Informal entrepreneurship presents one of the few opportunities for slum dwellers to experience poverty alleviation in adverse contexts, especially in lower-middle-income countries such as India. However, collecting data on informal entrepreneurial activity presents a challenging task for researchers and governmental institutions. Without accurate data on the level and extent of informal entrepreneurship in Indian slums, the efficiency of socioeconomic policy measures on informal entrepreneurial activity and thus poverty alleviation is severely impeded. This paper therefore explores the spatial connections between urban architecture types, formal institutional control and support, and informal entrepreneurship. It first argues that informal entrepreneurial ventures in certain environments, such as urban slums, competitively benefit from underdeveloped urban infrastructure, leading to higher levels of informal entrepreneurial venturing. It then suggests a plausible theoretical mechanism to explain the spatial relationship between institutional control and informal entrepreneurial ventures in urban slums. In doing so, it theoretically contributes to the intersection of institutional theory and the informal entrepreneurial venturing literature by presenting a dataset of informal entrepreneurial activity in slums, articulating a spatial "gradient" between informal and formal institutional environments, and providing empirical evidence on the impact of formal institutions on informal establishments in urban slums and other resource-constrained environments, with implications for theory and public policy.
