Roy rejects the idea that informality is a separate sector of the poor, arguing instead that it is a mode of urbanisation that runs through the whole city, elite enclaves and gated suburbs included. Informality, in her account, is produced by the state itself: planning law creates value by deciding which illegalities are tolerated, which are demolished and which are quietly legalised, so deregulation is an exercise of sovereign power rather than its absence. This makes the city a patchwork of 'states of exception' in which the same act is criminal in a squatter settlement and unremarkable in a luxury development. Planning must therefore confront its own role in distributing legality, rather than treating informal settlements as an external anomaly to be formalised.
The paper redirected international debate from de Soto-style titling and slum eradication toward the politics of legality, tenure and differential enforcement, and became a foundational text for Southern urban theory alongside her later 'worlding cities' work. It underpins today's incremental upgrading, secure-tenure and anti-eviction agendas and the argument that theory must be built from Delhi, Cairo and Rio rather than exported to them.
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