rethink citizen’s involvement. How could sociologist but also policy practitioners learn from informal performances of citizenship in relation to the dominant actors and institutions? This paper analyses the misfit between informal tactics of residents and top-down strategies of government in a neighbourhood in Utrecht. An ethnographic case study of performed interactions between citizens, welfare practitioners, and policy makers unravels how strategies to involve residents paradoxically disrupt informal mechanisms and thereby disengage residents from taking part in the political process. Latent tensions deepen in the unhandy mismatch between well-intended strategies and everyday tactics. Could local governments use tacit knowledge without ‘taking over’ or ‘disrupting’ the tacit fabric of the neighbourhood?