Informality Revisited

Informality Revisited offers an overview of recent debates about Latin American government programmes for the formalisation of informal settlements and housing provision in a neo-liberal context. Contributions from Latin American researchers analyse the contradictions in government actions and evaluate the consequences for urban poverty.

• Brings together nine leading Latin American researchers in the field of land and housing policy to address the question of informal urban development, particularly in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Peru
• Highlights the interrelationships between the production of formal and informal urban development and demonstrates how economic and legal reforms intended to make the market more effective and profitable have affected the production of urban space
• Explores how Latin American governments are applying neo-liberal principles to land and housing policies
• Investigates the implications of government actions for the production and commodification of urban land as well as the formalisation of property rights and provision of housing for the urban poor
• Contributors draw on a wide range of quantitative and qualitative data, including census results and previously unpublished official statistics

Preface: Urban Informality in Latin America in Global Perspective (Ann Varley)

Introduction (Clara Salazar)

1. The Informal COMP-FUSED City: Market and Urban Structure in Latin American Metropolises (Pedro Abramo)

2. The Pending Agenda of Property Right Formalisation in Peru: Conceptual and Public Policy Aspects (Julio Calderón Cockburn)

3. The Limitations of Land and Social Housing Policies in Overcoming Social Exclusion: the Bogotá Experience (María Mercedes Maldonado Copello)

4. Cure or Vaccinate, Two Contrasting Policies: Regularisation vs. Land Reserve in Sustainable Urban Development (Carlos H. Morales Schechinger)

5. New Procedures, Persistent Failures: Entitlement Practices in Mexico’s Informal Settlements (Clara Salazar)

6. Informal Settlements in the Age of Digital Cartography: Insights from Mexico City (Priscilla Connolly)

7. Preventing ‘Clouded’ Titles in Previously Informal Settlements. The Administrative and Judicial Transmission of Property (Edith R. Jiménez-Huerta, Heriberto Cruz-Solís and Claudia Ubaldo-Velázquez)

8. Conclusion (Clara Salazar)

Index

Clara Salazar is a lecturer and researcher at the Centre for Demographic, Urban and Environmental Studies, El Colegio de México. She has given guest lectures in many universities in Latin America countries and elsewhere and has published four books, as author, co-author or editor, and around fifty book chapters and articles in specialist journals. Her research analyses informal urban development, focusing on the strategies employed by poor households to gain access to land and housing as well as the role of the state in this context.

Informality Revisited offers an overview of recent debates about what Latin American governments are achieving with their programmes for the formalisation of informal settlements and housing provision in a neo-liberal context. The term ‘informal’ refers to the collective and individual actions of low-income households building their dwellings outside the legal framework of property rights and planning regulations. This social process is common throughout Latin American, but some of the region’s governments have created formalisation programmes to regularise the property rights of informal settlement residents.

The text brings together nine leading Latin American researchers in the field of land and housing policy, with specific expertise in informal urban development, who argue that government actions have focused on making the market more efficient. Unlike other contributions that have treated urban informality as a separate issue, the contributors highlight the interrelationships between formal and informal urban development, showing how economic and legal reforms intended to make land and housing markets more efficient and profitable have affected the production of urban space for the low-income population. The text identifies the contradictions in land market deregulation and explores the paradoxes and ambiguity inherent in treating the free market and privatisation as the key to preventing the reproduction of informal settlements and reducing poverty levels.