Brokerage and the Urban Encounter

Over the last three decades, literature in urban politics, sociology, and anthropology has repositioned brokerage from a marginal or "corrupt" anomaly to an essential mechanism of urban survival and capital accumulation. Whether operating within a Latin American favela (Koster 2016), a North Indian informal colony (Auerbach 2020), or a financialized real estate market (Sigler et al. 2023) in a Western metropolis, brokers do the interpretive, affective, and strategic labor that makes the city legible. They are the human infrastructure of the urban encounter. In resource-scarce environments, brokers act as critical links to public infrastructure in low-income settlements, forge political spaces, and secure resources in the cracks of formal governance (Björkman 2021).

It is in this context that the proposed session invites papers that explore the critical role of such intermediaries/fixers in shaping the contours of the modern metropolis. It welcomes empirical, theoretical, and methodological papers from diverse geographical contexts that may address, but are not limited to, the following core questions:

1. How do brokers adapt their strategies of claim-making and resource extraction in the face of increasingly digitized municipal governance?
2. In what ways do real estate and labor intermediaries in developed cities structurally mirror or diverge from the political "fixers" of informal settlements in developing contexts?
3. How are primordial identities leveraged or reconfigured by brokers to establish authority and trust within highly volatile urban neighborhoods?
4. What methodological innovations are required to study the ephemeral networks of modern urban intermediation?