The marketization of economic informality: rooftops, housing, and private property in a Cairo neighborhood

The article explores market making under conditions of widespread economic informality, applying it to a segment of Cairo’s housing market. I draw on rich ethnographic work involving a group of small developers who had actively engaged in building extra housing units on rooftops of already existing buildings in a middle-class neighborhood. I argue that marketizing informality was driven by differential embeddedness, referring to a two-pronged process of simultaneous dis-embeddedness and embeddedness of production and exchange. Informally-supplied commodities were dis-embedded from the logic and dynamics of social reproduction. Simultaneously, the market-oriented embeddedness of production and exchange into existing formal and informal systems of norms, identities, practices and relations enabled the institutionalization of the fledgling market space. Much of this process was driven by the informal developers themselves through three mechanisms: adhesive legality, social legitimization and private enforcement.