Marginal Urbanisms : Informal and Formal Development in Cities of Latin America [1 ed.] 9781443893367, 9781443897013

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Marginal Urbanisms

Marginal Urbanisms: Informal and Formal Development in Cities of Latin America Edited by

Felipe Hernández and Axel Becerra

Marginal Urbanisms: Informal and Formal Development in Cities of Latin America Edited by Felipe Hernández and Axel Becerra This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by Felipe Hernández, Axel Becerra and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-9701-9 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9701-3

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ..................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................ ix Locating Marginality in Latin American Cities Felipe Hernández Rethinking the Role of Social, Spatial, and Political Conditions in the Study of Informality .......................................................................... 1 Diane Davis Part I: (Re)Theorising Informality in Latin America Latin American Informal Urbanism: Contexts, Concepts and Contributions with specific reference to Mexico.............................................................. 22 Priscilla Connolly Informality and Geographic Rift in Latin America ................................... 48 Brian M. Napoletano, Jaime Paneque-Gálvez, Claudio Garibay Orozco and Antonio Vieyra Medrano Participation Matters from Favela Bairro to the Mega Events and their impact in Brazilian Informal Settlements ................................... 64 Fernando Luiz Lara Part II: Place-Making: The Urban Impact of Informality Informal House Design in the 21st century: Cholo and Remittances Architecture ............................................................................................... 82 Christien Klaufus Informality and Place-Making in the City, Xalapa, Mexico .................... 102 Melanie Lombard The Underlying Language and Meaning of Informality .......................... 117 Jaime Hernández Garcia

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Beyond Formality and Informality: The (Informal Modernism) Space, a Place to Investigate Design Principles and Opportunities .................... 133 Axel Becerra Part III: Academic Research and Studio Practices in the Interpretation of Informality Landscapes of Peace: Design, Social Articulation and Conflict Suspension ............................................................................................... 148 Felipe Hernández TAAC: A Strategy for Intervention in the Fabric of Queretaro, Mexico ..................................................................................................... 164 Aaron Weller and Alfonso Garduno Off the Map: The Unplanned City Case Study, Las Flores, Colombia .... 174 Adib Cure and Carie Penabad About the Authors ................................................................................... 185 Index ........................................................................................................ 190

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The idea for this book started at the Informality: Re-Viewing Latin American Cities conference in 2011, an event sponsored by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), at the University of Cambridge. A second conference in 2012, entitled Informality: Re-defining Architecture and Urbanism in Latin America and organised by Axel Becerra Santacruz at Universidad Michoacana San Nicolas Hidalgo, in Morelia, Mexico, helped to consolidate our ideas and intentions to materialise this project. We are therefore grateful to CRASSH and to the Universidad Michoacana San Nicolas Hidalgo for their support. We are also grateful to all those who attended the events and contributed with their ideas to strengthen the debate on informality in Latin America. Needless to say, we are indebted to the contributors of this volume for their interesting contributions and, also, for being patient during the long time that took us to prepare it; we are also thankful for the patience of the publishers who remained supportive throughout the process. Many individuals contributed to the realisation of this volume. We must thank Peter Kellett, an appreciated collaborator and esteemed scholar on informality with whom we have worked in the past. He attended the Cambridge conference and was enthusiastic about this publication. We are grateful for his support and hopeful that we can work again in the future. Axel Becerra Santacruz, though one of the co-editors, deserves special mention: without his hard work this volume would have never come to fruition. To Axel, for his encouragement and the long hours he invested to take this project to completion, I am greatly indebted. There are many colleagues at the Harvard Graduate School of Design who played an important part, directly and indirectly, in the realisation of the book. Rahul Mehrotra has supported the volume since the beginning and created the opportunity for Axel and I to work together at the GSD where we finally completed the job. Diane Davis with whom we had many conversations about informality in Latin America and who contributed an introductory piece. For their intellectual and practical support we are obliged. We would like to thank Nick Bullock, at the University of Cambridge, for listening to our ideas on informality and marginality and for showing

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an interest in questions about Latin American cities. His support and guidance were fundamental to the realisation of this book. Other colleagues at the University of Cambridge provided intellectual support: Wendy Pullan and Mark Sternberg made insightful comments through informal conversation and, so, helped us to mature our ideas on conflict, segregation and the socio-political dimension of urban transformations. The members of Cities South of Cancer, Adriana Massidda, Apurba Podder and Pawda Tjoa ought to receive our greatest appreciation. They helped at the first conference in Cambridge, and have played a fundamental role in the development of strategies to study, interpreted and respond to marginality and informality in developing-world countries. Additional gratitude goes to Pawda Tjoa, an extraordinary student and very talented architect, who devoted several nights to review, correct and complete all the chapters in this volume. Similarly, we are immensely indebted to Marion Houston, who so carefully proofread the final draft, not simply correcting language issues but asking challenging questions about content and the coherence of the argument. Editing a book demands long hours of work, time during which we are apart from the people we love. Mariela Becerra and little Aidan for their patience and understanding. Sebastian and Amalia Hernández who listened patiently even when they did not understand, showed me that they care in their own way, I miss them every day and carry them in thoughts. Lucia Meza who came to visit in Cambridge MA and spent many hours alone, deserves to be mentioned. As a mother she has always been supportive. Laurie Zapalac, who read drafts and asked challenging questions, forcing me to revaluate my position many times, has to receive our strongest appreciation. Her enormous support will be remembered. There may be others who contributed to the realisation of this volume and will remain unmentioned. We apologise profusely for their omission but extend our deepest gratitude for their contribution.

INTRODUCTION LOCATING MARGINALITY IN LATIN AMERICAN CITIES FELIPE HERNÁNDEZ UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

Marginal urban development continues to be a challenging phenomenon in most Latin American cities. Although it is generally assumed that marginal urbanisation is a twentieth-century phenomenon, it has been ubiquitous since the foundation of Latin American cities in the sixteenth century. The phenomenon became more complex and extensive during the second half of the twentieth century, but it is important to understand its longevity. Indeed, it is difficult to approach the study of Latin American cities, historically and in the present, without the notion that marginality has always been an inherent part of them. The conditions of marginality and the extension of informal development that we see today in most cities throughout the continent are a magnified expression of the conditions of urban growth initiated by the Spanish and Portuguese with their segregationist approach to urban planning and design during the colonial period. It is pertinent to start a revision of current attitudes toward urban marginality and informality with a historical reference given the fact that most of the celebratory literature produced in the past ten years focuses on recent interventions in the slums of Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela. Although the celebration has receded, and a reflective mode seems to prevail at the moment, the relative success of programmes (and punctual isolated projects) in the above-mentioned countries has generated an architectural rhetoric that sees urban marginality as a problem that can be resolved via the insertion of urban infrastructure: transport, schools, libraries, parks and other communal buildings. This has fuelled an attitude of physical determinism, the idea that complex socio-economic urban problems can be resolved by transforming the physical environment. The implementation of rapid transport systems throughout Latin America, and other parts of the developing world, is a clear example. In the 1990s

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Curitiba implemented successfully the first system. Bogotá followed with significant success and, then, other cities in Colombia, Indonesia, Mexico and Ecuador followed suit—with varying degrees of success and failure. Medellín built a cable car (Metro Cable) to link the slums on the hills with the elevated metro that runs along the valley. Today there are similar systems in Caracas and Rio, others are being built in Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil and South Africa. Another trend is the construction of schools and libraries in slums to improve education and, thus, maximise opportunities of employment. The assumption that physical infrastructure per se will reduce urban marginality ignores the complex and convoluted historical experiences of marginalised people, the very reasons why they are marginalised. The purpose of this volume is not to celebrate recent interventions in Latin American slums. Instead, the essays collected here present a reflection on the achievements of the past twenty years, given that success has only been partial. There has been great development in governmental efficiency, so national and local governments have been able to execute important projects and urban programmes, thereby quickly contributing to the improvement of quality of life in deprived, often violent, communities. On the other hand, the causes of marginality have not always been addressed. As a result, the factors that cause collective disadvantage continue to affect many communities throughout Latin America. In other words, the essays in this volume focus on the wide range of socioeconomic, political, ethnic and historical issues that have influenced the appearance of marginal urbanisms and informal architectures in Latin American cities, rather than focusing on physical interventions. The underlying premise is that changing the physical environment alone can only lead to superficial improvement of urban conditions. More significant change can only be achieved by addressing—through social discourse, policy and design—the subjacent socio-economic conditions that cause certain groups of people to exist in perennial conditions of disadvantage. Although contributors address different aspects according to the disciplinary fields in which they work and their research interests, there is thematic consistency throughout the volume in the interest to revise—and reflect—on the experiences of the past twenty years. In order to create a context for the broad range of topics, and critical approaches, concerning the question of marginality and urban informality included in this volume, this introductory chapter discusses three key aspects: 1) the concept of urban marginality itself, 2) the prevalence of colonial urban principles and, 3) the question of race and its influence on the fabric of cities. The first section shows that marginality is not a

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twentieth-century phenomenon in Latin American urbanism but rather an inherent characteristic of the continent’s cities since their foundation. The second section argues that key aspects of colonial discourse continue to influence development in the continent: the socio-ethnic and economic fabric of Latin American cities continues to display patterns of segregation and discrimination whose origins can be traced to the Spanish and Portuguese colonial periods. The third section discusses the existence of widespread, yet concealed, racist practices which have an important effect on the way Latin American cities are built, experienced and consumed by people. The last section of this chapter explores the possibilities of translating recent academic debates into practice. As such, these three aspects introduce a new agenda for urban development in Latin America: the need to address the historical underpinnings of marginality and the longevity of the urban conditions found in our cities today. Thus, this chapter creates an ample context, and a historical-theoretical foundation, to support the more specific arguments presented by individual authors in the volume. At the same time, this chapter re-introduces key questions that require attention in order to develop inclusive urban practices that respond more adequately to the realities of the people who inhabit marginal areas in cities throughout Latin America.

Urban Marginality Marginality refers not only to physical urban development on the margins of cities, the peripheries, but also to the entire range of socio-economic, political and cultural expressions which are considered not to comply with the minimum standards necessary to achieve an adequate participation in society. In urban studies, and the social sciences, the concept of marginality is often linked to socio-economic activity outside regulatory frameworks created by the government. Thus, marginal urbanisms, and architectures, are only an expression of such a complex set of circumstances, and a minute aspect of what is encompassed by urban marginality. Marginality can be understood in dichotomous relation to centrality, however this semantic duality is much more tenuous than in other pairs of terms, such as informality, which inevitably expresses the opposite of formality. Although no term, or pair of terms, would be able singularly to encompass the whole range of phenomena found in contemporary cities—in Latin America and everywhere—marginality is useful for embracing a wider set of issues including, but not limited to, architecture and urban form. Therefore, in order to broaden the scope of

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our discussion in this volume, we want to refer to the question of urban and architecture informality in the larger context of marginality. Let us first examine the historical evolution of term in Latin America through its proponents and detractors. Two of the early supporters of marginality theory in Latin America, the sociologist Gino Germani and the Jesuit priest Roger Vekemans, argued that modernization—and, indeed, industrialisation as an intrinsic part of such process—had caused a series of social divisions which disenfranchised the poor; who were unable to attain the same benefits possessed by other members of the urban population. Thus, in order to overcome underdevelopment, it was necessary to integrate excluded populations, so the poor could enjoy the full benefits of urban life, and have the same prospects of social mobility as everyone else in society. Towards the end of the 1970s, however, the concept of marginality had lost credibility. Its critics had been able to argue convincingly that the poor were not always marginalised. Instead, they argued, the poor played a key function in both society and the economy. In her book The Myth of Marginality (1980), Janice Perlman affirmed that people in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro were “socially well organised and cohesive, and their residents capable of making good use of the urban milieu and its institutions” (Perlman 2010: 149). Perlman contends that favela residents were involved in politics and fully cognisant of their capacity to influence policy to obtain benefits. Perlman also criticises the fact that the concept of marginality became so powerful in Brazilian planning practices that it was used to justify favela eradication programmes, which triggered the very social divisions that caused marginalisation in the first place. This kind of criticism led to a decrease in the use of the term marginality, which was rarely employed in the 1980s and early 90s. It is important to note that Perlman was not the only critic of marginality theory. There were others like Anibal Quijano, Emilio Pradilla and Paul Singer who also questioned the accuracy of the term to describe socio-economic conditions in Latin America. It is equally important to observe that Perlman’s work focuses on Rio de Janeiro and, therefore, academic caution is needed before generalizing the rest of Latin America. There may be similarities with other countries, but there are also significant differences and the same claims that she makes for Rio would not be valid in some slums in Bolivia, Peru or Colombia. In recent years, however, the concept has reappeared in academic circles. “Advanced marginality”, for example, championed by the sociologist Loïc Wacquant, is used to describe the latest iteration of global capitalism, in which a significant part of the urban population has become

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irrelevant in economic terms and, therefore, excluded from the rest of city, relegated to –what he calls– “segregated ghettoes”. Latin Americans have reacted with skepticism to Wacquant’s notion of advanced marginality, which they find to be very similar to earlier definitions produced in Latin America. In her article ‘Marginality, Again?!’, for example, Teresa Caldeira denounces Wacquant’s definition of advanced marginality for being “nearly identical to the theses of authors such as José Nun (1969) and Anibal Quijano (1971), who theorised about the appearance of a ‘marginal mass’ in the Latin American countries that industrialised under a condition of dependency” (Caldeira 2009). Although Caldeira’s criticism is accurate, it also helps to highlight where I see a difference between the notion of marginality used in the 1970s and more recent appropriations. In her critique, Caldeira speaks of a “marginal mass”, the poor as an undifferentiated mass of people. For many of us today, “the poor” is not a homogeneous mass, but a multitude of groups who live in different conditions in the hostile environment of the Latin American city. There are different ethnic origins, gender identifications, religious affiliations, there are the urban poor versus the rural migrant poor, and so on. In other words there is an enormous multiplicity, and that is a difference in the way we approach the concept of marginality today: it helps to reveal that complexity. Indeed, in their essay “Concepts in Social and Spatial Marginality”, Mehretu, Pigozzi and Sommers describe marginality as “a complex condition of disadvantage which individuals and communities experience as a result of vulnerabilities that may arise from unfavourable environmental, cultural, social, political and economic factors” (Mehretu et al. 2000: 90). The conditionality of Mehretu’s definition, ‘vulnerabilities that may arise’ from a wide range of conditions, is important because it opens the discussion to include key factors that received little attention in the 1960s: the cultural and social aspects of marginality. To these I add the historical dimension inherent in collective conditions of urban disadvantage. Let us introduce some interpretations, or categorisations, of marginality, in order to illustrate this important aspect. Mehretu et al., for example, propose four categorisations of marginality, two of which can contribute to the development of a more nuanced understanding of current urban conditions in Latin America: systemic and collateral marginality”. 1 In their own words,

 1

The proposed four types of marginality: Contingent, Systemic, Collateral and Leveraged. See Mehretu, A., B., L. M. Pigozzi and Sommers (2000) “Concepts in Social and Spatial Marginality”, in Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography, Vol. 82, No. 2, Development of Settlements, 89-101.

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Introduction Systemic marginality results from disadvantages which people and communities experience in a socially constructed system of inequitable relations within a hegemonic order that allows one set of individuals and communities to exercise undue power and control over another set with the latter manifesting one or a number of vulnerability markers based on class, ethnicity, age, gender and other similar characteristics. Unlike marketbased inequalities, systemic marginality does not lend itself to reform policies of the welfare state. This is because systemic marginality is a deliberate social construction by the dominant class to achieve specific desirable outcomes of political control, social exclusion and economic exploitation. Systemic marginality is of particular significance in countries that have experienced pervasive inequity and oppression under colonial and/or neo-colonial regimes in the less developed world (Mehretu et al. 2000: 91-92).

It arises from their definition of “systemic marginality” that it is not a form of disadvantage caused by an internal inability of national governments to regulate the economy, or its failure to guarantee opportunities for all people, nor is it the fault of groups of people who are unable to succeed by themselves due to their own incompetence (i.e. it is not a failure of the poor). Instead the authors assume marginality as an artificially—“socially constructed”—form of disadvantage imposed upon and experienced, primarily, by groups of people who have been excluded from the structures of political control. As a result, economic and urban policy offers little opportunity to improve the conditions of life of those marginalised groups. In spite of their sophistication, and best intentions, economic and urban policies designed to assist systemically marginalised groups fail because there are long-lasting, historically constructed, cultural barriers that impede their success: racial designations, stereotypes, etc. In the authors’ views, the dominant classes created these barriers intentionally to maintain their dominant positions. Systemic marginality has two scales, international and national/regional. At the international scale we find a positional polarity between former colonial nations which continue to use colonial strategies in order retain their authority over their former colonies—through the creation and implementation of international trade laws, credit, aid and other mechanisms of control such as the restriction of travel for people of certain countries (for example, the fact that nationals from most Latin American countries need visas to travel to the USA and Europe). At a national/regional level there is another positional polarity involving former colonial settlers who continue to exercise political and economic control over indigenous peoples. In the case of Latin America, one example is Afro-descendant groups which have limited access to the institutions of power and,

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therefore, little political influence (and representation).2 That is why policy may guarantee access to credit for black people, or those of indigenous descent, but they are unable to trade on equal terms in a white-dominated market place. Similarly, local governments may build schools and offer training to people in slums, most of whom are ethnic minorities, but these people cannot access higher education or get better-paid jobs because they are dark-skinned or live in slums, due to a generalised social response whose origin is colonial. The latter example introduces us to the second type of marginality: collateral. Collateral marginality is a condition experienced by individuals or communities who are marginalised primarily on the basis of their social or geographic proximity to individuals or communities that experience either contingent or systemic marginality. Generally, individuals or communities who are collaterally marginalised may not, in themselves, share vulnerability markers, but they suffer marginality by contagion as a function of their presence in a social or geographic milieu that is pervasively disadvantaged by contingent or systemic forces. (Mehretu et al. 2000: 93) Thus, “collateral marginality” refers to the following condition. Many people from slums in Latin America are unable to develop a business, or take formal employment at the appropriate level (according to education, training or experience), because they live in slums. In other words, it is not a person’s lack of education and/or training which prevents them from getting a job, not even the colour of their skin, it is their geographical proximity to marginalised groups which hinders their social and economic mobility. While these issues are relatively well known in scholarly discourse (and, even, in casual conversation), they are significantly absent from architectural debates and political discourse in Latin America. Issues relating to colonialism and race and class were not central to the celebrated projects built over the past twenty years in Brazil, Colombia or Venezuela, where mestizo, indigenous and Afro-descendants were generalised as “poor”.3 However, these issues are very important because they have deep

 2

In Brazil, for example, where Afro-Brazilians make nearly half of the country’s population, they represent almost 80% of those living below the poverty line and contribute under 20% of the national GDP (Morrison, 2007). Another telling fact is that in 2015, 39 Brazilian government ministers in Dilma Rousseff’s cabinet were White (Barbara, 2015). Conveniently, only the Head of the Special Secretariat for the Promotion of Racial Equality was not. 3 It is important to note that ethnic issues were not completely absent, especially in Brazil, but have not been central to urban policy and do not feature largely in the celebratory architectural literature that was produced in the years following the

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effects on the social fabric of the city—the whole set of ethno-racial interactions, economic imbalances, and access to services, education and even space in the city—not simply only on its physical form (i.e. to the fact that different ethno-racial group and social classes occupy different geographical areas). While studying some of the urban interventions on the peripheries of Medellín, Colombia, we discovered that residents of Santo Domingo (where the first Metro cable was built and, also the location of the famous Library of Spain, known as Santo Domingo Library) often deny that they live there. Many forge their address because the association with Santo Domingo carries a negative stigma that can affect their chances of getting a job.4 The French sociologist Loïc Wacquant explains these attitudes of denial—denying one’s own identity—as strategies of self-protection. People who live in areas of the city conceived as sites of criminality, violence, vice, and immorality, deploy protective mechanisms to disassociate themselves from the physical and social context to which they belong. Not only do they lie about the place where they live, as in the case of Medellín, they disavow knowing people around them, they adopt a selfdeprecating view of themselves taking the vituperative representations held by outsiders and applying them to their neighbours, and often retreating to the privacy of their homes in order to avoid contact with people in their community. “This social withdrawal and symbolic disidentification, in turn, undermine local cohesion, hamper collective mobilisation and help generate the very automism that the dominant discourse on zones of urban dispossession claims is one of their inherent features” (Wacquant 2010: 217-18). In other words, systemic and collateral marginality generate urban conditions which not only perpetuate physical decay but also increase social fragmentation, thereby precluding the possibility of overcoming the disadvantages and vulnerabilities experienced by those individuals and communities who are unable to participate more actively in all aspects of society: politics, the economy, organisational friendship, etc. These are forms of marginality that cannot be resolved via traditional urban formulas for poverty alleviation. It is not simply that Latin American governments are unable at this point to absorb the vast portions of the population that are currently excluded and operate on the margins. Nor is it that the private

 completion of Favela Bairro (Brazil), Metro Cable (Medellin) and the similar cable car intervention in Caracas. 4 Authors who have explored the demoralising effects of living in slums in Latin American cities include: Gilbert 1985; Nightingale 2012; Pearlman 1980 and 2001; and Turner 2000.

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sector is also unable to employ such a large population at a time when industries and businesses focus on trying to reduce labour costs. Poverty alleviation policies, economic formalisation and slum upgrading are unable to achieve their goals because colonial socio-cultural markers based on ethnicity remain both in place and unchallenged. Here, education (at all levels) becomes an important vehicle for confronting and dismantling racial stereotypes, while policy is fundamental to promote inclusion and participation. Our final interpretation, or categorisation, corresponds with Wacquant’s concept of “advanced marginality”, a concept that encompasses the complex reality I have just described. The qualifier “advanced” is meant here to indicate that these forms of marginality are not behind us: they are not residual, cyclical or transitional; they are not being gradually reabsorbed by the expansion of the “free market” […]. Rather, they stand ahead of us: they are etched on the horizon of the becoming of contemporary societies. (Wacquant 2008: 232).

Wacquant refers primarily to poor neighbourhoods in The United States and France, although he starts and ends his book, Urban Outcasts, making allusions to other regions of the world. Teresa Caldeira has taken him to task for implying that urban conditions in decaying USA and French cities are comparable to those in the developing world. Similarly, Janice Perlman takes issue with the fact that most residents of the favelas she has studied in Rio for over forty years are not ‘forcibly relegated’ and have the opportunity to move out of the favela—as indeed many have over the length of her study. The latter affirmation questionable, yet it is important to remind ourselves that both Caldeira and Perlman refer to specific cases in Rio de Janeiro. 5 In other parts of Latin America, particularly in countries affected by armed conflicts—like guerrilla and paramilitary wars in Colombia or drug cartels in Mexico—people are ‘forcibly’ displaced from the countryside to the outskirts of cities, and they have little opportunity to return. Thus, some neighbourhoods in Colombian and Mexico fit closely—though not precisely—Wacquant’s notion of the hyper-ghetto: they are quasi-prisons that store a surplus population unable to retain formal jobs and unsupported by the state, where new hierarchical systems develop on the basis violence and territorial control. These are places where interpersonal relations are affected by suspicion and distrust,

 5

Indeed Caldeira can be accused of extending a specifically Brazilian condition to other countries of Latin America where socio-political circumstances are significantly different.

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where public spaces are perceived as dangerous, where residents avoid one another in order to protect themselves. Indeed, the rise of gang violence in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela, to mention only a few countries where this phenomenon is rampant, highlights a situation that is ‘ahead of us’, and so ‘advanced’ in Wacquant’s terms. Moreover, the fact that statistically most gangs are made up of Black, Indigenous and mixed-race members, together with the fact that most gangs are formed in the slums of large cities, is striking evidence that sustained modes of marginalisation have an enormous impact on the social and physical fabric of Latin American cities. For Wacquant it is important to develop ways to identify not only the forms of marginality that affect specific groups in specific cities, but also the causes of marginality: the historical socio-economic and cultural forces that generate pervasive forms of disadvantage which disqualify certain groups of people keeping them on the margins. Wacquant and Mehretu et al. do not limit themselves to theorising about contemporary forms of marginality. Their intention is to formulate a rigorous and comprehensive framework to study the multiple effects of uneven urban development. I am not proposing to abandon other terms, such as informality itself (included in the title of this book), because such terms continue to be useful to address more directly specific aspects of the urban debate. Informality, for example, lends itself conveniently to the study of issues relating to architectural and urban form. Additionally, given the history, extent and influence of the formal-informal debate—in economics, urbanism and architecture—any intention to abandon it would seem ludicrous. In other words, our interest in this volume is not to undermine one term, or set of terms, in order to replace it/them by other(s), but it is rather to articulate a range of critical terminology in order to address more effectively a wider range of urban phenomena. I invoke their concepts at the beginning of this chapter, and this volume, in order to introduce the complexity of a condition that has become, and will remain, part of the Latin American urban reality; it is not a transient problem but rather a condition of our very urbanity.

The Prevalence of Colonial Urban Principles We have already seen how several aspects of colonial discourse continue to influence development in Latin American cities. In recent years, sociologists, geographers, urbanists and cultural commentators have revealed the correlation that exists between marginality and colonialism. More importantly, this correlation can be found in former colonies as well

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as in the cities and societies of the developed world. Authors such as Loïc Wacquant, mentioned above, and others like Carl Nightingale, James Scott, AbdouMaliq Simone, to mention only a few, have written extensively about the pervasive presence of racial colonial representations in the structure of cities around the world. Their studies open up new avenues for engaging with numerous subjacent socio-economic, political and cultural issues behind urban poverty. Segregation emerges as a key concept in studies about the rapid expansion of informal settlements and economies around the world—including the developed world. The long tradition of colonial and postcolonial studies in certain parts of Europe6 and North America, as well as in the Indian sub-continent, the Caribbean and South-East Asia, has helped to develop a more nuanced understanding of the persistence of colonial traits in the current social global order. Latin Americans, however, have been much less receptive to colonial and postcolonial discourses. In his book On Post-Colonial Futures, Bill Ashcroft observes that Latin American, and particularly South American, scholars strongly resist the idea of engaging with postcolonial discourse (Ashcroft 2001: 22). Ashcroft notes that for some scholars “Latin America is under threat from a new colonising movement called colonial and post-colonial discourse, yet another subjection, it would seem, to foreign formations and epistemologies from the Englishspeaking centres of global power” (Ashcroft 2001: 23). Rejection of postcolonial discourse could result from the fact that Latin American scholars in the 1980s and 1990s were sceptical about post-structuralism, which was seen as the basis of postcolonial critique: as European philosophical school of thought, post-structuralism was seen as a threat to Latin American intellectual integrity. Only towards the end of the 1990s did a group of Latin American scholars produce an alternative to the Anglo-Saxon-led postcolonial discourse. The Modernity/Coloniality group (which includes Anibal Quijano, Walter Mignolo and Arturo Escobar) revisited earlier critiques of the historical inscription of Latin America carried out by Europeans in order to express their own positionality. “Walter Mignolo, ostensibly rejecting post-colonialism, cites the post-colonial critique of Edmundo O’Gorman in The Invention of America (1961) […] to sustain that O’Gorman did first what Said and Todorov did two decades later” (Ashcroft 2001: 25). Mignolo adopts the concept of “Coloniality” coined by the Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano in order to develop an incisive

 6

Mostly in England and France, but also to a lesser extent in Germany and the Netherlands.

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critique to the construction of Latin America and its societies.7 Although their work has been very influential, it has not permeated architectural debates, and has had only a tangential influence in discussions about urban development. It is my intention to insert their ideas more directly into studies about cities in the continent. As an international and inter- crossdisciplinary group, they have developed a critical approach that could help broaden the horizon of formulaic academic interpretations and practical responses to the realities of people in cities throughout the continent. The fact that they engage directly with the legacy of colonialism is of particular importance. By formulaic academic interpretations and practical responses to our urban reality, I refer to recent interventions in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, Medellín and Caracas, which consist of infrastructural insertions to satisfy a deficit in social services and urban standards. Building urban infrastructure—mass transport systems, schools, libraries and parks—has become the accepted formula for addressing uneven urban development, a formula now exported to cities in Africa, Asia and South-East Asia. The relative success of such urban interventions has fuelled an attitude of physical determinism according to which the socio-economic problems of Latin American cities can be resolved by changing the physical environment. However, this approach overlooks the historical causes of marginality and the composition of the population that suffers from exclusion: the subjacent socio-economic issues addressed in the previous section. Indeed, physical determinism dangerously distracts from the history of colonialism that underpins the very social structures it is trying to correct. That is why it is imperative that the colonial origin of Latin American cities acquires a more important presence in contemporary urban agendas. Colonial urban ordinances not only determined the physical fabric of cities, but also the place that cities occupy in a global system of dependent capitalism based on controlled local economies which rely heavily on the export of primary goods. The same ordinances determined the place of different ethnic groups in the socio-economic structures of production and consumption, not only their location in the physical fabric of the city.

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Other members of the Coloniality debate are Enrique Dussel (Argentina) and Arturo Escobar (Colombia).

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The Laws of Indies and the Contemporary City Much has been said about the implications that the Laws of Indies had for the socio-spatial configuration of cities founded by the Spanish in North, Central and South America.8 Yet, such an extensive body of work has had little impact in architectural academia in Latin America. The legacy of colonialism remains understudied and largely misunderstood by architects and Latin American architectural historians. It is often reduced to a historical period, and a set of conditions, considered to have been overcome in the two hundred years after independence. The fact that segregationist Spanish colonial planning caused a socio-cultural, economic and morphological fragmentation that has developed through time—rather than appearing suddenly in the past ninety years, or so—needs not only academic attention but also a more nuanced understanding, so that contemporary policy can truly help to alleviate current urban conditions in Latin America. Both the urban form and the architectures of Spanish cities were directly influenced by the Ordinances of Phillip II, which ordered that communication (as well as intercourse) be prohibited between the Spanish and the Indians, who were to occupy different quarters. Phillip II also insisted that the houses where the Spanish lived, and all buildings in the Spanish city—planned upon a grid—should be beautiful in order to impress the indigenous; leaving no doubt of the intention of the Spanish to stay and dominate (Nightingale 2012: 50). Indigenous people, and later African slaves, had restricted access to the “formal” (gridded) city. Neither indigenous nor black slaves were able to own land in the city, nor could they occupy administrative positions in government. Indigenous people were forced to live on the peripheries, where they developed an economy of subsistence outside the regulatory framework of the Spanish. In spite of their subordinate economic position, indigenous informal economies were part of an interdependent system including the slaves and the Spanish themselves, who benefitted from their productive activities. Yet the indigenous were penalised for their activities, which in many cases were considered illegal. This set of injustices generated an urbanism of marginality that lies at the basis of the contemporary city.

 8

In the introduction to the Rethinking the Informal City: Critical perspectives from Latin America (2009) I discuss this point at some length. See “Introduction: reimagining the Informal in Latin America” pages 3 – 6. In his book La Ciudad Letrada, Angel Rama addresses the issue in much greater detail. See Rama, A. (1996) The Lettered City. Translated by J. C. Chasteen. Durham: Duke University Press.

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In his seminal book Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities, Carl Nightingale describes very effectively the social effects of Spanish colonial planning in the Americas: In the interior of New Spain […] threats to Spain from other Europeans were less acute, and authorities dispensed with city walls. However, they fortified many of their houses in case of Indian revolt and established a system of urban separation for their conquered subjects. City officials forced local Amerindians into areas known as reducciones or barrios, far outside the central gridiron of the ciudad de españoles –the Spanish city. In Lima, Peru, the Indian quarter was a fenced neighbourhood inside the walled city known as El Cercado. The remaining Indian nobles, whom the Spaniards called caciques, were charged to look after the local secular affairs of these districts under a legal code designed exclusively for Indians.9

Two points stand out in this description: first, the choice of a particular set of physical forms (urban and architectural) as a vehicle to materialise a desired social order; second, the implications that such a set of forms had on the socio-political fabric of colonial Spanish cities. Nightingale’s explanation shows that “separation” refers not simply to distinct physical locations for the Indian and Spanish populations—and later Black African slaves—but also to the creation and implementation of different legal codes for each socio-ethnic group. In other words, the Spanish colonial city in the sixteenth century was already constituted by separate socioethnic groups, each of which occupied different territories, obeyed different rules and produced different economies, architectures and urban forms. This heterogeneity implies a very complex urban construct, with a complex system of exclusions and inclusions that multiplied and perpetuated difference, instead of eliminating it. That is why studying the legacy of colonialism is necessary in order to understand contemporary urban conditions, and to respond more effectively to such conditions both through policy and design.

The Modernity of Latin American Cities Just as it is important to study the legacy of colonialism, it is fundamental that architects, architectural historians, urban designers and policy-makers understand that Latin American cities are fundamentally modern. It is an



9 Nightingale, C. (2012) Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 50.

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error to assume that “the colonial city”—as most people throughout Latin America describe colloquially the old sections of cities—is pre-modern in relation to the areas that have been designed and built since the late nineteenth-century, which are considered to be modern. As I will show in this chapter, Latin American cities are materialisations of, and develop alongside, modernity. 10 Correcting this generalised error is necessary in order to overcome the judgement that marginal urbanisms, and informal architectures, are somewhat “non-modern” and, for that reason, incompatible with modern development. On the contrary, precisely because Latin American cities are fundamentally modern, marginal urbanisms are a constitutive part of their modernity. It is by understanding the inherent modernity of Latin American cities that we can overcome the physical determinism which, as I explained above, reduces cities to their material fabric. The work of the Modernity/Coloniality Group provides a helpful platform for examining the relationship between colonialism and modernity in Latin America. The Modernity/Coloniality group, is a collective of [mostly] Latin American thinkers who have developed a methodological approach for reviewing the persistence of colonial constructs in our contemporary societies. For the Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano, who coined the term colonialidad, or coloniality, Latin American societies have either retained or assumed the characteristics of colonialism after independence. 11 For Walter Mignolo, another member of the group, coloniality is the condition of being in the world as social by-products of colonialism and, therefore, as “outcasts from history”.12As such, the notion of coloniality opens up a door for examining the position of formerly colonised subjects, who did not experience colonialism themselves— because no Latin American experienced direct colonial domination either by the Spanish or the Portuguese—but who exist in an awkward (disadvantageous) relationship with the former colonial centres of power, and currently with the USA—a country that has dominated (indeed intervened directly) in politics, the economy and urban development in Latin America since the end of the nineteenth century. The perspective of Coloniality brings to the fore what Mignolo, and others, call “internal colonialism”: the process through which white elites in most Latin

 10

Modernity understood as an all-embracing social condition that has economic, cultural, technological and architectural dimensions. 11 Quijano , A . (2001) Colonialidad del poder: globalización y democracia. Lima: Sociedad y Política Ediciones. 12 See Mignolo, W. (2005) The Idea of Latin America. Oxford – Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 3.

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American countries retain economic, political and cultural control, thereby perpetuating a hierarchical system based largely on racial designations created during colonialism. Three key concepts lie at the centre of the work of the abovementioned group: Modernity, Colonialism and Capitalism (the latter conceived also as Globalisation). For them, the series of phenomena largely understood as Modernity—the rise of rationalism, the development of mercantile economies, the prioritisation of individualism, and so on— developed due to, and at the same time as, European colonial expansion in the sixteenth century. It was necessary to develop new forms of spatial representation for the purposes of trans-oceanic navigation. It was also necessary to create more efficient ways to quantify time in order to transport products more effectively around the world. International trade and the exploitation of resources in distant lands required new economic and administrative (political) systems, together with a stratification of labour that granted authority to the colonisers over the colonised—for the purpose of control. Thus, capitalism is seen to develop alongside colonialism, as the economic system that could more effectively satisfy the complexities of colonial exploitation and trade. As such, capitalism is inseparable from globalisation because capitalism evolves in the context of a colonial-global economy. It thus became clear that colonialism is constitutive of modernity. Indeed, modernity cannot be understood without an understanding of colonialism, which in turn cannot be conceived in isolation from the development of capitalism and globalisation (Mignolo 2005: xiii). That is why, for Mignolo, the discovery of America “marks a turning point in world history: it was the moment in which the demands of modernity […] began to require the imposition of a specific set of values that relied on the logic of [colonialism] 13 for their implementation” (Mignolo 2005: 6). In order to serve their purpose as outposts of colonisation (i.e. centres of socio-economic control that guaranteed the effective exploitation of resources required to generate wealth in Europe and to participate in rapidly expanding networks of global trade), cities were conceived rationally. As argued above, the Laws of Indies did not only influence the grid as a segregationist tool, but also underpinned complex socio-economic, racial and political configurations that have outlived direct colonial intervention. Latin American cities are inherently modern: they are simultaneously the product of modernity and the vehicle to achieve it. It may be that some



13 Mignolo uses the work “coloniality” here, which I have changed for colonialism to express more clearly the principles that are referred to.

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parts of contemporary Latin American cities are not stylistically “modernist”, because they were built before the advent of modernism, or because they have been deliberately built not to match its aesthetic postulates, yet it is an error to assume that Latin American cities are not modern and that informal architectures are not part of the continent’s modernity. Tackling this historical inaccuracy will reveal that the principles of colonial urbanism do not represent the antithesis to modernity. On the contrary, colonial urbanism is a constitutive element of the very modernity of Latin American cities. Indeed, if “modernism” –the architectural style that appears at the beginning of the twentieth century– is understood somewhat as Hilde Heynen suggests, 14 then we must understand the current physical condition of Latin American cities (their current urbanisms and architectures) as a result of the processes of modernisation particular to each city, and the experiences of modernity that all urban residents have had. Contemporary Latin American cities correspond with colonial patterns in their political configuration, in the convoluted range of ethnic representations, as well as the social structures that support culture, the legal system and the economy. These configurations, representations and structures are expressed in the territorialisation of the continent’s cities. It is a well-known fact that a large proportion of “the poor” are people of indigenous and black African descent, as well as mixed-race populations. Recent studies in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela also show that in many cities those populations can be linked to specific areas of the city, revealing an interesting—if scandalous—correlation between poverty, ethnicity and territory. Failure to comprehend the prevalence of colonial urbanism in contemporary cities hinders the possibility of producing more effective solutions to the problems that architects, urban designers and planners feel compelled to resolve.

 14

Hilde Heynen argues that modernism appears when architects agree that a particular set of forms is the legitimate answer to the experience of modernity and the problems and possibilities resulting from the process of modernisation. See Heynen (1999), 26. See also, Hernández, F. (2015) “Architectural Latin American Modernism: Twentieth-Century Politics, Historiography and the Academic Debate”, in Lindgren, A. and S. Ross (eds) The Modernist World. London: Routledge, 383-391.

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The Race Question in Latin American Cities In November 2014, the Mayor of Bogotá, Gustavo Petro, announced a plan to build social housing in some of the most affluent areas of the Colombian capital. It was also specified that the project, which consisted of several hundred units, would serve to accommodate, primarily, people displaced by violence—a population that continues to grow in Colombia despite the peace process. The announcement was politically bold and caused immediate reactions from all quarters of society. One such reaction came to my attention on the radio.15 A woman who called the radio station and identified herself as a resident of Chico—one of the most prestigious barrios of Bogotá—said “I cannot conceive the idea of living near to all those black people”.16 She then expressed worries about her own safety, and the safety of her children, whom she would no longer allow to play outside, or in the park, if the black people moved in. The newspapers, which I read following the radio programme, reported that owners of commercial venues in the relevant sectors of Bogotá were also concerned about security and the fact that “the poor” would scare away their main customers.17 Although it is a reasonable concern, it ratifies the association of “blackness” with both poverty and insecurity. The articles published in the papers summarised an interesting series of contradictory positions. On the one hand were the opinions of local property owners and residents, on the other hand were academics from local universities who appeared to be more receptive to the idea. According to the latter interviewees, none of whom was an architect, the mayor’s idea would offer opportunities to overcome segregation in the capital and encourage a more peaceful and culturally productive social mixing. They also expressed concerns, but theirs focused on the policies and educational strategies needed to implement the mayor’s idea while preventing conflict during its

 15

I was teaching a course at Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá at the time. This is my own translation of her comment in Spanish, “yo no puedo concebir la idea de vivir con todos esos negros de vecinos”. 17 See El Tiempo, Bogotá “Viviendas para pobres en barrios ricos, ¿es el camino? Los expertos aplauden intención de Petro para luchar contra la segregación, pero hacen advertencias”. Yesid Lancheros. Published on 10 November 2014, accessed on 24 June 2015. See also El Tiempo, Bogotá. “Ideas para que gente de distintos ingresos conviva en un mismo espacio: Expertos evalúan cómo reducir brechas. Revivir proyectos y zonas abandonadas, entre las propuestas”. Published on 11 November 2014, accessed on 24 June 2015. See also El espectador, Bogotá. “El Distrito identificó siete colegios públicos aledaños. Debate por casas gratis en barrios estrato 6”. Published on 7 November 2014, accessed on 24 June 2015. 16

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implementation. The programme seems to have been abandoned—at least public discussions have receded—but it certainly opened up a large area of enquiry about race, racism and racial segregation in Colombia, a debate that has received little attention in the country and, more generally, in Latin America. The debate about social housing in upmarket areas of Bogotá led me to investigate further racial dynamics in the city. I remembered that Club Colombia, the most exclusive private social club in Cali, the country’s third largest city, prohibited admittance to black people –at least until 1997, when I lived there– although several maintenance staff, cooks and waiters/waitresses were black. This urban phenomenon of racial exclusion is eloquently described by Fatimah Williams Castro, a black American academic, social commentator and blogger, the author of “AfroColombians and the Cosmopolitan City: Negotiations of Race and Space in Bogotá, Colombia”. Her essay analyses an autobiographical occurrence when Williams and five of her friends, all Afro-descendants, were denied entry to an upmarket nightclub in Bogotá’s Zona Rosa. Confirming the comments made by an unidentified caller to the radio station, Williams indicates that racism is prevalent in Colombia, even though it is concealed under the guise of cosmopolitanism. The capital city serves as the symbol of Colombia’s modernity, stability, and global status and plays a significant role in countering its image as a violent country run by narco-traffickers, mafiosos, and armed groups. However, the white elite cosmopolitanism promoted in Bogotá and the Zona Rosa depends on simultaneous practices of inclusion and exclusion and on complex convergences of space, time, and race. White Colombians help reinforce existing racial hierarchies and inscribe them in urban space through spatial distancing — locating racism and racial discrimination outside their immediate social worlds. Racial discrimination and spatial distancing impact the ways in which city residents interact with urban space and each other, maintain racialised cosmopolitanisms, and produce an everyday common sense about race and belonging embedded in urban space. They conflict with the national branding of Bogotá as a cosmopolitan city and Colombia as a diverse, multicultural nation. (Williams 2013: 106) Williams reveals a subjacent condition of racial discrimination that affects how urban space is socially constructed and experienced—and consumed—by different groups in Colombia. It is subjacent because it is not an overt condition, nor is it considered socially or politically problematic (and is certainly not supported by segregationist policies). However, it is clear that it has an effect on the physical fabric of the city.

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While there is no longer an official exclusionary statute that separates different races, the space of the city continues to be contested on that basis. Where different social groups live in the city, what spaces they have access to, what jobs they can get, and how other groups perceive them, is largely determined by race. As such, race is a key factor determining the geography of the city and the quality of its architectures. I have already mentioned that in Caracas, Lima, Mexico DF, Quito and Rio de Janeiro, it is possible clearly to identify the specific areas of the city that are occupied by indigenous and black people. Indeed, the architect, sociologist, and urban commentator Priscilla Connolly has studied how planning legislation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries enforced ethnic segregation, contributing largely to the development of slums in Mexico. Her essay in this volume demonstrates that informal settlements have not always developed spontaneously, but rather following historical precedents of land speculation and ethnic segregation. Similarly, in his essay “Stratification by Skin Colour in Contemporary Mexico”, the sociologist Andrés Villarreal provides statistical evidence that there is profound social stratification by race in Mexican cities. While the term “class” is more commonly used in Mexico, due to sustained inter-racial mixing, class designations are largely influenced by physical features and colour of skin. What is more, he demonstrates that darker-skinned individuals in Mexico, primarily those of indigenous and African descent, have lower levels of educational attainment and occupational status. As a consequence they are several times more likely to live in poverty and less likely ever to become affluent. 18 The historical precedent that Connolly examines, and the racial study that Villarreal undertook in contemporary Mexico, reveal a panorama of urban segregation where the most likely residents of slums are indigenous people and Afro-descendants. These examples corroborate the relationship between urban marginality and race. It is important to understand that discussions about race, and urban racial discrimination, in Latin America require a great deal of specificity. Racial attitudes and policies in Latin America have not followed the same social and political routes as in the USA, which is often taken as the referent for racial studies. It is equally important not to generalise across Latin America because attitudes and policies vis à vis race vary from country to country, historically and in the present. As Edward Tellez and Tatiana Paschel note, “in Brazil, race mixture narratives held that blacks and African culture were central to the nation; in Colombia, they ignored



18 See Villarreal, A. (2010) “Stratification by Skin Color in Contemporary Mexico”, in American Sociological Review, Vol. 75, No. 5, 652-678.

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and downplayed blackness while greatly valuing whiteness; and, in The Dominican Republic, they excluded blacks and African culture by regarding them as backward and foreign” (Tellez and Paschel 2014: 865). These are only a few examples of varying attitudes towards “blackness” that reinforce the need for precision in addressing the impact of racial discrimination on the fabric of cities. On the other hand, while national differences need to be noted, the commonality exists that indigenous people and Afro-descendants represent the two most marginalised groups in Latin America and are the most likely residents of informal settlements.19 More detailed inter- and cross-disciplinary studies are being carried out in many countries. However, the participation of architects and urban designers in these studies is notoriously scarce. The argument to be made is that architects and urban designers have skills, knowledge and expertise which could help to produce useful interpretations of current social phenomena and, in turn, help to translate those interpretations into more effective solutions. The focus, however, ought to be on the causes of marginality, not on its most recent expression; it makes little sense to invest in programmes that will never attain their intended effect due to the prevalence of insurmountable racial attitudes which preclude inclusive urban development. The point that I am at pains to demonstrate is that the mere provision of infrastructure –transport, education, recreation and health—is insufficient to resolve fully a complex set of socio-political and economic issues that have great historical longevity. Infrastructure only resolves the physical expression of a broad range of social conditions and experiences, which cause the problems we aim to resolve today with infrastructure. To be more effective it is necessary to create consistent and enforceable standards to prevent discrimination against individuals, and groups, on the basis of race, class as well as on the basis of their location in the city (i.e. the areas where they live). It is important to encourage



19 Statistical estimates provided by Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) indicate that there are between 30 and 40 million indigenous people in Latin America, equalling 8% of the region’s total population. The same estimates suggest that there are approximately 150 million people of African descent (blacks), or 30% of the region’s total population. In other words, nearly half of the region’s population can be classified either as indigenous or black. In this chapter I do not deal with statistics for mixed-race people (Mestizos, Zambos, Mulatoes, etc.) who also amount to a large percentage of the population and suffer from different forms of discrimination throughout the continent. See Hooker, J. (2005) “Indigenous Inclusion/Black Exclusion: Race, Ethnicity and Multicultural Citizenship in Latin America”, in Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 37, No. 2 (May, 2005), 287.

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commercial interactivity, facilitating transition from the informal to the formal economy—even permitting the fluctuation between the two— without threatening marginalised people’s economic autonomy. The latter proposition is a way of doing justice to the condition of interdependence that has characterised economic activity between dominant and marginalised groups since the colonial period. It is important to observe the urbanisms (i.e. the physical forms) that have developed over decades of systemic marginalisation. This is not to accept perilous urban conditions—environmental risk, health hazards, criminality etc.—but to reinforce spatial constructions that permit social-urban development in the particular conditions seen in Latin American cities. That is why greater participation in inter- and trans-disciplinary studies will help architects and urban designers to generate historically informed interpretations of current urban realities and, from that basis, produce more inclusive programmes for the improvement of the living and working conditions of minority groups.

Intervening in the Urban Fabric After examining the question of marginality, the persistence of colonial principles of social control and segregation, and the need to address race as a key issue in the study of contemporary Latin American cities, let us explore some ideas about marginal urbanisms and the ways to deal with the challenges they present. The emphasis of this exploration is less on producing new methodologies for the study of, and practical intervention in, the fabric of cities, than in the possibility of continuing to develop existing practices, many of which have proven to be somewhat successful. The adverb somewhat is not an indication of pessimism, nor is it here to diminish the impact of recent urban programmes throughout Latin American, but rather to draw attention to the limitations inherent in any attempt to resolve those aspects of our cities that are considered to be dysfunctional, negative or perilous—many of which do not need resolution as such, but articulation.20



20 I have proposed the notion of “Articulatory Urbanism”, both as a method of analysis and as a design-practice whose purpose is to identify productive economic activity (often informal) in order to generate a programme for intervention in the urban fabric of cities. Instead of absorbing informal productive practices into the formal economy – thereby undermining the socio-economic practices and organisation of the poor – an Articulatory Urbanism uses architectural knowledge and expertise to enhance existing economic capacity with better physical

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The past thirty years have seen a proliferation of work on marginal urbanisms—slums, informal settlements, favelas, etc. Interest in these urban expressions derives from the rapid growth of cities during the past century, particularly in the developing world, where conditions of life are perceived to be lower than in the west or north. Some of the most successful urban interventions in deprived areas of Latin American cities—the Favela Bairro Programme in Rio de Janeiro and the Proyectos Urbanos Integrados in Medellín—focus on providing basic urban infrastructure. In his essay in this volume, Fernando Luiz Lara analyses the trajectory of Favela Bairro and compares it with similar programmes in other Brazilian cities. He tells us that Favela Bairro started in the late 1990s, inserting recreational and other communal facilities in the favelas of Rio while simultaneously improving mobility inside them. The purpose was to offer residents of favelas a range of activities that would encourage social interaction amongst residents, hoping that by engaging in such activities they would not take part in antisocial or criminal activities. The programme also addressed border conditions between favelas and affluent neighbourhoods, so as to promote interaction between different income groups (or social classes). The programme, as Lara explains, has been only partially successful. Although Favela Bairro continues today, its name, primary objectives and means of implementation have changed significantly in order to correct some deficits and include newer aspects. The most recent iterations of the programme, for example, include housing, an aspect not included in the first two phases. The point here is that urban programmes need not only be sustained—i.e. implemented for long periods—they also need to be adaptive in order to correct and optimise constantly; cities are never finished but always transforming themselves, the reason why predictive urbanisms often fail. However, Lara maintains that the major obstacles programmes like Favela Bairro need to overcome are not always economic but, rather, socio-political: corruption, continuous changes in urban policy, and distrust between different social groups (favelados, contractors, politicians, etc.). The Proyectos Urbanos Integrados (PUI) also attracted international attention. Interventions in Medellín included a sophisticated network of schools, libraries and parks—and also Library-Parks.21 In addition, many

 environments that facilitate socio-economic interaction, thereby minimising conflict. See Hernández (2014). 21 See Hernández, F. (2009) “Building on the City’s Edge”, in Beyond Modernist Masters: Contemporary Architectures in Latin America. Basel – Berlin: Birkhäuser, 24-41. The chapter explains the principles and functioning of the Library-Parks in Medellín.

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pathways, roads, and a Metro-Cable were built to enable greater mobility inside the slums and across the city. The PUIs gave urban presence to the peripheral slums, and helped to reconfigure the symbolic relationship between the hills and the valley: the hills are no longer perceived as a sign of underdevelopment, an embarrassment, but rather as evidence of the city’s capacity to transform its own image. In addition to this symbolic reconfiguration, newer infrastructure has also brought practical benefits to the residents of the slums in the form of education, sports activities, and the ability to move more efficiently throughout the city. However, as mentioned previously, socio-ethnic stigmatisation continues, causing social exclusions to remain in place, which in turn justify criminality as a resource—in the mind of the poor, there may be no other equally beneficial option. Clearly, recently implemented programmes in Brazil and Colombia have been beneficial for the people, in spite of their shortcomings. They have generated an important opportunity to develop newer ways of thinking about urban marginality, poverty alleviation and the future of cities. The creation of private-public consortia to raise funds, design and build the projects is a significant development. Multi-sector collaborations between the government, private investors and philanthropists are not innovative per se, but they had not been implemented at such a large scale in either of the two countries. Such kinds of collaboration became feasible due to government reforms that gave local authorities greater control over their own regional budgets. Decentralisation also helped to expedite planning processes, including the appointment of consultants and contractors, or the ability to raise additional funds if necessary. These new approaches to governance, though susceptible to corruption, became fundamental to achieve the transformations seen in Rio and Medellín. On the other hand, multi-sector collaborations present a significant risk in the privatisation of services. In the case of Medellín, for example, Empresa de Servicios Publicos de Medellín, has become a financially successful public-private enterprise with national and international subsidiaries. In the case of Brazil, as Lara points out, many of the corruption cases that have occurred in the past years involve illegitimate associations between public servants and private investors. In other words, in both cases (as well as in Mexico and Venezuela) resolving social problems in dangerous, deprived, peripheral zones became a profitable business for those able to invest in urban development programmes. The critique to neoliberal development advanced by thinkers like Harvey, Roy and Swyngedouw, applies here (Harvey 2012; Roy 2010; Swyngedouw 2011), for it emerges that helping the poor is more beneficial for the

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wealthy than it is for the main beneficiaries. That is why significant efforts need to be made to address the unbalanced distribution of wealth characteristic of Latin American societies and to guarantee that the poor can truly benefit from the contributions of these kinds of multi-sector investments. A clear set of conditions of investment, along with the implementation of operational levies, and tax distribution through participatory budgets, would be ways in which private-public investments could guarantee greater sustained benefit for the poor. While the critique to neoliberal development applies, it does not undermine a modality that has proven to be effective in order to take significant urban projects to completion in relatively short periods of time—usually the equivalent to a mandate period for a mayor, or a president. As mentioned above, in developing world countries whose governments are unable fully to supply all the services and infrastructures necessary to alleviate poverty and correct income disparities—and where the private sector is also incapable of employing the vast numbers of people who are statistically out of work, so as to guarantee stable, waged labour for everyone in the formal sector—public-private collaborations are a viable route to pursue urban development and to improve living conditions for the urban poor. In those collaborations, however, the role of the government should be to guarantee not only the equitable provision of public services through the construction of urban infrastructure, but also to oversee that the insertion of infrastructure materialises in real opportunities to access higher education, better work (validating work in the informal sector) and social mobility (not simply physical mobility through transport but the actual possibility of social betterment). It appears that the tendency of urban development programmes such as those implemented in Brazil and Colombia is to dismantle informality by absorbing it into the formal sector—through micro-credit loans, training and education, for example. In her essay in this volume, Diane Davis addresses this issue in great detail. She argues that the debate between those who see economic informality as a problem that needs to be eliminated because it fetters economic progress, and those who approach it as a “safety-net” to guard against poverty—and possibly even an enabler of economic innovation—still continues. The issue, however, is much more complicated. It is not so much a question about whether to eliminate or encourage informality, but how to reach the tricky balance required to allow the persistence of informality while maintaining the credibility of the government, so it can continue to regulate the formal sector. Davis’s take on the formal-informal economic debate appears to focus on the hyphen, which emerges as a vast complex space of economic transactions.

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In other words, she breaks away from a circular and limited debate about the antagonism between formal and informal economic practices in order to examine the perennial, and indeed necessary, connections needed for economies to flourish in countries where the government is weak and society extremely unequal. In sum, the Brazilian experience has demonstrated that the provision of basic social infrastructure is fundamental to stimulate social interaction and development in deprived areas. Similarly, the PUI in Medellín seeks to transform slums by introducing educational and recreational infrastructure, as well as transport. The relative success of these programmes, in Brazil and Colombia, has generated a rhetoric of urban development based on the insertion of infrastructure as the solution to the challenges caused by concentrations of poverty in developing-world cities: informal settlements (slums), insecurity and criminality, environmental risk. The argument most strongly presented in this chapter, and this volume in general, is that infrastructural insertions need to be considered as the baseline for urban development, not as its main goal. Urban infrastructure cannot be taken as the only target for urban development programmes, but rather as an instrument for achieving more significant, and inclusive, urban transformations that respond more adequately to the realities of the people who inhabit Latin American cities.

The Structure of this Volume As mentioned in the introduction, this volume does not celebrate recent interventions in Latin American informal settlements but, instead, presents a reflection on the achievements of the past twenty years. The purpose is to expand the debate about urban informality, locating it within the larger context of marginality, a suitable concept to approach and engage the whole range of circumstances that cause economic, cultural and political exclusion. In the first chapter of this volume, “Rethinking the role of social, spatial, and political conditions in the study of informality”, Diane Davis analyses the debate on economic informality in Latin America, exploring different positions in practice as well as in academia. Her argument focuses on the two main conflictive positions against and in favour of informal economic practices. Both are essential in order to support the development of national economies in developing-world countries, which already struggle to balance internal growth with their interest in playing more important roles in the global economy. Davis maintains that the definitions of “formal” economy include, indeed require, informal

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transactions that permit its development. She also shows how informality does not always amount to illegality, nor even extra-legality, but rather to unregistered practices that occur in parallel with the formal, but are geopolitically outside it. For Davis, the space between the formal and the informal is a site of economic productivity that cannot be undermined de facto, nor can it be eliminated. Instead, Davis maintains that governments in developing-world countries—and, increasingly, in the countries of the north and west—must continue to devise mechanisms to articulate these two positions that are interdependent. Security, however, is a major concern. While Davis argues favourably for the need to negotiate between formal and informal economic practices, her position is much less cautious about the propensity of informal economies to descend into violence, insecurity and even war. That is why she concludes that “security as a social good and a human right needs some sort of established and legitimate rule of law” to guarantee development, social order and governmentality. This chapter lays the foundations for all subsequent discussions of the history of informal settlements, remittances, megaevents and capitalism, conflict, appropriations of space, as well as memory and place-making in the informal city. The first section of the book, (Re)Theorising Informality in Latin America, includes three essays that examine the historical, economic and socio-political conditions where informality develops. In the chapter “Latin American informal urbanism: contexts, concepts and contributions with specific reference to Mexico”, Priscilla Connolly calls for a new round of discussion about urban informality in Latin America. Along with most authors in the volume, she indicates that the debate in architectural circles is limited largely to issues relating to the physical characteristics of informal settlements, thus failing to engage with key historical issues. For Connolly, the exclusionary practices that cause marginality in Latin America follow a trajectory that starts with colonialism. Therefore, approaching informality historically is necessary in order to understand the specificity of these kinds of expression, which in her view pertain particularly to Latin America and are different from similar phenomena in other continents; however she also argues that the historical study of informality in Latin America could help to develop methodologies to interpret informality elsewhere. Another important argument in Connolly’s chapter relates to the longevity of the informal debate in Latin America. In her view, Latin American scholarship on informality predates by various decades ideas emerging from Africa and South East Asia. However, the prevalence of English in the most recent literature, particularly in poststructuralist and postcolonial contribution, hinders the impact of local

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theories and interpretations. In the chapter entitled “Informality and the geographic rift in Latin America” Vieyra et al. carry out an exhaustive study of terminology relating to the influence of capitalist practices in the transformation of cities and rural areas, indeed entire national territories. They invoke Harvey’s concept of the “spatial fix” in order to advance an incisive critique of the destructive effects of capitalism’s expansion to, and within, Latin America. Their chapter offers a suitable preamble to Fernando Lara’s chapter, entitled “Participation Matters from Favela Barrio to the Mega Events, and their impact in Brazilian informal settlements”, in which he reviews practices of participation in two Brazilian cities focusing on two key aspects. First, the benefits of governmental continuity—or the inverse, the detrimental effect of governmental discontinuity—in the implementation of participatory agendas and the realisation of significant urban projects. Second, Lara explores the disruptive effects that the mega-events (the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the forthcoming 2016 Olympic Games) have had on the implementation of participatory programmes in Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte. His essay highlights the conflicts between internal policies to help the development of local economies and the urgency of participating in larger global markets. The second section of the book, “Place-making: the urban impact of informality”, includes four essays dealing with the processes of consolidation of informal settlements and the difficulties in interpreting such urban and architectural expressions. In “Informal house design in the 21st century: Cholo and remittances architecture, Lima Peru and el Alto Bolivia”, Christien Klaufus studies how the money that Peruvian and Bolivian migrants send from Europe and the USA back to their families is invested in real estate, that is, the construction and extension of family houses on the peripheries of cities. The appellative “cholo” indicates that the migrants are not simply poor but, also, of indigenous descent. Their architectures are largely rejected by the architectural establishment in the two relevant countries, as are the areas where the families of the emigrants built their houses. The phenomena that Klaufus describes in her chapter relates to colonial territorial exclusion on the basis of race and ethnicity. It refers also to a form of globalisation from the bottom up and the money markets that emerge as a result of contemporary migration routes. Klaufus opens up a large area of enquiry very closely linked to the issues raised by Davis and Connolly, although Klaufus examines the architectural expression of such phenomena more directly. In the chapters “Informality and place-making in the city, Xalapa, Mexico”, and “The underlying language and meaning of informality”, Melanie Lombard and Jaime

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Hernández García, respectively, explore the complex processes of placemaking in shantytowns in Mexico and Colombia. They contest mainstream architectural theories—and historical inscriptions—which deny symbolic meaning to shantytowns. Both authors carried out extensive longitudinal research in order to trace the processes by which outdoor spaces and buildings, as well as some elements of buildings, become part of the collective memory and acquire symbolic meaning through time. The authors feel that more should be done in formal academia to develop more fluid and inclusive methods of analysis to deal with informal architectures. In the chapter “Beyond Formality and Informality: In Search of a Place to Investigate Design Principles and Opportunities”, Axel Becerra Santacruz attempts to supply one such method of analysis by revising the concept of vernacular knowledge. Lombard and Hernández use the term vernacular, yet Becerra engages with the potential inherent in the concept to connect popular architectural expressions—building materials, decorative motifs, construction techniques and so on—with history and academic discourse. Becerra subscribes to the quintessential critique of architectural theory’s insufficiency in dealing with cases that cannot be easily classified in traditional terms, such as informal architectures. He reminds us that further efforts need to be made by Latin American scholars to develop useful methods of analysis to study the broad range of architectural manifestations that make the continent’s cities. The final section of the book “Academic Research and Studio Practices in the Interpretation of Informality” examines studio practices as a key vehicle for the study of informality. Over the past ten years there has been a proliferation of design studios looking at informal settlements in Africa, India, Latin America, China and South East Asia. The Graduate School of Design (Harvard University), Cambridge, Columbia, The Bartlett, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH), Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid (ETSAM)—to mention only a few European and North American schools of architecture—and many others throughout Latin America, have had at least one studio dealing with urban informality in the developing world for the past ten years. While the projects that students design are not commissioned, and rarely get built—Taller Activo, included in this volume, is an example of those where academic work has been built with significant social impact due to its continuity—they have become effective vehicles for the advancement of research on the subject. In spite of the criticism, mostly suggesting that students from wealthy universities land briefly to view how the poor live in the slums of underdeveloped countries but never have an impact on the ground, the three cases included in this volume show that studio practices make a

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significant contribution to knowledge in the subject and can even have a real impact on society. Indeed, this volume is largely the result of a number of academic collaborations between institutions in the United Kingdom, the United States and universities in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. Many authors in this volume work simultaneously in academia and practice. Thus, much of the material in this volume is the result of studios conducted by the authors as a pedagogical resource and, also, as a way to gather information that is later translated into policy and physical interventions at various scales. We see academic institutions playing an important role in the development of cities. Not only can universities be large depositories (or repositories) of information and knowledge on cities, they also offer an opportunity for continuity in the study and implementation of urban problems, surpassing the capacities of the government—with their limited periods and party discontinuities—and the revenue driven private sector. As such, universities and schools of architecture are uniquely well placed to assume an unmatched leading role in the future of urban development. With these three aspects—the revision of theoretical positions; the analysis of informal settlements in four cities throughout Latin America; and, finally, reviewing the potentially decisive role of studio practices in the advancement of urban research—this volume pushes the debate on urban informality and marginality beyond the limits of the merely formal and in search of more inclusive practices to transform the fabric, as well as the socio-economic conditions, of Latin American cities.

Works Cited Ashcroft, B. On Post-Colonial Futures. London: Continuum, 2001. Caldeira, T. “Marginality Again?!” in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research vol. 33 no. 3 (2009): 848-853 Castro, F.W. “Afro-Colombians and the Cosmopolitan City: Negotiations of Race and Space in Bogotá, Colombia.” Latin American Perspectives 189, vol. 40 no. 2 (2013): 105-117. “El Distrito identificó siete colegios públicos aledaños. Debate por casas gratis en barrios estrato 6.” El espectador, (Bogotá) November 7, 2014, accessed on June 24, 2015. Gilber, A. Housing the State and the Poor: Policy and Practice in Three Latin American Cities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Harvey, D. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London: Verso, 2012.

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Hernández, F., P. Kellett and L. Allen. Rethinking the Informal City: Critical perspectives from Latin America. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009. Hernández, F. Beyond Modernist Masters: Contemporary Architectures in Latin America. Berlin: Birkhäuser, 2009. —. “Urban and Environmental Crisis in Cali, Colombia: Locating its Origins and Scrutinising the Proposed Solutions.” Scroope 23, (2014): 24-35. —. “Architectural Latin American Modernism: Twentieth-Century Politics, Historiography and the Academic Debate.” In The Modernist World, edited by A. Lindgren and S. Ross, 383-391. London: Routledge, 2015. Heynen, H. Architecture and Modernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Hooker, J. “Indigenous Inclusion/Black Exclusion: Race, Ethnicity and Multicultural Citizenship in Latin America.” Journal of Latin American Studies 37, no. 2 (May 2005): 285-310. “Ideas para que gente de distintos ingresos conviva en un mismo espacio: Expertos evalúan cómo reducir brechas. Revivir proyectos y zonas abandonadas, entre las propuestas.” El Tiempo (Bogotá) November 11, 2014, accessed on June 24, 2015. Lancheros, Yesid. “Viviendas para pobres en barrios ricos, ¿es el camino? Los expertos aplauden intención de Petro para luchar contra la segregación, pero hacen advertencies.” El Tiempo (Bogotá) November 10, 2014, accessed on June 24, 2015. Mehretu, A., B.W. Pigozzi and L.M. Sommers “Concepts in Social and Spatial Marginality.” Geografiska Annaler 82, no. 2, (2000): 89-101. Mignolo, W. The Idea of Latin America. Oxford-Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Nightingale, C. Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012. Perlman, J. The Myth of Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in Rio de Janeiro. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. Perlman, J. Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Age in Rio de Janeiro. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Quijano, A. Colonialidad del poder: globalización y democracia. Lima: Sociedad y Política Ediciones, 2001. Rama, A. The Lettered City. Translated by J. C. Chasteen. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. Roy, A. Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of development. London: Routledge, 2010.

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Simone, A. For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities. Durham-London: Duke University Press, 2004. Swyngedouw, E. “The Zero-Ground of Politics: Musing on the PostPolitical City.” In Urban Asymmetries: Studies and Projects on Neoliberal Urbanization, edited by T. Kaminer, M. Robles-Duran and H. Sohn, 25-33. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2011. Tellez, E. and T. Paschel. “Who Is Black, White, or Mixed Race? How Skin Color, Status, and Nation Shape Racial Classification in Latin America.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 120, no. 3 (2014): 864907. Turner, J. F. C. Housing by People: Towards an Autonomy of Building Environments. London: Marion Boyars Publihing Ltd., 2000. Villarreal, A. “Stratification by Skin Color in Contemporary Mexico.” American Sociological Review, vol. 75, no. 5 (2010): 652-78. Wacquant, L. “Urban Desolation and Symbolic Denigration in the Hyperghetto.” Social Psychology Quarterly, vol. 73, no. 3 (2010): 21519.

RETHINKING THE ROLE OF SOCIAL, SPATIAL AND POLITICAL CONDITIONS IN THE STUDY OF INFORMALITY1 DIANE E. DAVIS HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF DESIGN

The study of informality continues to capture interest among scholars around the world. Some of this is due to the accelerating demographic expansion of the informal sector in large metropolises faced with rapid urbanisation, partly in response to recent global economic restructuring processes that have reduced formal employment opportunities in traditional manufacturing sectors (Roy and AlSayyad 2004; Hansen and Vaa 2002; Sassen 1994). In some cities of the world, the proportion of the economically active population involved in informal sector activities has steadily grown in the last two decades and now hovers around seventy percent (Baroni 2007). Yet even with sustained or renewed interest in informality, and greater urgency to understand its recent expansion, surprisingly little has changed about the way scholars study informality. Many of the questions and normative assumptions that guided research on informality in the 1970s and 1980s are still predominant today (Hart 1973; Portes, Castells, and Benton 1989; Chickering and Salahdine 1991). Then and now, most scholarship has concerned itself with economic informality, asking how informal practices affect the production, supply, or exchange of goods and services—ranging from industrial products to commercial services to housing and other forms of urban infrastructure. Even when politics or society are brought into the mix, the point of departure still remains economic informality (Fernandez-Kelly and Shefner 2006; Carpio, Klein, and Novacousky 1999; Cross 1998; Beneria and Roldan 1987). Likewise, those who study economic informality continue to debate its normative character, dividing over whether it is a problem to be eliminated because it fetters economic progress (Kenyon and Kapaz 2005), or whether it is a “safety-net” to guard against poverty—and possibly even an enabler of economic innovation—that should be tolerated or encouraged

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(Bromley 1990). Among those who see economic informality as a more benign, worthy of toleration, set of practices, the tendency is still to emphasise the informal sector’s capacity to provide the social welfare benefits and employment possibilities that neither the state nor the private market will provide. A more radical version of this claim has recently emerged in the form of arguments that economic informality can establish the basis for new forms of citizenship, ranging from “quiet rebellion” (Bayat 2000) to subaltern urbanism (Roy 2011) to a more fully insurgent citizenship (Holsten and Caldeira 2008). Even so, in the worlds of policy and urban governance, these voices pale in comparison with those who assume that informality is an economic burden: an activity that should either be reduced or eliminated. Those taking this view tend to base their negative assessments in an understanding of the “opportunity costs” of informality as well as its counter-productive implications for effective functioning of states and competitive markets. Many focus on the loss of tax revenues and the violation of regulatory regimes (including those linked to labour rights and worker compensation) that usually accompany informal practices. Others highlight market distortions and emphasise how economic informality negatively affects pricing, or other mechanisms to rationalise supply and demand for goods, driving informal enterprises into a “low-productivity trap” (Palmade and Anayiotos 2005). Straddling these two approaches are those hard-pressed to characterise informality either positively or negatively because of lack of agreement as to whether those employed in the informal sector are truly marginal in economic terms (i.e. steeped in poverty). Some contend that informality enables a degree of profit maximisation—and perhaps even significant wealth generation—due to its capacity to elude taxation and to circumvent wage and labour regulations, neither of which would be possible in the formal economy. In their view, informality is a way of “gaming” the system that should be discouraged. Others offer a less nefarious interpretation, suggesting that informality provides low wage-earning and livelihood options that keep folks marginally out of poverty in ways that otherwise would be unavailable in the formal economy. Given the complexity of these issues, two key questions emerge: whether it is possible, or even desirable, to attempt to classify informality in positive versus negative terms, and whether the condition of informality presupposes a dependent and marginal status versus a more powerful status that can be manipulated and exploited for personal or collective gain (Garcia-Bolivar 2006). Whether informality produces gains or losses, for whom and why, depends on whose perspective one takes as well as on the specific context in which it operates. What might be good for an individual

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citizen and society might be bad for the economy or the government, and vice-versa. Likewise, what might be good for a city and its residents might be bad for federal—or national—authorities, or vice-versa. Such assessments do not only depend on how one prioritises individual versus collective goals, or urban versus national goals, they also depend on whether one sees informality as serving a political versus an economic function. Informality may offer employment and legitimise the state, even as it undermines free markets and the state’s fiscal capacities. These caveats, combined with the fact that informality may always involve some sort of trade-off among actors and functions, suggest that it may be impossible—if not patently foolhardy—to try to arrive at a single conclusion. Informality by definition may have both positive and negative implications. Further complicating the search for categorically normative assessments, informality is in many ways a relational condition: activities are classified as “informal” only in contrast to what is considered “formal”. That is, whether or not informal activities play a positive or negative role may depend less on what informality produces or how it functions per se, and more on whether it complements, undermines, or replaces those activities that have been defined as “formal”. This in turn means that one cannot understand the positive or negative effects of informality unless one understands these outcomes in relationship to formality. This caveat further suggests that we may have been asking the wrong questions about informality. Rather than trying normatively to evaluate informality as a singularly positive or negative phenomenon, it might be more illuminating to ask under what conditions informality stabilises or de-stabilises other aspects of the formal order, be it social, political, or economic. By asking such questions, we could understand the positive or negative larger impact of informality in relational terms. In what follows, I offer an expanded analytical framework for studying informality that takes us beyond the preoccupation with economic activities alone, allowing us to understand informality’s stabilising as opposed to de-stabilising character in a more broadly-cast and relational manner. The first sections of this chapter present some general propositions that lead us to conceptualise informality in political and social as well as economic terms: terms which underscore the relational dimensions of informality, and which lend insight into its implications for the state, the rule of law, and social and political order more generally. The hope is that by conceptualising informality in more analytically expansive and relational terms, we not only understand how and why it may have stabilising as well as de-stabilising qualities, but we are also better

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prepared to understand when informality becomes a problem, and for whom. The final parts of the chapter take up questions more directly about the conditions under which informality becomes a major problem, at least in terms of challenging the stability of a given order. With a focus on violence as a fundamentally de-stabilising force, I offer several propositions to address the range of factors that link informality to violence, thereby disrupting patterns of social, political, or economic order. I also argue that the line between informality’s stabilising and de-stabilising functions is very fine, providing a precarious balancing of coercion and complicity that can explode into violence and disorder relatively easily. I then give examples of how this balance can be crafted and managed by both formal and informal actors in ways that frequently prevent informality from becoming a significant social problem, followed by a discussion of the factors and conditions that will disrupt this balance. Although this chapter is intended to offer general analytical principles, it occasionally draws on the case of Mexico and other large metropolitan locales where urban informality dominates daily life.

Widening the analytical reference points for studying informality Most scholarship on informality takes the economy as its point of departure, defining informality in almost purely economic terms. In the words of Feige, the informal sector is conventionally understood to encompass “those actions of economic agents that fail to adhere to the established institutional rules or are denied their protection” (1990: 990) [author’s emphasis]. The history of this preoccupation with the primarily economic underpinnings of informality can be traced back to research on the developing world in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly to a debate over whether the large masses of citizens in Africa, and other late industrialising nations, who failed to find work in the formal sector should be considered unproductive and/or unemployed. The response by anthropologists like Keith Hart, considered to be one of the founding fathers of the field, was that many of these citizens were indeed productively employed, but that they existed below the radar screen of the state and, thus, were not counted as such in national measures of economic performance. From this observation, the definition of informality emerged as referring to those activities that elude formal legal institutions and regulatory frameworks. In the economic domain, this includes noncompliance or evasion of formal rules and regulatory frameworks for

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policing or guiding economic activity, ranging from taxation policy to labour protections to product standards. Although the law is often seen as the main reference point for distinguishing between formal and informal activities, this does not mean that it has any causal bearing on the degrees or extent of informality in a given society. In certain circumstances, a strong and legitimately sanctioned legal code will drive firms to avoid the state’s regulatory reach, while at other times the recourse to informality is a reflection of the inadequacies of the law, or the illegitimacy of the law as seen from the vantage point of those who are officially subject to it. Likewise, the existence of the law does not necessarily resolve tensions over the distinction between the illicit versus illegal dimensions of informality, another issue of contention, primarily because the law (and its avoidance) is functioning in both instances. An example of the former might be seen as street selling of consumer durables where taxation and other revenuestream accounting practices remain elusive, while the latter might be the sale of drugs. Both these activities, to a certain degree, violate regulatory rules imposed by the state, but one may be considered merely as illicit because of passive avoidance of the legal requisites, and the other seen as illegal because of active repudiation of legal restrictions. Even scholars of the law will themselves distinguish between formal and informal law (Pistor 2000), further complicating the debate over what constitutes the boundaries of “legality”. Ambiguity over hard-line definitions of what constitutes illegal versus illicit activity is not merely a concern for scholars who seek analytically precise definitions for the study of informality. It also has direct implications for social order more generally, primarily because the characterisation of something as illegal versus illicit—or just plain informal—has a direct bearing on whether and why citizens or the state will consider some informal sector activities as more legitimate or tolerable than others, thus determining the lengths to which they will go to eliminate or tolerate such behaviours. The recognition that there may be differences of opinion between the state and citizens about the tolerance for illicit versus illegal activities, as well as the suggestion that informality by its very definition will reflect a certain degree of struggle over who has the authority to define legally appropriate behaviour, both serve to introduce the spectre of politics into the mix. This is so not just because struggles over degrees of tolerance for informality may inevitably involve actors with different degrees of political power, but also because in order to settle or manage such contention, actors may invoke informal as well as formal mechanisms of

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political influence. Stated differently, politics might also be subject to the same formal/informal distinction as the economy, with boundary-drawing in one domain affecting the other. In the political sphere, for example, there are a range of implicit and explicit rules that govern and regulate political activities or governing authority—meaning that politics and governance can also have both formally and informal dimensions. Even in situations where formal structures and processes of political decision-making (such as elections, laws about territorial jurisdictions and sovereignty, etc.) are well accepted across multiple domains of society, there often exist back-room deals, informal social and political networks, or hidden negotiations that are as likely to form the basis for politics and governance decisions as are the formal structures and processes. Some of this has remained unexamined in the literature on informality because political science scholarship tends to deploy other concepts or languages to characterise such activities, ranging from terms like influence-peddling to clientelism to corruption. But one could also recognise these terms as reflecting different degrees of informal political negotiation or the use of informal relations and norms for policymaking (Anjaria, 2011; Helmke and Levitzky 2004). And just as with economic informality, the question about the way in which political informality strengthens or weakens the state, and governing processes, remains under debate. While some would argue that informal politics can hurt the formal foundations of governance or undermine the rule of law, others might argue that it helps to legitimise the political process. A focus on political informality is useful to our understanding of the conditions under which states tolerate or repress economic informality because it focuses attention on the role played by non-state actors in the political process. Non-state actors would include social organisations, civil society associations, and other self-organised groups who may hold economic or political priorities independent from the state, but might still wield a degree of informal political power. Recent work by Deepak Lambda-Nieves shows how immigrant home-town social associations rely on economic remittances and transnational identities to influence political decisions—or offer alternative, sometimes “competing”, governance functions—in their home countries, even without having the formal elected capacity or constitutional authority to do so.1 Using their “informal” political power these, and other transnational social groups, may ally with either citizens or the state to push for toleration of informal economic trade in both illicit and illegal goods, particularly if these “alternative imagined communities” rely on economic resources drawn

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from these activities (Davis 2008). Accordingly, the fate of economic informality is often tied to patterns of political informality, and vice-versa. Once we recognise that some citizens prefer to use informal social channels for influencing politics, often because such mechanisms give them more influence than will formally recognised party institutions or legally sanctioned electoral rules, we must consider the conditions that make such influence possible. This not only forces a closer examination of the historical origins, or inadequacies, of formal political structures, institutions, and processes, or the way these affect citizens’ relationships to, and views of, the state, but also suggests that a more focused study of civil society and its normative order and expectations is necessary. Indeed, it is important to recognise that civil society is replete with sociologically or anthropologically accepted rules that govern or regulate social behaviours and institutions, often built around status, prestige, and customary authority or certain forms of social power (maybe even based on formal assumptions of race, class, gender). These rules are independent from those formally outlined by the law, the state, politics, and the market as proper practice. Thus it is important to understand the range of practices in civil society that might support or undermine state and market tolerance for informality. Although scholars sometimes suggest that civil society norms tend to reflect dominant political or economic agendas in ways that accommodate or reinforce the weight of state or market regulations, they may also reinforce a certain degree of “autonomy” from centres of power, depending on cultural history and the speed of social change. Likewise, dominant or accepted social behaviours that tend to sustain hegemonic market and state practices may themselves be rejected by certain groups within society, particularly when they reinforce a political and economic order that is seen as alienating or harmful to certain social or class sectors, or when political and economic change creates new forms of inequality that throw into question old social, cultural, or normative orders. Both examples raise the question of whether civil society practices should also be understood as divided between more formal (or established) rules and informal practices that undermine or stand in opposition to them. To be sure, offering this conceptual distinction may be problematic for a variety of reasons, including the fact that informality as a concept is built around an understanding of the ways in which socially-constituted networks, obligations, reciprocities, or practices provide a basis for action. Thus, it may be difficult to distinguish between formal and informal social processes, as all social processes are to an extent informal unless they are enshrined in the law, which in turn makes them legal rather than social

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practices. However, sometimes informal social practices eventually become the established norm for social behaviour, thus changing the cultural order, and making it difficult to distinguish between formal and informal social practices (Nee 1998). Yet, in most cases informal social practices merely co-exist with the legally sanctioned, more socially “acceptable” norms and practices. We consider these distinctions because they force us to ask whether it is the more formal and “acceptable” social norms—rather than informal and “deviant” social expectations—which are more likely to sustain or undermine formal practices and procedures with respect to political and economic informality. One way to empirically address these distinctions is to assess the socially accepted rules governing individual and group behaviour in the everyday public sphere, as well as the extent to which social norms are formalised in the law and/or made transparent in the workings of given societies and their cities. Jurgen Habermas (1996) lays the theoretical foundation for such an inquiry in his seminal book Between Facts and Norms. His aim is not only to understand how modern societies function in an orderly manner through the lens of informal social norms, but also to discover the extent to which there is a recognised correspondence between informal social norms and the constitutional “facts” that underpin the rule of law.

Studying informality in relational terms Although there is not always agreement about the gains and losses associated with informality, there is growing consensus that the informal sector is extraordinarily diverse. It holds small-scale producers and traders (including individual vendors) as well as larger, sometimes more “formal”, enterprises that may subcontract portions of their production process to non-regulated manufacturers. Thus, the informal sector is largely constituted by a wide array of inter-connected persons and activities, some of which may be more subject to regulation than others. It is important to consider the appropriateness of characterising an activity as either formal or informal. We have already raised this issue with respect to society, which is governed by both formal and informal rules, but the same goes for economic and political practices, which can be subject to a mix of formal and informal procedures. To state it more boldly, all major organising institutions and processes of modern society respond to both formal and informal rules and procedures, and they should be studied as such. This theoretical postulate poses its own empirical challenge, because sometimes it is difficult to identify the line between formal and informal

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activities in a given sector. Let us take an example from the economy. If a given firm or individual producer is the unit of analysis, it may be relatively clear as to whether it does or does not conform to state regulations that would determine its status as formal or informal (although such information is often hidden by keeping “double books”). But if the subject of study is the entire production-commercialisation-consumption process of a particular commodity, or if a particular economic sector depends on an extended supply-chain of interactions between firms and producers of different sizes with multiple and diverse regulatory reference points, characterisation is much more difficult because it is the connection between formal and informal activities that generates economic gain for individual producers. In the world of commerce, a similar dynamic is often at play: a fixed enterprise compliant with formal labour regulations and tax obligations may itself establish an illicit social connection with informal vendors, who will sell some of the established enterprises’ commercial products in an informal or illegal manner, as a purposeful means of avoiding regulation. In this instance, the set-up advantages both the formal and informal seller, who profit from the connections in ways they could not individually. When formal and informal firms work together to purposefully leverage each other’s advantages for individual gain, such connections tie them to each other both conceptually and empirically. The relational dynamics of informality can link actors and network activities across different sectoral domains as well. Indeed, informality in one domain (i.e. economy) may emerge—or even be tolerated—because of dynamics or priorities in another sector. This can happen on a grander analytical scale, as in the connections between the different organising vectors of society: for example, if states are weak, the formal rule of law and formal governance practices are weak, which could allow—or encourage—further economic informality. Likewise, widespread economic informality could allow—indeed encourage—political informality to reign. But such dynamics also unfold in a more grounded fashion, through the networks and activities of individuals who themselves span the wider array of political, social, and economic domains. Some of this has to do with the ways in which formal and informal actors leverage each other’s aims by strategically networking across sectors. For example, actors in formal political domains often develop targeted relations of reciprocity with those in the informal economic sector for both political (votes) and economic (cash) gain. The latter produces under-the-table revenues that can be applied to political campaigns, while the former helps solidify social relationships that serve as the basis for political loyalties and reciprocities.

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Once the connections between formal and informal actors are recognised, it becomes important to explore conditions under which connections, or co-existence, fuel conflict, and whether the political, social, and economic nature of such connections is the primary source of conflict. If conflict emerges over control of economic resources, for example, social disorder arises and dominant patterns of political power may be disrupted. This can lead either to violence or to renewed efforts to re-establish hegemony, emanating from whichever party has the most to lose with the disruption (the formal or the informal). Current research on drug trafficking by Luis Astorga and his colleagues lends insight into this paradoxical process. For years, formally elected political actors in Mexico allowed drug trafficking, smuggling, fabrication of contraband, and other forms of informal and illegal activities to exist, in part because their revenues financially sustained the political activities and state power of the groups in control. But as the amounts of money involved continued to grow, and the stakes became greater for both sets of parties, the balance and connections between the formal and informal actors became disrupted. The same practices of complicity that brought gains in the past were no longer beneficial or tolerable. As a result, Mexico is an all-out struggle between formal and informal means of generating both income and political power. With the historical equilibrium disrupted, the line has been crossed and the balance upended. Many informal activities and organisations that were tolerated in the past now represent a problem for the economy, the state, and society as a whole. All this further suggests that when we study informality, and how the formal-informal nexus works (or breaks down), we need to understand history: how certain patterns of complicity within and between informal and formal actors or domains become institutionalised and tolerated. In much of the work on the institutionalisation of these patterns, informality is seen as the “weapon of the weak”, in that it gives a certain degree of economic gain to those who might otherwise be fully disenfranchised. The ways that economic informality frequently becomes the basis around which clientelistic political practices are forged (Cross 1998) suggests that the weak have a lot to gain from informality. Such relations allow them access to the state that would not always be forthcoming through electoral contests. But both these examples also show how informality also serves the strong, or at least the state, which can fuel its own power or hegemony vis-à-vis other formal actors and institutions by tolerating informal economic practices and using other social and political relations to forge bonds with the “weak.”

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By understanding these dynamics, it is clear that informality serves a critical legitimising function for both the state and society. It is a source of order accepted from below and not just imposed from above, and by so doing stabilises the social and political order. This is one reason why informality is often allowed to exist in poor and unequal societies where it may be politically more expedient to let large numbers of citizens engage in informal economic activities that fall beneath the radar screen of the formal law or the state’s social and political reach. It serves as a sort of “social safety net” for citizens whose employers or governments are unwilling or unable to guarantee them formal rights or benefits. By using informal or illegal arrangements to provide goods and services that the state has failed to offer, citizens can provide for themselves without inordinate demands made on employers or the state. This may also make them less inclined to engage in political opposition or social protest targeted towards the state (or to demand the state’s guarantee of citizen rights and obligations). Such arrangements are not always cost free, of course. In the economic domain, allowing informality to flourish can limit the state’s capacity to draw formal revenues that could be distributed by the state to other key activities. It can also create economic competition that is bad for legitimate firms, in turn crippling the basic fundamentals of an economy. Likewise, in the political domain, the use of informal networks of influence and power to supplant the state’s legitimacy runs the risk of empowering caciques, or political bosses, who have no accountability (above or below), a situation that in the long run can de-legitimise formal politics and other state arrangements. Finally, maintaining both formal and informal rules and relations is a very difficult task that demands considerable nuance and bureaucratic expertise. This may be the most costly and clear limit of all, primarily because managing both formal and informal practices requires constant attention and subtle maneuvers on the part of regulatory authorities. It is extraordinarily difficult to both discipline and tolerate informality at the same time, although this is exactly what is needed in a world where both formal and informal rules are operating. After all, the whole point of imposing formal regulations is to establish a set of clear, identifiable, and transparent rules for action. That such rules are oppressive, marginalising, and de-legitimising is exactly why informality emerges and may be partially tolerated. But the mere act of partially tolerating informality can itself generate negative and destructive impacts in the long run, particularly when such efforts end up empowering lower tier arms of the state—like street-level police—with the discretion and mediating capacity to decide whether to apply the rules or tolerate

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informality. It is in this unchartered action space between repression and toleration that trouble resides, because by definition there are no formal rules for managing this space. And when there are no formal rules, everything is up for negotiation; and when everything is up for negotiation, disorder is more likely than order.

Informality and social order All this suggests a paradox: the toleration of informality may create legitimacy gains and thus stabilise the social, political, and economic order, but such gains are always unstably linked to other formal functions of the state and even the economy. Most authorities –especially at the level of the city where informal activities tend to predominate—struggle constantly to balance the aims of political legitimacy, economic prosperity, and social order; all of which involve ongoing negotiation over the degrees of tolerance for informality. These negotiations involve recognising the virtues of informality, but are tempered by a desire to limit its reach so as to strengthen the rule of law—they contribute to the ambiguous and contested nature of the formal-informal divide. To be sure, this process is Janus-faced. Some see the toleration of informality less as a form of domination and more as a resource that can “perform” or symbolise opposition to the state, although both routes could lead to disorder. Scholars like Ananya Roy and Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria have adopted James Scott’s notion of “the weapons of the weak,” arguing that the mere existence of informality—or the toleration of what Roy (2011) calls “subaltern urbanism”—holds the potential to help inspire subaltern subjects and subaltern spaces to serve in the struggle against the hegemonic and oppressive power of the state. Moreover, such consequences can emerge out of the disorder generated by a destabilisation of the precarious balance between formal and informal practice. In the recent revolution in Tunisia, it does not escape notice that large-scale mobilisation of the people against an oppressive, non-democratic state was directly instigated by the mistreatment of a single street vendor by an abusive policewoman. Her repressive actions broke the precarious and unstable arrangement of everyday tolerance for informality—in that given time and place—with so much symbolic force that it sparked a much larger wave of anger against the government. The example of the Tunisian street vendor is analytically instructive not just because it shows how precarious and unstable the negotiations between formal and informal actors can be, but also because it calls attention to the physicality of negotiations and the role that urban space

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plays in both linking formal and informal actors and establishing the basis for order or disorder. In his study of informality, AbdouMaliq Simone (2006) notes the importance of keeping the social, spatial, and even political context of informal selling as open and accessible as possible, because this is how stability and predictability in employment are created. Such outcomes are only possible when there is a clear set of reciprocities between the state and informal sector. In a context where it is often unclear just who has the right and ability to do what, and where once-relied-upon forms of authority are increasingly unable to put their stamp on how daily life is to be enacted and understood, there is a pervasive anxiety on the part of urban residents as to with whom they can live and work, with whom they can talk and what kind of collective future they can anticipate. (Simone 2006:360)

The urgency of making clear the agreed-upon notions of order, even if done so only informally, is important not just for informal vendors who might need to rely on horizontal and vertical linkages with consumers and suppliers to reproduce their commercial economic activities. This state of affairs also holds within it the seeds of its own destruction: open-ness and an implicit social order help sustain “the possibilities of constituting a multiplicity of trajectories of accumulation, collaboration, livelihood” that are in turn “continuously threatened with disattention, co-optation and state-engineered disappearance” (Simone: 360). In short, space is a key element in both the maintenance and disruption of a “workable” balance between the forces of formality and informality. If the state’s capacities to police or regulate the territorial spaces of informality rest on its power to keep such activities confined to certain physical locations, then we must not only accept that space serves as a key element in keeping the balance between informality and formality, but also that this balance can be easily disrupted by state actions (as with the Tunisian police incident), or by citizen responses (the outraged manifestations thus engendered). Yet we also need to recognise the converse: that transformations in space—particularly the extent to which they change the balance of state, or citizen control, over the spaces of informality, or the extent to which they move informal activities into new physical territories, or beyond established boundaries of control—can empower either citizens or the state. Whichever way, such spatial transformations will upset the working balance between the forces of formality and informality, perhaps even generating a new round of negotiation or struggle, leading to instability.

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There are several reasons why space is important to the stability of the informality-formality nexus. For one, it is very difficult for an entire society to be subject to the ambiguities and negotiations needed to manage the general tensions between formality and informality. Negotiating the terms of exchange between the formal and the informal sectors cannot readily be achieved at the level of society as a whole. That is the role of the law, which as we have discussed does not necessarily fulfil that function and when it does, it is often enforced unevenly in space as well as with respect to certain subjects. For another, even when informality is tolerated in a more general sense, for reasons of self-interest or political expediency, such toleration cannot be widespread across all activities and all sectors simultaneously. Doing so would produce total anarchy and make a charade of any efforts to establish a constitutional or legal basis of order. No government (whether local or national) can formally acknowledge that its basic organising political and economic structures and processes are entirely up for grabs, or negotiable as a general principle. However, it is possible to allow such negotiations or ambiguities in certain physical spaces (and not others), and the more hidden the better. This helps explain why areas with extensive informality have often developed the reputation as “no man’s lands”, precisely because they have been “allowed” by the state to be the physical locations where informality flourishes and where formal actors and institutions take advantage of informal ones, and vice-versa (whether in the form of smuggling, prostitution, drug trafficking, sale of contraband, or other activities through which formal and informal sectors profit). As the site of illicit activities, such spaces also pull the state into a complicit relationship with illegality, because without state “protection” they would not survive. Such dynamics do not only help explain why the police and other coercive forces of the state have propped up their own power by maintaining the balance between the formality-informality nexus. When a society allows certain territories to exist outside the law, the role of the police in making sure their activities stay confined is really critical. Indeed, the police stand at the front line of regulating activities in certain territories, and they hold the power to determine, even negotiate, the lines between formal and informal, legal and illegal, activities (Martin 2007). They also tend to become embedded in these illegal networks, thus driving problems of police corruption which further undermine the rule of law and fuel the vicious cycle of informality and illegality. This is true not only for high profile places known for their concentration of informality (Dharavi in Mumbai; Rocinha in Rio; Mushin in Lagos; Tepito in Mexico City), it is also true in most cities of the world where certain districts for the poorest

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and most marginal are the most prone to illicit activities, and where they usually rely on police corruption and complicity to maintain these activities. Once we recognise the importance of policing the boundaries and territories of these activities, as both enabling and constraining illicit production, we can also understand why certain physical places tend to host informality and illegality more than others. That is why the spaces most prone to illicit or informal activities are often the hardest to police. This not only includes areas in environmentally vulnerable locations on hillsides, or in underserviced areas without streets, it also includes physical spaces that fall between the cracks of formally cast political jurisdictions, such as on the borders of municipalities, states, and nations.

Concluding hypotheses about informality, order and disorder In this chapter I have tried to offer an explanation for how and why informality is allowed and often encouraged to flourish. I have also pointed out the “unstable” aspects of informality: how it rests on certain balances of power, how it draws political and economic actors together in a downward spiral of more informality, and how changes in space (and how it is policed) as well as politics and the economy can challenge the equilibrium between formal and informal activities. Overall, informality serves key functions for citizens and the state, and that is why it is pervasive even in settings where the law is strong. Some scholars (and policymakers) would suggest that trouble begins when informality devolves into illegality because violating the law lays the foundation for legal, social, and political disorder. But if we recognise that informality is a response to the inadequacies of the law, precisely because the law is not always adequate for guaranteeing the basic goods of society (human rights, welfare, protection, etc.), then we need another benchmark for assessing when informality becomes a problem. Three different ideas come to mind. The first is more macro-sociological, having to do with a focus on the larger conditions that give rise to informality and how they might produce problems in a given social, political, or economic order. In particular, I would like to suggest that problems of disorder (including violence) emerge when the balance, or the uneasy co-existence, between formal and informal actors and activities is disrupted by major changes in the organisation of politics, economy, society, or urban space. In such conditions, there will be lots of instability and power-jockeying, which could lead to abuses of power and the threat of coercion, even extortion,

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against past players in the system. Such conditions can pose a problem for both citizens and the state. The second idea revolves around questions concerning how the system of informality functions. As I noted earlier, much informality takes place with the complicity of formal actors. In such situations, certain key persons, or organisations, can begin to play important roles as mediators between the formal and informal world. Street vendor organisations are one example from the economic world; local (i.e. neighbourhood or service-provider linked) caciques are examples from the political and social worlds. I suggest that scholars focus more attention on the power and discretion accruing to these mediating actors and institutions, as indicators of how well informality is serving its purpose, or function. If these actors become so empowered or so emboldened as to start serving their own purposes, independent of the larger groups they are mediating for, then we see the creation of a strata of “oligarchs” that hold both citizens and the state (or the formal and the informal) hostage. In such situations, the benefits accruing to informality or the formal-informal nexus become privatised in such a way as to reduce the larger social, political, and economic gains to society. A third and final comment has to do with the arenas in which informality may become a problem. As noted earlier, it is not that difficult to find situations where the development of informal economies, informal housing, and even informal politics has produced benefits or secured gains for the less privileged and marginalised, and not merely the state. Yet one arena where I think informality is, and will always be, dangerous is the arena of security, or policing and protection services. My historical understanding of police and security services suggests that any effort to working outside, or on the margins of the law—even when it seems functional and desirable to citizens and the state—establishes a set of routines and expectations that will always produce problems, such as abuses of power, exploitation, extortion, and threats of violence coming from both citizens and the state. Thus, informality in policing or security services is something to be avoided, mainly because lack of accountability to a larger authority can be an extremely dangerous affair when it comes to security. Why this is so has as much to do with the larger aims of stability and social order, and how they serve as the principal building blocks for a just democratic society, as it does with the concept of accountability per se. Remember that democracy is a social project as much as a politicalinstitutional project. It can only flower when there are strong connections between ruler and ruled in a social contract that ties citizens to one another

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and to the state in a common framework for social order and political action. For such a situation to materialise, citizens and the state must buy into a single rule of law with predictable results and mechanisms of accountability. The concluding point here is that there may indeed be certain normative absolutes when it comes to informality. The large bulk of production and consumption services that are provided informally in the developing world can yield both positive and negative results for both citizens and the state. The same would be said whether we are considering political, economic, or even social informality. But when it comes to security, the logic and bulk of the evidence suggests otherwise. Security as a social good and a human right needs some sort of established and legitimate rule of law. Even when imperfect, when citizens or the state seek to informally bypass these norms and constraints, the sacrifices in terms of justice as well as democratic accountability are just too great. Knowing this, one can only hope that the debate over informality will spill over into the security domain, so as to generate further research on its effects, to understand how toleration of economic informality might all too easily morph into security informality, and to think of new ways to disaggregate the two so that democracy, social stability, and political order are most able to flourish.

Works Cited Anjaria, Jonathan S. “Everyday Corruption and the Politics of Space in Mumbai.” American Ethnologist vol. 38, no. 1 (2011): 58-72. Baroni, Bruno. Spatial Stratification of Street Vendors in Downtown Mexico City. MCP Thesis Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007. Bayat, Asaf. “From ‘Dangerous classes’ to ‘Quiet Rebels’: The politics of the urban subaltern in the Global South.” International Sociology vol. 15, no. 3 (2000): 533-57. Beneria, Lourdes and Marta Roldan. The Crossroads of Class and Gender: Homework, Subcontracting, and Household Dynamics in Mexico City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Bromley, Ray. “A New Path to Development? The Significance and Impact of Hernando de Soto’s Ideas on Underdevelopment, Production, and Reproduction.” Economic Geography 66 (1990): 32848. Carpio, Jorge, Emilio Klein, and Irene Novacousky. Informalidad y Exclusion Social. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1999.

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Chickering, Lawrence A. and Mohamed Salahdine, eds. The Silent Revolution: The Informal Sector in Five Asian and Near Eastern Countries. San Francisco: ICS Press, 1991. Hansen, Karen T. and Mariken Vaa, eds. Reconsidering Informality: Perspectives from Urban Africa. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2002. Helmke, Gretchen and Steven Levitsy. “Informal Institutions and Comparative Politics: A Research Agenda.” Perspectives on Politics, vol. 2, no. 4 (2004): 725-40. Martin, Jeffrey. “A Reasonable Balance of Law and Sentiment: Social Order in a Democratic Taiwan from the Policeman’s Point of View.” Law & Society Review, vol. 41, no. 3 (2007): 665-97. Cross, John. Informal Politics: Street Vendors and the State in Mexico City. Stanford University Press, 1990. Davis, Diane E. “Non-State Armed Actors, New Imagined Communities, and Shifting Patterns of Sovereignty and Insecurity in the Modern World.” Contemporary Security Policy, vol. 30, no. 2 (August 2009): 221-45. —. “Insecure and Secure Cities: Towards a Reclassification of World Cities in a Global Era.” MITIR: The MIT International Review, (Spring 2008): 30-41. —. “Conflict, Cooperation, and Convergence: Globalization and the Politics of Downtown Development in Mexico City.” Research in Political Sociology, vol. 15 (2006): 143-78. de Soto, Hernando. The Other Path: The Economic Answer to Terrorism. New York: Harper Collins, 1989. Fabricus, Daniela. “Resisting Representation: the Informal Geographies of Rio de Janeiro.” Harvard Design Magazine 28 (Spring/Summer 2008): 1-8. Feige, Edgar. 1990. “Defining and Administering Underground and Informal Economies: The New Institutionalist Approach.” World Development, 18/7. Fernandez-Kelly, Patricia and Jon Shefner. Out of the Shadows: The Informal Economy and Political Movements in Latin America. Princeton University Press, 2006. Garcia-Bolivar, Omar E. “‘Informal economy: Is it a problem, a solution, or both?’ The perspective of the Informal business.” Northwestern University School of Law: Law and Economic Papers. Berkeley, CA: The Berkeley Electronic Press, 2006. Goldstein, Daniel M. “In Our Own Hands: Lynching, Justice, and the Law in Bolivia.” American Ethnologist 30, no. 1 (2003): 22-43. .

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Habermas, Jurgen. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. Hart, Keith. “Informal Income Opportunities and Urban Employment in Ghana.” Journal of Modern African Studies 11, no. 1 (1973): 61-89. Holston, James and Teresa Caldeira. “Urban Peripheries and the Invention of Citizenship.” Harvard Design Magazine 28 (2008): 19-23. Johnson, Jennifer L. “Deregulating Markets, Reregulating Crime: Extralegal Policing and the Penal State in Mexico.” In Deciphering the Global, edited by Saskia Sassen, 265-282. New York: Routledge, 2007. Kenyon, Thomas and Emerson Kapaz. “The Informality Trap: Tax Evasion, Finance, and Productivity in Brazil.” Public Policy for the Private Sector, no. 301 (December 2005): 1-4. Nee, Victor. “Norms and Networks in Economic and Organizational Performance.” American Economic Review, vol. 88, no. 2 (May 1998): 85-89. Palmade, Vincent and Andrea Anayiotos. “Rising Informality: Reversing the Tide.” Viewpoint Series, Note 298. World Bank Group, Private Sector Development Vice-Presidency, Washington DC, 2005. Pejovich, S. “The Effects of the Interaction of Formal and Informal Institutions on Social Stability and Economic Development.” Journal of Markets & Morality, vol. 2, no. 2 (Fall 1999): 164-181. Pistor, Katharina. “The Evolution of Legal Institutions and Economic Regime Change.” In Governance, Equity and Global Markets, edited by Pleskovic B., 119-128. Proceedings of the Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics in Europe, Paris, La Documentation Française, 2000. Portes, Alejandro, Manuel Castells, and Lauren Benton. The Informal Economy: Studies in Advanced and Less Developed Countries. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Roy, Ananya. “Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 35, no. 2 (2011): 223-38. Roy, Ananya, and Nezar AlSayyad. Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004. Sassen, Saskia. Cities in a World Economy. Pine Forge Press, Thousand Oaks, CA, 2000. —. “The Informal Economy: Between New Developments and Old Regulations.” Yale Law Journal vol. 103, no. 8 (1994): 2289-304.

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—. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton University Press, 1991. Simone, AbdouMaliq. “Pirate Towns: Reworking Social and Symbolic Infrastructures in Johannesburg and Douala.” Urban Studies, vol. 43, no. 2 (2006): 357-370. Weinstein, Liza. “Mumbai’s Development Mafias: Globalization, organized crime, and land development.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research vol. 32, no. 1 (2008): 22-39.

PART I: (RE)THEORISING INFORMALITY IN LATIN AMERICA

LATIN AMERICAN INFORMAL URBANISM: CONTEXTS, CONCEPTS AND CONTRIBUTIONS WITH SPECIFIC REFERENCE TO MEXICO PRISCILLA CONNOLLY UNIVERSIDAD AUTONOMA METROPOLITANA-AZCAPOTZALCO, MEXICO DF.

Figure 3-1. This cartoon strip by the Chilean José Palomo was published the Mexican daily El Universal on August 14th 2006. Here, a rather obese television addict (homo videns) is watching a programme about global urban problems. Against a background of precarious informal housing the reporter states “in a planet of 6,500,000 inhabitants, a third live in houses like these”. The couch potato comments to his wife: “Look, those houses are identical to the houses round here! It seems that our architects are globalising our style of cities. Does that mean that we are exporting our life-styles?”

Introduction This chapter hopes to convey two basic ideas. First, I suggest that the notions, social practices and contexts defining Latin American informal urbanism are specific to the region. Second, by tracing the historical development of some of these notions and practices, I attempt to indicate ways in which this experience can contribute more to understanding informal urbanism throughout the world, including countries where it

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supposedly does not exist. The achievements and potentials of informal urbanisation in Latin America should be recognised, as should the insights and lessons learned from more than five decades of systematic observation of the phenomenon. The need for a new round of discussion on Latin American informal urbanism can be justified by the very low profile that the Latin American informal urban experience has had in recent debates in English on the topic, particularly in poststructuralist and postcolonial contributions (Varley 2013). Many Latin American interpretations of informality predate by various decades the recent ideas emerging from Africa or South Asia. For example, the idea of informality as a form of governance for the exercise of state power and capital accumulation (Chatterjee 2004; Roy 2009, 826) was present in Latin American debates about the role of informal settlements and activities in political dominance from the 1969’s onwards, as Roy herself repeatedly acknowledges in her book about Calcutta (2003, 15-18; 140-2). Similarly, references to informality as a “heuristic device that uncovers the ever shifting urban relationship between the legal and the illegal” (Roy 2011, 233) have strong parallels with the earlier discussions about legal aspects of Latin American informal urbanisation (Azuela 1989; Duhau 1993; Fernandes and Varley 1998). On the other hand, recent interest in comparing Latin American urban informality with similar phenomena in other parts of the world (de Alba and Lesemann 2012) does not consider the abundant scholarship on the informal production of the built environment. The relevance of Latin American informal urbanism is partly due to its overwhelming presence in most of the countries in the region. As much as 61% of the population of Venezuela’s principal cities live in “selfproduced” neighbourhoods or barrios de ranchos (Villanueva y Baldó 1994, 342-3, cited in Bolívar 1998, 57-8). In Mexico City, the “colonias populares” have been responsible for at least 65% of all residential growth (Connolly 2009). The inhabitants of Lima’s barriadas make up around 35% of the total population (Riofrío 2004, 4) while about 60% of the population of Brazil’s largest cities live in “what may be described as ‘informal settlements’” (Fernandes and Rolnik 1998). In a region where nearly three-quarters of the total population live in cities, these percentages represent a substantial part of urban growth, not to mention practically all forms of building in non-urban areas and smaller towns and villages. The reason why discussions about “informality” are restricted to the urban context, especially large cities, is of relevance to the Latin American case, as will be discussed below.

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Each Latin American country calls urban irregular settlements by a different name: barriadas, pueblos jóvenes, favelas, loteamentos, barrios, barrios de rancho, barrios populares, comunas, lotificaciones irregulares, asentamientos humanos autoproducidos, asentamientos urbanos (o humanos) irregulares, populares, no-controlados o precarios, colonias populares o proletarias, villas miseria, callampas, urbanización informal, fraccionamientos clandestinos, fraccionamientos piratas, urbanización popular, none of which are easily translatable into English. Each name signifies particular local processes so generalisations may be misleading. However, the strong similarities in the physical appearance of informal settlements throughout the continent tempt a physiognomic approach, not so much in terms of their architectural form, but in relation to the generic production process. This process, by no means exclusive to Latin America, concerns the temporal order whereby people are responsible for creating their own housing. By definition, this order of proceedings violates building and other regulations. First, people acquire plots from unauthorised developers and occupy the land, building makeshift houses. In some countries, occupation happens by invading public or private land. Very often, the land has little initial market value because of its undesirable location and/or planning restrictions. The settlers then petition for services, which are introduced gradually, often with labour or monetary inputs from the residents, starting with electricity, then water and drainage, paved roads and so on. Meanwhile, land titles or some other guarantee of possession may be obtained, often more than once. The houses enlarge and improve—not all of them—and empty lots are occupied, often by better-off people who build their houses over a shorter period. Population densities increase, often to over 600 persons per hectare, due to multi-family occupancy of the plots and rental housing. Land use diversifies as commercial and productive activities move in. This so-called “settlement consolidation” involves constant efforts, especially by women, not only in securing urban services and legal recognition from the government but also in the housebuilding process itself. Consolidation may last 20 years or more and is never complete. The adjective that originally described these processes in Latin America was not “informal”. The term asentamientos irregulares was used from the 1960s due to the influence of the United Nations and Habitat terminology, but habitat popular or urbanización popular is more favoured in recent decades. “Habitat”, like settlement, is useful in that it refers not only to housing but also to the surrounding neighbourhood, the underlying processes and, indeed, the whole way of life and social order it

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embodies. “Popular”, when associated with “habitat” and other aspects such as “music” (different to “pop” music in English), culture, art and so forth, is an exclusively Latin American term, meaning literally “of the people”, as opposed to “of the ruling classes”. Thus “popular” is a common, non-deprecatory way of referring (including self-referral) to the subaltern classes in everyday parlance. In this chapter, “informal” is preferred to “popular habitat” to avoid the connotations associated with “popular” in the English language. Although, as I will argue below, there is not much that is informal about Latin American “informal” settlements, hopefully, by retaining the term, my arguments can contribute to wider debates on informality. “Informal urbanism” also conveys the double meaning of the subject at hand. Urbanism generally refers both to the concrete habitat of city dwellers and to the ideas generated about this subject by those concerned with the study, planning and politics of towns and cities. Rather than its material characteristic, this second meaning of urbanism is the main concern of this chapter. Following these definitions, I have selected various historical examples that can help to illustrate the specificities of Latin American informal urbanism. These have to do with, firstly, the colonial legacy of the planned city as an ideal, rather than a reality, and the visual representations of the ordered city in contrast to the disordered “outside”. Secondly, I will refer to the “double-faced” state policies, with illustrations from Mexico, which promoted and legitimised irregular settlements throughout the twentieth century, while at the same time excluding them from the ideal of the planned city.

The colonial heritage: the planned city as an impossible dream of order Unlike the European cities of medieval origin and in common with many colonial urban centres,1 most Latin American cities were founded intentionally by “people with urban mentality” (Morse 1965), as the starting point for colonising conquered territories. This is particularly true of the Spanish Conquistadors, for whom colonising meant founding cities by means of solemnly drawn-up deeds guaranteeing the possession of the surrounding land by the Spanish crown (Brewer-Carias 1998, 6-7).2 The 1

Including colonial cities founded by the Greeks in the 5th century BC, designed by the proverbial “father of town planning”, Hippodamus of Miletus. 2 The role of towns and cities in the colonisation of Brazil is subject to debate. The idea of “anti-urban” or rurally-driven colonisation by authors such as Buarke and

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foundational title would also dictate formal aspects of the urban development reminiscent of ancient Greek and medieval European Utopias, as well as the classical treatises by Vitruvius and Alberti: the central square flanked by public buildings and orthogonal street layout that characterises Hispano-American towns and cities up to the present day. Most of the major cities had already been founded according to these principles by 1573 (Hardoy 1991), when the culmination of Spanish colonial planning law was enacted in the form of the Ordenanzas de descubrimientos, nueva población y pacificación de las Indias, passed by King Philip II in that year (del Vas Mingo 1985, 98; Brewer-Carias 1998, 27).3 The ordenanzas refer to diverse aspects of urbanisation, including political, economic, social and religious concerns, but 20 of the 148 paragraphs specifically concern the physical attributes such as location, orientation, layout and dimensions of streets and public spaces, etc. They also specify that the settlers should avoid contact with the native population (García 1985, 80). As an example of planning legislation, the ordenanzas are historically unique in that they dictated the theory and practice of a particular model of urban development throughout more than three centuries of Spanish colonial rule and beyond (Wyrobisz 1980, 33; Brewer-Carias 1998, 27). The above illustration is from a textbook by the Mexican planner Domingo García Ramos (1911-1978) Iniciación al Urbanismo, still used in university courses, which includes a description of the ordenanzas at the end of a chapter dedicated to the classical and medieval urban utopias. García’s verdict is unequivocally favourable to Philip II’s legislation, “measured in the survival and agreeable lifestyle that may be observed in our smaller cities, before the mechanistic evolution that has destroyed the magnificent structure of neighbourhoods moulded by an unchanging society” (García 1985, 82).

Furtado was challenged by the work of Reis Filho (2000) and, more strongly, by Matos’ recent interpretations (2011) and Szmresányi (2004), for whom “(the) original form of Brazilian cities responded to political decisions determined by technical and artistic criteria, implemented by competent technical personnel”. This is only true after the introduction of a governor general to replace the hereditary capitanías and the founding of Salvador as Brazil’s first capital in 1549. 3 Brazilian cities were also ordered by the Ordenaçaos Filipinas enacted during the unification of Spain and Portugal 1580-1668 and designed according to plans laid out by military engineers, albeit with more attention to the natural landscape and defence purposes (Hoyuela 2011). Szmrecsányi (2004, 93) suggests that these plans “existed, but do not predominate… the regulations are acknowledged but not always obeyed”.

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Figure 3-2. The ordenanzas de descubrimientos, nueva población y pacificación de las indias of Philip II, in the interpretation of Domingo García Ramos. Source: García Ramos, Domingo. Iniciación al Urbanismo, México DF: Universidad Autónoma Nacional de México. (Ist. Edition: 1961)

This historiography has various implications for understanding Latin American in-formal urbanism. The first is what Uruguayan literary critic Angel Rama (1926-1983) calls “the dream of order which served to perpetuate power and preserve the socio-economic structure that this power guaranteed” (Rama 1998, 23, italics in original). For Rama (pp. 2122) this dream, or symbolic representation, preceding the physical construction of the city was embodied in the solemnly enacted statutes written up “before the city exists so as to prevent all future disorder”. Thus an unchangeable quality was assigned to the symbols, in this case, the written word: “the only true one, as opposed to the spoken word”, subsequently articulated with another, two-dimensional representation or plan: “always the best example of an operative cultural model”. According to the Argentine historian José Luis Romero (1909-1977) this “supposed virtual capacity of the ideological city to configure reality” (1976, 13) was based on two premises: first, that the existing reality of the conquered territories was inert and amorphous and, second, that this reality should never have any autonomous and spontaneous development. “The city was a European reserve in the middle of nothing” (Romero 1976, 67). Of course, the “reality” in which the Spaniards built their colonial cities was seldom an empty space, and the model idealised in the verbal and pictorial representations by no means corresponded with how life went on in the cities. As Rama (among many others) has pointed out, this

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planned city inhabited by the Spaniards—la ciudad escriturada—was ringed by two linguistically and socially hostile peripheries (suburbs if you like) where the immense majority of the population lived. Mixed-race plebeians and lower-class Spaniards inhabited the inner ring, which shared a common spoken language with the “lettered city”; the majority of the urban population. Beyond this, on the outskirts of the city and extending towards the rural hinterland were the “Indians” and sometimes escaped African slaves (Rama 1976, 45-6). These communities spoke their own languages and lived in established communities under a different urban order: the pueblos de indios or “reductions” created by the Spaniards by solemn acts of congregación—or concentrated segregation—similar to those enacted for founding the “lettered” city. (Lovell 1992, 182). Spaniards, Negroes and those of mixed blood were not supposed to inhabit the Indian towns and villages, while Indians, with the exception of the conquered aristocracy, were banned from the Spanish city. In practice however, this legal “apartheid” was never fully upheld, especially as the proportion of Mestizo (mixed race) population increased as the colonial era advanced (Bronner 1986). The old adage “acátese pero no se cumple” (heed is taken but without compliance) was supposedly uttered by Cortés while solemnly holding on top of his head the Royal Decree which founded the city of Valladolid in New Spain (Girola 2009, 39). Although there are diverse interpretations of the origin and significance of this pronouncement, most authors agree that its use in the Spanish colonies provided a legalistic loophole by which unrealistic laws emitted in the metropolis could be evaded without incurring criminal offense. It is highly significant that this tradition is often associated with urban ordinance. The existence of regulations dictating the formal and social norms for urban development legitimised the general tendency in most Latin American cities where the élite occupied central areas subject to strict colonial governance, while everybody else inhabited the periphery, organised under a separate urban order. Spanish colonial urbanism was thus based on a double standard in which the very precise legal dispositions concerning who should live where, and how, existed more in representation than in reality, while at the same time legitimising the segregation of the disordered periphery from the formal élite centre. As we shall see, this scheme of things persisted throughout the colonial period and afterwards, even after the abolition of the pueblos de indios as corporate entities.

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The dual urban order of colonial Mexico City: realities and representations Nowhere is this double standard better illustrated than in Mexico City, the largest of all the Spanish colonial cities, established on the conquered metropolis of the Aztec empire. Here, the native “Indians” were segregated from the orthogonal urban core and settled in administrative units, called parcialidades, outside the jurisdiction of the Spanish city (Lira 1983, 19-20). Thus Mexico City was effectively made up of two “republics” each with their own set of rules and regulations: the planned central area, occupied by the Spanish minority, and the “Indian republic” comprising the parcialidades, or twin cities of San Juan Teotihuacan and Santiago Tlatelolco; and beyond these all the outlying “Indian” towns and villages. However, these two urban orders never really corresponded to a two-dimensional distribution of racial or social segregation. The indigenous aristocracy as well as servants and Negro slaves inhabited the Spanish city (Cope 1987). Some Spaniards chose to live in the Indian neighbourhoods, while the general population growth, of which people of mixed race accounted for an increasing proportion, continuously forced the physical expansion of the Spanish reticule outwards and into the indigenous quarters. There was also a spatial overlapping of jurisdictions. For example, there was overlap in areas divided for the purpose of collecting tribute. There was also overlap in the distribution of places of worship: there were parishes for Spaniards and for “Indians” but these did not necessarily coincide with areas where one or the other group resided. At the same time, the “Indian” and mixed race communities tended to inhabit the outskirts of the city, where they organised their own religious festivities, distinguishing themselves even more from the Spanish order of things (Lira 1983, 31-3). These peripheral settlements were also the hardest hit by the seasonal floods. The increasing inapplicability of the colonial ordinances to the city’s social and racial composition contrasts with visual representations of spatial order produced for the benefit of the rulers in Europe. One example of such representations is the corpus of urban plans sent from New Spain to the metropolis, about which much has been written.4 A significant attribute of the maps is their capacity to stick in the urban imagery, not least in the depiction of peripheral informal urban development as being radically different from the ordered city. The persistence of the same 4

See for example Mignolo (1995, Chapter 6), Mundy (1996), Kagan (2000) and Padrón (2004).

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cartographicc conventions describing “iirregular settleements” for th hree-anda-half centurries is shown in Figures 3-3a and 3-3b, w which comparres a map of Mexico C City drawn inn 1628 with a detail of a19980 official pllan of the same city (C Connolly 20088).

Figure 3-3a. P Platte Grandt van v de Stadt Mexico, Me 1628 by Amsterdam caartographer Johannes Vinngboons 1628, signed s by the arrchitect and maaster Builder Ju uan Gómez de Trasmontee. Photograph in i black and white w of the origginal watercolo our held in the Vatican M Museum. Vingbboons produced various copiess of this and sim milar plans, drawn from a lost original, presumably by y Trasmonte. (S See Connolly and a Mayer 2009; Connollly 2008). From m negative in Archivo A Fotogrráfico de la Coordinación Nacional de Monumentos Históricos dell Museo Naciional de Antro opología e Historia (DCC CLXVI-39), Mexico DF. Reprroduced with peermission.

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Fig 3-3b. Detail of 1:50 000 printed map of Mexico City published by the Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografía e Informática, sheet E14A39, Mexico 1980.

Another way of depicting Mexico City as a spatially ordered society for the benefit of the distant monarchy may be seen in the 18th century Pinturas de Castas (caste paintings). These paintings—produced mainly in New Spain, although there are some relating to Peru—depict couples of different races and their offspring with a text classifying the resulting mixture of races.5 Thus, the child of a Spaniard and an indigenous women is a Mestizo; the child of a Mestizo man with a Spanish woman is a Castizo; the child of a Castizo and a Spaniard is a Spaniard; that of a Spaniard with a Negress is a Mulato; the child of a Mulato with Spanish woman is a Morisco, and so on. Some of these classifications involve several generations of different combinations producing offspring classified under exotic nomenclatures such as Salta atrás, No te endiendo or Tente en el aire. Except for the basic categories involving Spaniards, there are many inconsistencies in how the castes are classified between one series of paintings and another. In fact, there is consensus among scholars that the classifications depicted in the Pinturas de Castas had little practical application and cannot be taken as a literal description of 5

The most recent and comprehensive register of all the known series of caste painting is by García (1969)

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class and rracial identities (Castro 1983; García 1989; Carrerra 2003). However, thhey clearly do d portray th he social suppremacy of Peninsular P Spaniards oover everyboddy else and the underlyinng social hierrarchy in which peopple with moore Spanish blood are suuperior to people p of indigenous oor negro desceent.

Figure 3-4a. From Spanish male and Ameerind female coome Mestizo. Painting P c. 1780. Anonym mous artist. Soource: Wikimed dia Commons, tthe free media repository https://commoons.wikimedia..org/wiki/File:M Mestizo.jpg

The Frennch geographeer Jérôme Mo onnet (2010) hhas related thee location and occupattion of the diifferent races depicted in thhe Pinturas de d Castas with the nottion and practtice of the forrmality/inform mality binomiial. Based on careful oobservations of 583 adultss representedd in 41 seriess of caste paintings, M Monnet showss that the supeerior castes teend to be porrtrayed as inactive, orr occupied inn some recreaational pastim me such as playing p a musical insttrument, reading or promen nading. Placedd within the co onfines of a well-furniished house, an enclosed formal gardeen or an ornaate public park, they occupy cleaarly-defined private p or reecreational sp paces. In contrast, thee mixed racess are portrayed as living annd working in n a single space wheree the distinctiion between the t public “ouutside” and th he private “inside” is lless clear. Thee lower down the caste hierrarchy, the mo ore likely the subjectss will be siituated outsid de, near makkeshift buildiings and,

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significantly for Mexico City, whose outskirts were perennially prone to flooding, in the proximity of water.6 Although Monnet is primarily interested in drawing out the distinction between occupational formality and informality and its relation to public spaces, his analysis may be extrapolated to extend to the production and use of the built environment. As in the case of the maps, the caste paintings are ambivalent; on the one hand, they represent a fictional social order based on a system of strict racial classification, while on the other hand they reflect and reinforce the existing social and racial-spatial segregation that usually places the nonSpanish population outside the ordered city.

Figure 3-4b. From male Black and female Amerindian, comes a Lobo Painting c. 1780. Anonymous artist. Source: Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zambo.jpg

Towards the end of the colonial period, the legal basis for the racial segregation of the population fell apart as the parcialidades, with their distinct urban order, were formally extinguished. The parochial divisions were reformed in 1772, removing the distinction between Indian and 6

The location of the negro and indigenous castes near water seems to have been missed by Monnet.

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Spanish parishes; in 1810, the Indigenous Tribute was abolished (Lira 1983, 35,); finally, in 1812, reforms to the Spanish Constitution abolished the distinction between Indians and Spaniards. This gave rise to subsequent legislation that declared the extinction of the “Indian” republics, obliging them to become municipalities wherever there was sufficient population; in the case of the former parcialidades of San Juan and Santiago, it was assumed that these would become part of the municipality of Mexico City (Warman 2003, 128; Lira 1983, 25, 35). However, as Lira points out “the parcialidades that the municipality considered to be suppressed were a reality whose weight would become increasingly apparent the more they were ignored in public decisions” (Lira 1983, 28). Lira’s book carefully documents this reality of the parcialidades throughout the nineteenth century and their resistance to successive attempts at legislating them out of existence, including the Liberal Reform of 1856 ordering the privatisation of the territorial base of the Indian communities: their communally owned and administered lands. If community ownership and administration of land was able to resist nineteenth-century liberalism, it found a new lease of life in Article 27 of the post-revolutionary 1917 Constitution: the Magna Carta of modern Mexico. This legislation declared null and void all the transactions derived from the 1856 Reform leading to the privatisation of the communal lands. More importantly, it also recognised the prerogative of villages to hold and manage communal property, even though such communities had no previous claims to the land. Furthermore, it laid out the legal processes whereby communities could demand, receive and administer their collectively owned properties, known as ejidos. The most important distinguishing characteristic of the ejido is that, although the rights to individual and communal plots are inherited, this form of property may not be sold, rented, put up as collateral, or otherwise commercialised. As Arturo Warman (2001, 55) has noted, the subject of this agrarian reform is the community, not the individual, and the property regime it created is collective, not private, under the jurisdiction of Agrarian Law. Vast swathes of land would be effectively governed, not by the municipalities, but by a pyramidal agrarian bureaucracy controlled by Federal Government. At the base of the pyramid were the elected comisariados ejidales (assemblies) in the case of the ejidos, or the traditionally appointed village elders where they still existed. The President of the Republic was the supreme authority of this agrarian property system, increasingly referred to as “social property”, corresponding to both original communal lands and ejidos (Warman 2001,

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75).7 By 1991, “social property” comprised 53% of Mexico’s territory, including much of the land surrounding villages, towns and cities built up over the course of the twentieth century. For a number of reasons, the Agrarian Reform would breathe new life into various threads of colonial social practice that would weave into twentieth-century “informal” urbanism in Mexico. First, the agrarian regime provided alternative normative frameworks legitimising the urbanisation of “social property” outside the legal norms that ordered the rest of the city or town. Second, it enabled the persistence, and even the reinvention, of primordial population centres with their own customary laws concerning corporate control of property and urban development. Third, the constitutional concept of the “social function” of property and the general acceptance of the right to a plot of land legitimised non-agrarian orders of property and urban development, such as colonias proletarias and cooperatives, among other forms of organised “informal” urban development.

Urbanism for the masses 1917-70: Proletarian housing, agrarian law and village traditions From the early decades of the twentieth century, but especially from the 1930s onwards, Mexico and many other Latin American countries experienced rapid population shifts to urban areas. Migration, coupled with very high birth rates, produced high demographic growth mainly in the larger cities. The poorer sectors of this additional population soon saturated existing rental housing supply in central areas and increasingly resorted to “irregular self-build” urbanisation on the periphery, described earlier. This process, which has been documented in many contexts,8 was seen to reverse the accepted order of things whereby, since colonial times, 7

By the 1960s, “social property” referred to ejidos but in the1970 census, the category also included the original communal properties that had survived the 19th century liberal reforms (Warman 2001). On the problems of defining “social property” as a distinct category from private property see Azuela (1989 chapter 2). 8 One of the earliest systematic accounts of this new informal housing process in Latin America, particularly in Brazil, Peru, Chile and Argentina, is to be found in the Proceedings of a seminar jointly sponsored by the Bureau of Social Affairs of the United Nations, the Economic Commission for Latin America, and UNESCO (in co-operation with the International Labour Organisation and the Organisation of American States) on urbanisation problems in Latin America Santiago (Chile), 6 to 18 July 1959, edited by Philip Hauser. I have analysed these early reactions in Connolly (2014).

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urban growth and construction should be first planned and authorised, after which the streets should be laid out and services put in and only then should the house be built and occupied. As early as the 1920s, there is ample evidence of new working-class housing developments in Mexico City, providing relatively cheap unserviced plots for people to build their own houses. Some of these areas were developed by the landowners themselves (Cruz 1994, 13), while others were negotiated by workers’ unions organised in cooperatives (Ziccardi 1982). Usually, negotiations were directly with the President of the Republic rather than the local authorities. Often the land involved was federal property, although there are recorded cases of invasions and other conflicts with private landowners. These origins, and the heroic nomenclature given to these neighbourhoods,9 gave rise to the term describing all this urban development, at least until de late 1960s: colonias proletarias. In 1937, the Mexico City government created an agency called the Oficina de Cooperación, which was responsible for solving conflicts between the inhabitants and developers, while providing urban services in existing settlements. The Oficina de Cooperación, which was later upgraded to Oficina de Colonias and operated until 1972, also began to develop new colonias proletarias, either by selling plots of land or promoting invasions (Perló 1981, 275; Azuela and Cruz 1989, 113). In the following decade, the Mexican government increased its support for this kind of urban development by expropriating land to establish new colonias and to regularise tenure in existing ones. The local government10 also provided technical and material assistance for settlement improvements and servicing. Three features of the legislation about the founding and improvement of the colonias proletarias over these decades are strongly reminiscent of the old dual colonial urban order. First, the government never announced these actions as official planning policy. The Oficina de Colonias did not depend on Mexico City’s Public Works and Planning departments, but formed part of the political arm of the government, in line with the functions of clientelistic political control of the colonias (Azuela and Cruz 1989). This political function was given legal backing by the 1941 Reglamento de Asociaciones Pro-Mejoramiento de las Colonias del 9

Some examples of the names given to these neighbourhoods are: “Un Hogar para cada Trabajador” (A Home for every Worker), Victoria de las Democracias, Obrero Popular, Liberación, el Porvenir (The Future), Defensores de la República, Mártires de Río Blanco, Patrimonio Familiar. 10 Departamento del Distrito Federal: Mexico City’s unelected government whose head was appointed by the President.

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Distrito Federal (Regulation for Neighbourhood Improvement Associations) which established that only one such organisation could exist for each neighbourhood, effectively guaranteeing the political monopoly of the state party machinery over the low-income urban sector.11 As Azuela and Cruz have shown, official recognition of a neighbourhood improvement organisation was essentially a second reincarnation of colonial practice, in that it was proxy to the official recognition of the neighbourhood itself: an alternative kind of planning permission authorising the existence of a territorial collective. The third aspect, echoing the discussions around agrarian property over the 1917 revolutionary Constitution, was the form of property, known as patrimonio familiar (family heritage), which was prescribed in nearly all of the expropriation decrees for the creation of colonias proletarias. This limited the right to sell or mortgage the plots sold by the government, a restriction extended to properties bought in any neighbourhood registered under the 1941 Reglamento. Although the patrimonio familiar form of property was never really institutionalised, its presence in the legislative discourse, echoing the ejido regimen, illustrates the persistence of paternalistic attitudes towards the urban poor in need of protection from the dangers of private property (Azuela y Cruz 1989, 126). Data from the Oficina de Colonias show that Mexico City’s Colonias Proletarias housed a population of 733,625 in 1952, approximately a quarter of the city’s total population (Sánchez Mejorada 2005, 213), a proportion which would rise to an estimated 40% by 1960 (Hart Deneke 1966, 217). The Oficina also generated very precise data regarding the area occupied these neighbourhoods, the number of lots they contained, the type of property they were built on and, most importantly as it was the main condition for regularisation, whether their residents’ association was officially recognised. In 1958, the National Housing Institute produced a study called Colonias Proletarias. Problemas y Soluciones, which included a comprehensive socio-economic survey of their population with detailed maps showing concrete proposals for improvement schemes, including financial feasibility studies (INV 1958). Thus, not only were the Colonias Proletarias a product of positive state action, but their 11 , The Confederación Nacional de Organizaciones Populares (CNOP), founded 1943 to complement the agrarian and workers’ branches of the main political branches of the ruling party, soon absorbed the majority of the Neighbourhood Improvement Associations amongst its ranks (Álvarez 2004, 77). These were formally assimilated into the CNOP when the Federación de Colonias Proletarias del Distrito Federal was created in 1951 (Cisneros 1993; Sánchez Mejorada 2005, 243-6).

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subsequent development was also controlled by government agencies, a process in which neighbourhood improvements were conditioned by adhesion to the ruling party.

Figure 3-5. Mexico City: INV. Colonias Proletarias. Problemas y Soluciones, México DF: Instituto Nacional de la Vivienda, 1958.

A more obvious and more complex example of how irregular settlements have been constituted in Mexico and governed by legal processes outside the urban planning system are the processes whereby the ejidos and other forms of property surrounding small towns and villages have been urbanised. Agrarian law changed over the course of the twentieth century, but the recognition of an area specifically designated for housing plots, schools and other urban services was present since 1917, first in the traditional form of a settlement’s fundo legal and from 1927 onwards as the zona urban ejidal or “urbanisation zone” (Pérez 2002, 200). The 1934 agrarian legislation authorised the creation of an “urbanisation zone” according to the needs of the ejido, allowing for the sale of urban lots to outsiders. In 1956 a Reglamento para la Urbanización de los Ejidos was drawn up, a piece of legislation that, according to Pérez

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(2002, 202), reflected government experience in dealing with urban settlements in ejidal property over the previous four decades. Right from the beginning of the post-revolutionary era, existing and newly-created agrarian communities needed to generate and extend an urbanised area to house not only themselves and their descendants but, increasingly, unrelated individuals who, for whatever reason, needed to live in the town or village. When this happened to be located near a large city, as was the case of the ancient and new population centres surrounding Mexico City, the demand for plots of land was considerable. As Cruz (1994) has shown, most of the ejidos located immediately to the north of what was then Mexico City were created in the 1920s and began to urbanise in the following decades. To the south of the city, beyond the new middle-class suburbs, ejido lands were mainly restored or granted to the outlying towns and villages in the 1930s and began urbanising intensively from the 1960s onwards. Because these towns and villages were located outside what was then considered to be the city proper—the “ordered” city in the colonial sense—their urbanisation was not contemplated in the successive planning legislation and masterplans for the city until 1976. In that year, the General Law on Human Settlements laid out the rules for comprehensive planning of all urban and rural settlements, although the first effective land use plan did not emerge until 1987. For this reason, the previous subdivision of lots was not illegal, in the sense that the territory was not even contemplated by the City Planning authorities. Instead, the local community, in the form of the ejido assembly (where there was one), or the traditionally elected village elders, authorised the subdivision and sale of lots. In this way, such traditions in the exercise of local power were constantly recreated, especially when the pressure for urban land and rising land values upped the stakes in territorial control. From the point of view of the property sale itself, some of the land transactions were legal, in the sense that the sellers owned the land under the private property regime. In the case of the subdivision and sale of ejidal land, the proviso for the creation of the “urbanisation zone” nearly always afforded the legal loophole whereby the otherwise prohibited property transaction could take place (Varley 1985; Cymet 1992, 51). In either case, the urbanisation was similar to, and followed the same pattern as, the colonias proletarias. People would buy or sometimes invade unserviced lots, with the expectation that eventually the transaction would be legally recognised and services would be obtained. The expectation was usually justified although the process might take several decades. Towards the end of the 1960s, due partly to the influence of concepts and practices coming from South America, the term colonias proletarias

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began to be substituted by colonias populares. 12 Popular was used to designate the multiple forms of lower-income settlements described above, together with others whose analysis is beyond the scope of this chapter. Along with the change of name came a change of scale. By 1970, an estimated 15% of Mexico City’s metropolitan population lived in colonias populares established on ejido lands, another 8% in and around towns and villages on non-ejido land, 8% on the dried-up Texcoco lake bed which was originally federal property and a further 12% on various other forms of colonias populares (COPEVI 1977). In all, more than half the city’s population lived in neighbourhoods which were a product of informal urbanism. After 1970 both the planning legislation and the legal procedures for regularising colonias populares changed, while their quantitative importance steadily increased, not only in Mexico City but also throughout the country. On the one hand, the national and local-level planning laws made it obligatory for State governments to draw up urban development plans, a requirement later demanded of municipal governments after constitutional reforms in 1983. This legislation eliminated any remaining legal basis for distinguishing between different urban orders, as the municipal urban development plans now regulate all land use. However, given the institutional weakness of most municipalities, communities with a traditional corporate power base, often empowered by the urbanisation process itself, continue to subdivide land under their control, regardless of the restrictions laid out in the municipal plans. In many cases, these local corporative powers control the municipal politics. Meanwhile, reforms to the Agrarian legislation in 1973 provided a new way of regularising urban settlements established on ejidal land. This required their re-expropriation by presidential decree, indemnification of ejidatarios and payment by the settlers to a federal government commission (CORETT),13 which controlled the whole process. As this mechanism provided additional guarantees to purchasers of lots on ejido property, it initially facilitated the urbanisation of agrarian properties (Duhau 1998, 211). However, by ultimately removing the lands concerned from the control of the ejidal assembly and implementing individual private property titles, it has had the opposite effect of reducing agrarian corporate power in the business of land development.

12

On the spread of ideas about “popular” urbanism from Argentina and Chile to Mexico, see Connolly (2014) 13 Comisión para la Regularización de la Tenencia de la Tierra.

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In 1992, further constitutional reforms effectively put an end to agrarian reform by discontinuing the redistribution of land and authorising the sale, or rental, of ejido lands, collectively or as plots, prior to certification of individual rights. One effect of these measures has been to enable private developers to acquire large amounts of ejido land. However, many ejido assemblies continue to administer their land collectively, authorising illegal subdivisions and sales under the old rules. In other cases, notably in Mexico City’s ejidos, as well as around the city, the surviving assemblies have boycotted the certification process altogether.14 Such practices, often combined with (or sometimes in opposition to) the traditional power structures, which operate in small towns and villages throughout the country, demonstrate the continuing presence of effective local corporative identities in urban affairs, including land development.15

Some contributions of Latin American informal urbanism The processes exemplified above are mainly from Mexico. However, many similar situations occur in other Latin American countries. In Peru, for example, since the 1950s the government has maintained a “doublefaced” policy regarding the barriadas, systematically pronouncing them to be illegal and undesirable while at the same time providing the institutional framework, land and other resources for their creation and consolidation (Riofrío 2004; Ramírez and Riofrío 2006, 12; Bromley 2003). In Venezuela, State compliance with the formation and consolidation barrios de ranchos is interpreted by Bolívar, Ontiveros y Freitas 2000, 3-4) as establishing and accepting an “alternative legality… and that precarious possession forms an important part of this informal code”. John Betancur (2007), writing about Medellín in the 1970s-1980s, states: “…this period continued the emphasis on regulations but opened the doors for private experimentation and legalisation of informal dwellings without offering a public solution.” With reference to Bogotá, Carmen González (2009, 258) notes that “Formal and informal property systems influence one another…The legal system’s tolerance of informality is itself a form of regulation”. Among many others, Edesio Fernandez (2003, 139) takes as given that “in cases like Brazil, urban illegality is no longer the exception but has become the rule, the structural phenomenon that organises the production of the city”. 14

For a discussion of the literature on this see Connolly 2009. For a recent analysis of the continued presence of small towns and villages in Metropolitan Mexico City see the anthology compiled by Lucía Álvarez (2011). 15

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The double-faced policy and its implications for the whole city are disguised by the terminology applied to the habitat of the poor: “uncontrolled”, “anarchic”, “irregular”, “informal”. In the light of my analysis in this chapter, all these adjectives are blatantly inappropriate. What they aspire to describe, the urban spaces produced for and by the masses, are simply not uncontrolled; there are reglas del desorden—rules for disorder—which affect social practice throughout the city (Duhau and Giglia 2008). At the same time, such negative definitions are apt in that they condense the contradictions they enshrine. “Irregular”, “informal” and so forth effectively express the idea that these manifestations of poverty are the result of the lack of planning, while ignoring that the practices that created them are constituent parts of everybody’s social order. Describing “informal” urbanism as disorderly and anarchic is a convenient way of denying that this apparent disorder is, in fact, the result of contrived planning. It is possible that many users of these terms, including academics and design professionals, are unaware of the processes I have described above; it is more likely that they prefer not to recognise them. The use of terms such as “informal”, and “irregular”, facilitates this oblivion. An important point of contact between Latin American informal urbanism and recent debates about informality in the English language is implicated by the colonial origins of the social practices concerned. In Latin America, the implications of these colonial origins are contradictory. On the one hand, certainly, the colonial legacy of informal urbanism imposes acceptance of the domination of the European over the nonEuropean, of the élite over the subaltern, of the inside “order” over the outside “other order”. Yet this “other order”, the order of corporate local governance, with its traditions, identities and memories of community ownership, as well as its clientelism and corruption, is not only alive and kicking but also constantly reinvents itself. At the same time, it provides avenues of resistance, of effective difference, which have to be accommodated within the political power structure. The “ordered city” is not always better than the “other” and nowhere is this more evident than in Latin American informal urbanism, which has arguably produced a superior habitat for the masses than the architected attempts of formal government housing policy. So I would beg to differ with the rhetorical question posed by Ananya Roy (2011, 235) when she asks “In settings of colonial difference, can the archives and annals yield the voice of the subaltern? Or is such a voice and existence constantly blackened, constantly erased?”. In the case of Latin America, I suggest that the archives and the annals are a constant

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reminder, not only of the centuries of suppression of the subaltern voice— which they definitely are—but also of its successes and capacity to survive. Like the peasant communities who obtain copies of their primordial deeds from the Mexican National Archive to prove that the King of Spain granted lands to their villages in perpetuity, we can look to the historical record for proof that another order is possible.

Works Cited Álvarez, Lucía. La Sociedad Civil en la Ciudad de México: Actores Sociales, Oportunidades Políticas y Esfera Pública. México DF: UNAM/Plaza y Valdés, 2004. —. Pueblos Urbanos. Identidad, Ciudadanía y Territorio en la Ciudad de México. México DF: Miguel Ángel Porrúa, 2011. Azuela, Antonio. La Ciudad, la Propiedad Privada y el Derecho. El Colegio de México: México DF, 1989. Azuela, Antonio and François Tomas. El acceso de los pobres al suelo urbano. Nueva edición [en línea]. Mexico: Centro de Estudios Mexicanos y Centroamericanos, 1996. Azuela, Antonio and María Soledad Cruz. “La institucionalización de las colonias populares y la política urbana en la ciudad de México (19401946).” Sociológica, vol. 4, no. 9 (1989): 111-33. Betancur, John. “Approaches to the regularization of informal settlements: the case of PRIMED in Medellin, Colombia.” Global Urban Development, vol. 3, no. 1 (2007) Bolívar, Teolinda. “Contribución al análisis de los territorios autoproducidos en la Metrópoli Capital Venezolana y la fragmentación urbana.” Urbana 23, (1998): 53-74. Bolívar, Teolinda, Teresa Ontiveros and Julio de Freitas. The Question of the Legal Regularization of Urban Barrios in Venezuela. Boston: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy Working Paper, 2000. Brewer-Carias, Allan. “Poblamiento y orden urbano en la conquista española de América.” Paper presented at the Jornadas Internacionales sobre Derecho Urbanístico, Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, 23 July 1998. Bromley, Ray. “Peru 1957–1977: How time and place influenced John Turner’s ideas on housing policy.” Habitat International 27, (2003): 271–92. Bronner, Fred. “Urban Society in Colonial Spanish America: Research Trends.” Latin American Research Review, vol. 21, no. 1 (1986): 7-72.

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Carrera, Magali Marie. Imaging Images in New Spain: Race, Lineage and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. Castro Morales, Efraín. “Los cuadros de castas de la Nueva España.” Jahrbuch für Geschichte von Staat, Wirtschaft, und Gesellschaft Lateinamerikas 20 (1983): 671-90. Chattergee, Partha. The Politics of the Governed. Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. New York: Colombia University Press, 2004. Cisneros, Armando. La Ciudad que Construimos. México DF: Universidad Autónma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa, 1993. Colonias Proletarias. Problemas y Soluciones. México DF: Instituto Nacional de Vivienda, 1958. Connolly, Priscilla. “¿El mapa es la ciudad? Nuevas miradas a la Forma y Levantado de la Ciudad de México 1628 de Juan Gómez de Trasmonte.” Investigaciones Geográficas 66 (2008): 116-34. —. “Observing the evolution of irregular settlement: Mexico City’s colonias populares 1990 to 2005.” International Development Planning Review, vol. 31, no. 1 (2009): 1-36. —. “Vaivenes del urbanismo popular en América Latina.” in Héctor Quiroz (ed) Aproximaciones a la historia del urbanismo popular. Una mirada desde México. México DF: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (2014): 33-66. Connolly, Priscilla and Roberto Mayer. “Vingboons, Trasmonte and Boot: European Cartography of Mexican Cities in the Early Seventeenth Century.” Imago Mundi, vol. 61, no. 1 (2009): 47-66. Cope, R. Douglas. The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–1720. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994. Coulomb, René and Cristina Sánchez Mejorada. ¿Todos Propietarios? Vivienda de alquiler y sectores populares en la Ciudad de México. México DF: Centro de la Vivienda y Estudios Urbanos, AC, 1991. Cruz, María Soledad. Crecimiento Urbano y Procesos Sociales en el Distrito Federal (1920-28). México DF: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Azcapotzalco, 1994. Cymet, David. From Ejido to Metropolis. Another Path. An Evaluation on Ejido property Rights and Informal Land Development in Mexico City, New York: Peter Lang, 1992. De Alba, Felipe and Frédéric Leseman. Informalidad Urbana e Incertidumbre, México DF: UNAM, 2012.

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Del Vas Mingo, María Milagros. “Las Ordenanzas de 1573, sus antecedentes y consecuencias.” Quinto Centenario 8, Madrid: Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 1985. Duhau, Emilio. “La urbanización popular en América Latina: ¿Institucionalización o pactos sociales implícitos?.” In La Urbanización Popular y el Orden Jurídico en América Latina, edited by Antonio Azuela, México DF: El Colegio de México, 1993: 19-30. —. Habitat Popular y Política Urbana. México DF: Miguel Ángel Porrúa/Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Azcapotzalco, 1998. Duhau, Emilio and Angela Giglia. Las Reglas del Desorden: Habitar la Metrópoli. México DF: Siglo XXI/ Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Azcapotzalco, 2008. Fernandes, Edesio. “Perspectivas para a renovação das políticas de legalização de favelas no Brasil.” In A Cidade da Informalidade. O Desafio das Ciudades Latino-americanas, edited by Pedro Abramo, Rio de Janerio: Livraria Sette Letras, 2003: 139-172. Fernandes, Edesio and Ann Varley. Illegal cities: law and urban change in developing countries. London, New York: Zed Books, 1998. Fernandes, Edesio and Raquel Rolnik. “Law and urban change in Brasil.” In Illegal cities: law and urban change in developing countries, edited by Fernandes, Edesio and Ann Varley, London & New York: Zed Books, 1998: 171-190. García Ramos, Domingo. Iniciación al Urbanismo. México DF: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1985. García, Saíz and María Concepción. Las Castas Mexicanas; Un Género Pictórico Americano. Milan: Olivetti, 1989. Gilbert, Alan and Ann Varley. Landlord and Tenant: Housing the Poor in Urban Mexico. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. Girola, Lidia. “La cultura del ‘como si’. Normas, transgresión y anomia en la sociedad Mexicana.” In Se acata pero no se cumpla. Estudios sobre las normas en América Latina, edited by Kathya Aruajo. Santiago de Chile: LOM Ediciones, 2009. González, Carmen. “Squatters, Pirates, and Entrepreneurs: Is Informality the Solution to the Urban Housing Crisis?.” Inter-American Law Review, vol. 40, no. 2 (2009): 239-59. Hardoy, Jorge. Cartografía Urbana Colonial de América Latina y el Caribe. Buenos Aires: Grupo Editor Latinoamericana/Instituto Internacional del Medio Ambiente y Desarrollo-IIED-Argentina, 1991. Hart Deneke, Alberto. “The colonias proletarias of Mexico City. Low income settlements at the urban fringe.” Master’s thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1963.

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INFORMALITY, MIGRATION, AND GEOGRAPHIC RIFT IN LATIN AMERICA BRIAN M. NAPOLETANO, JAIME PANEQUE GÁLVEZ, CLAUDIO GARIBAY OROZCO AND ANTONIO VIEYRA MEDRANO CIGA UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL AUTONOMA DE MEXICO

Discussions about informality tend to follow two primary lines, they refer either to modernisation and neo-Malthusianism. In keeping with the traditional discourse of modernisation, many development scholars have begun to describe informal settlements as part of the urbanisation process rather than as manifestations of extreme poverty (Roy, 2005). Maloney (2004, 1159), for instance, claims that the informal sector is the “unregulated, developing country analogue of the voluntary entrepreneurial small firm sector found in advanced countries, rather than a residual comprised of disadvantaged, [sic] workers rationed out of good jobs”. This is consistent with the broader assumption in modernisation theory that the demographic transition to urban areas is part of the development process, and is socially and ecologically beneficial. The shift from peasant agriculture to wage labour is alleged to relieve peasants from the stress and burden of entrepreneurship (Collier, 2008), and to free optimal agricultural land for commercial intensification, which in turn is alleged to free less productive land for other uses, including conservation (the “land-sparing” hypothesis; e.g., Aide and Grau, 2004). This paradigm reflects the logic of most international development policies, which frequently promote: 1) agricultural intensification and (when backed by the USA; e.g., CCGA, 2009) the adoption of genetically modified crops (Collier, 2008) to satisfy increasing food demand (Garnett et al., 2013), and 2) technical training to prepare displaced peasants for the urban labour-market (e.g., World Bank, 2008).

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Modernisation scholars tend to attribute the persistence or increased informality, poverty, and deleterious land-changes to policy and market failures, rather than structural flaws in the dominant mode of production (Foster, 2009, 134-137). This paradigm tends to emphasise further economic growth as the solution to the problem, with policy changes to be administered as needed to correct for failures (Brulle, 2010, 392-394). Although they are not synonymous, informality is frequently linked to poverty and immiseration; although empirical evidence does not support modernisation theory’s characterisation of informal workers as entrepreneurs (Cockcroft, 1983, Montes-Rojas, 2010), particularly because informality implies the absence of formally recognised rights and bargaining power (Breman, 2013). Micro-lending and other modernisation-based initiatives have failed to alleviate the structural failures that contribute to informality, while structural adjustment programmes and other neo-liberal policies have exacerbated immiseration and deterioration of informal livelihoods (Davis, 2007, 178-185). Neo-liberal policies have also contributed to the growth of informality, as depeasantisation has increased rural-urban migration, undermined efforts to achieve food and labour sovereignty, and adversely affected ecological processes (Bartra, 2004, 49-54; Bello, 2009; Otero, 2011), while economic growth has failed to translate into reduced unemployment or higher wages for workers (Weeks, 2000). Although the neo-Malthusian paradigm—which attributes poverty and land conflicts to high fertility and unlimited acquisitiveness (Eastwood and Lipton, 1999)—rejects modernisation theory’s claim that further economic growth presents a solution to the underlying drivers of informality, it similarly fails to address the structural features of the socio-economic system and instead resorts to a form of biological determinism (Commoner et al., 1971; Foster, 1999a). Although the tautological assertion that a finite resource-base cannot support an infinite series of demands lends this perspective a degree of prima facie support (Gimenez, 1973, 1), the implication that humanity has already overpopulated the planet lacks empirical backing and ignores the social dynamics responsible for poverty and informality (de Castro, 1952, 15-18; Hughes, 2000, 36-63). Even a superficial examination of socio-economic data indicates that the primary problem is one of distribution, rather than absolute quantity, of wealth. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP, 2001), for instance, estimates that 1.6% of the income of the world’s wealthiest 10%, who consume 54% of the global income, would be sufficient to provide the $300 billion USD required to eliminate the extreme poverty of the one billion people who live on less than $1 USD per day. Although fertility and informality are linked, the relationship is at best bidirectional, and the

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former cannot be legitimately invoked as the primary driver of the latter (Abernethy, 2002; Dasgupta, 1992). Moreover, the invocation of population control as a means to address poverty and ecological degradation tends to lead to deleterious social consequences that disempower the most heavily burdened members of the informal sector, women and children (Davis, 2008; Malwade Basu, 1997). In the following sections, we propose the concept of geographic rift as an alternative means to situate informality in the context of the global capitalist-system. After a brief description of the concept, we describe how the structural features of global capitalism associated with it relate to the underlying drivers of informality, and conclude with a brief discussion of the implications of geographic rift for informality.

Geographic rift in the context of global capitalism Building on the body of scholarship surrounding Marx’s (1990) concept of “metabolic rift” (Foster, 1999b Foster et al., 2010) and Harvey’s (2001, 2006) concept of “spatial fix”, we propose that informality can be conceptualised as a physical manifestation of geographic rift, which in turn reflects the inherent tendency of capitalism to generate a metabolic rift between socio-biophysical processes in the landscape and the dictates of capital accumulation.

Metabolic rift Foster (1999b) proposes that the concept of metabolic rift developed by Marx in his critique of capitalist agriculture (Marx, 1990) and ground rent (Marx, 1991) provides an analytical basis for understanding how capitalism affects the environment-society dialectic. The central postulates in this theory are that capitalist production entails: 1) the subjugation and intense exploitation of human labour and other natural resources; 2) the transformation of ecological limits into barriers to be overcome, all to achieve capital accumulation. Both factors preclude the possibility of rational control over society’s metabolism and its reconciliation with social needs and biophysical limitations because the consumption of natural resources and distribution of wealth is not directed by social needs or democratic consensus, but dictated by powerful elites in the interest of capital accumulation (Foster et al., 2010; Clark and York, 2008). In this context, the rise of capitalism as a world-economy in sixteenth-century Europe and its subsequent industrialisation and development into the dominant world-system created a qualitative change in the environment-

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society dialectic that perpetually places society’s metabolism in conflict with existing biophysical and social processes (Foster, 1999b; Wallerstein, 2011).

Spatial fix In addition to creating a metabolic rift, the perpetual drive to accumulate capital and maximise surplus-value frequently leads to situations of overaccumulation, where the accumulated capital cannot be productively employed (Harvey, 2006, 190-196). To circumvent the devaluation of labour-power and capital that typically follows from over-accumulation, a capitalist subsystem (e.g., a state or a corporation) can attempt to shift the problem: what Harvey (2001, 24-25) calls a “spatial fix”. Societies (usually states) can pursue a spatial fix through four avenues: 1) lending over-accumulated capital to bolster the borrower’s ability to purchase exports from the lending country, thereby increasing effective demand; 2) lending capital to develop the productive powers of another region; 3) directly displacing the devaluation; and 4) primitive accumulation, or accumulation through dispossession, including the cannibalistic subjugation of weaker capitalist regions (Harvey 2001a, 300-307). The exploitation of the Global South (both peripheral and semi-peripheral states) as a source of cheap raw materials for capital in the North is one example of spatial fix on a global scale (Schoenberger, 2004; Wallerstein, 1979). Although predominantly spatial, spatial fix also has a temporal dimension, such as when capital is invested in the development or improvement of infrastructure (Harvey, 2004; Schoenberger, 2004). Presently, the USA, as the dominant imperial power, is pursuing a spatial fix via accumulation through forcible global dispossession, as the ideological orientation of its national elites and the immediate interests of the capitalist class both preclude the pursuit of a temporal fix via wealth redistribution or deficit-financed infrastructure development (Harvey, 2004; Schoenberger, 2004). Dobrovolski’s (2012) analysis of the role of metabolic rift in capitalist ground rent—a vital channel of capital accumulation (Harvey, 2011)— suggests a similar tendency to pursue a spatial fix to over-accumulation. The drive to maximise ground rent drives capital consistently to seek out functional landscapes and convert them into rent-generating commodities, leading to constant cycles of expansion and dispossession, because resource-rich landscapes are exhausted and their rent-generating capacities decline. Although primarily concerned with the commodification of “natural” landscapes such as forests and wetlands, this spatial approach to

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rent-maximisation is also evident in urban environments when states appropriate informal areas to facilitate formal investment in housing and infrastructure (Harvey, 2011; Davis, 2007).

Geographic rift In turn, geographic rift refers to the socio-ecological contradictions triggered by the attempt to appropriate and transform territory in pursuit of a spatial fix to the problem of capital over-accumulation. The concept is inherently dynamic, as the imposition of the capitalist world-economy on a given territory enrols multiple social, biophysical, and geophysical actors in a complex network (Latour, 1996; Robbins, 2012). Thus, manifestations of geographic rift vary geographically and across spatial-temporal scales, while the territories and landscapes in which they are situated are themselves highly fluid. Informality, as an inherently “unplannable” aspect of urbanisation (Roy, 2005), reflects this variability and unpredictability. Conversely, characterising informality as a manifestation of geographic rift allows us to transcend the “apolitical” paradigms of modernisation and neo-Malthusianism and examine the underlying processes in the context of the capitalist world-economy (Robbins, 2012, 14-17). Geographic rift links to informality at all three of the former’s moments of the cycle (Napoletano et al., unpublished manuscript): 1) forced migration, 2) resource commodification, and 3) subordination to the capitalist world-economy. Although forced migration typically exhibits the strongest underlying connection to informality, resource commodification and subordination to the capitalist world-economy both exhibit strong connections as well.

Forced migration and the growth of the informal sector Apart from natural fertility, population growth in informal territories is driven by in-migration, which can take the form of rural-urban migration, inter-urban migration, and intra-urban migration. Insofar as informal territories reflect poverty, this migration is typically—but not always— forced, rather than voluntary. The immediate causes of such forced migration typically include a combination of the following: 1) violence or disasters, 2) human trafficking, 3) unemployment and the inability to satisfy material needs, and 4) over-qualification and the absence of viable opportunities (Delgado Wise, 2013; Lee, 2011), and in many cases this migration is frequently driven by a combination of these factors.

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Rural-urban migration Rural-urban migration is frequently associated with depeasantisation (Bello, 2009; Bryceson, 2000; McMichael, 2012a), although such migration can also reflect an effort to preserve peasant livelihoods when wage labour is used to supplement household production (e.g., Faber, 1993). The historically dominant driver of depeasantisation has been direct land-appropriation, often in tandem with privatisation and commodification, at which point the land as a commodity enters a market dominated by exchange-value rather than use-value (Courville and Patel, 2006). Initially, the primary mechanisms of land appropriation were the enclosure of commons and forcible expropriation by colonial powers as they absorbed the rest of the world into the capitalist world-economy (Marx, 1990; Galeano, 1997; Wallerstein, 1979). Although its form has changed, this forcible expropriation of peasants continues as an accumulation strategy, whereby the interests of global corporations have managed to eliminate institutional resistance and to silence dissenting subaltern voices in many regions, such as Somalia and Tanzania in Sub-Saharan Africa and Guatemala and Honduras in Central America. Thus, contemporary landtitling and micro-lending programmes similarly contribute to land appropriation, as they force landholders to participate in the capitalist market to pay taxes levied by the state or interest on loans, and the formal contracts are frequently used to legitimise previous land seizures (Harvey, 2011; Paprocki, 2013). The commodification of agricultural production, particularly in the context of the global market and GM crops, can also give rise to depeasantisation by trapping peasants on a “pesticide treadmill” (Nicholls and Altieri, 1997). This treadmill can rapidly escalate, particularly with the help of falling market prices for export commodities, as the need to constantly supply inputs can force peasants to continue borrowing, while the need to repay debts forces peasants to increase production, forcing further borrowing for more inputs. In India, this debt cycle has triggered a humanitarian crisis, as bankruptcy prompted more than 17,000 farmers to commit suicide in 2009 alone (CHRGJ, 2011). The promotion of biotechnology in the context of patented seeds threatens to further intensify this pathway to depeasantisation by creating a dependency on external suppliers for the seeds themselves, in addition to inputs (Bello, 2009; Robbins, 2012, 235-238). The capitalist, neo-liberal, world-system assault on peasant agriculture through structural-adjustment programmes, which have undermined

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support for peasants, and multilateral and bilateral trade agreements, has accelerated rates of depeasantisation and other forms of rural-urban migration. It has also undermined the possibility of food sovereignty in much of the Global South (Bello, 2009). Such an assault includes World Trade Organisation mandates to minimise or eliminate trade protections, which have exposed peasants to competition from heavily subsidised US and EU products, These policies have exposed traditional agricultural territories to global financial speculation and land markets, thereby contributing to the current international land grab (Cotula, 2012; GRAIN, 2010; McMichael, 2012b). Agricultural land gained through direct appropriation or commodification is frequently converted to high-input export-production, which the United Nations Commission on Trade and Development has cautioned is neither socially nor ecologically sustainable (UNCTAD, 2002), and reflects another physical manifestation of geographic rift. The commodification of other natural resources also contributes to depeasantisation when land is appropriated for hydrocarbon and mineral extraction or “mega-projects” such as dams and transportation corridors (Chacón et al., 2010). In Mexico, for example, the government has granted mining concessions over 30 million hectares, or 15% of its national territory, to domestic and multinational corporations (MMR, 2013). Between 2009 and 2012, corporate mining investments amounted to nearly 19 billion USD and yielded sales totalling 71.2 billion (SE, 2013). Compensation to communities displaced by these activities, however, only rarely—and usually only after difficult social protests—amounts to more than 0.5% of total sales. The indirect effects of mining on the remaining communities, such as aquifer contamination and violence directed at community members, frequently obliterate the possibility for peasant agriculture, lead to further depeasantisation, and reflect some of the more severe socio-ecological aspects of geographic rift (Garibay 2009, 2011).

Inter-urban migration The two primary drivers of forced inter-urban migration are the direct appropriation of informal urban territories and persistent urban unemployment or underemployment. Insofar as migration—temporary or permanent—is considered a response to unemployment, the relationship between the two is straightforward: workers unable to obtain sufficient resources in one urban area are forced to migrate to another. The underlying drivers of urban unemployment, however, are less frequently acknowledged, particularly in

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development proposals that suggest that education and technical training can alleviate problems of urban poverty. As Marx (1990, 1993) observes, capitalism consistently produces a relative surplus-population as companies constantly attempt to increase individual worker productivity, and therefore decrease the number of workers employed. The primary mechanism for increasing this productivity is technological innovation, which is used both to discipline the existing workforce and (temporarily) increase an individual company’s profit relative to the industry as a whole (Noble, 1986; de Janvry, 1981). In the Global South, this inherent tendency is exacerbated by the wider gap between wage and productivity increases associated with social disarticulation (de Janvry, 1981) and neoliberal policies that have mandated the reduction of state enterprises and employment and the opening of domestic economies to foreign capital, thereby contributing to the “de-industrialisation” of major urban centres in the region (Davis, 2007; Bello, 2009). Even in cases where individuals are able to obtain some form of wagelabour, underemployment is also a major driver of migration. In this context, underemployment refers to an inability to acquire sufficient wages to support a household, and South-North migration has been the dominant feature of international migration since neo-liberal policies gained political support in the 1970s (UNDESA, 2004, viii). This is a significant driver of temporary migration, as the relatively higher (in relation to the cost of living) wages obtained in the North can be sent to family members in the South in the form of remittances, with global North-South remittances estimated at 167 billion USD in 2005 (World Bank, 2006, xiii).1 In Mexico, the inability to procure employment in the formal urban sector is discouraging the rural poor from pursuing rural-urban migration, while the erosion of peasant agriculture is forcing them to rely more heavily on temporary migration and wage labour. This is resulting in the formation of informal rural territories that are even more isolated and impoverished than their urban counterparts (Carton de Grammont, 2009). Local governments can also trigger inter-urban migration by directly appropriating informal territories, and often do so to commodify the territory itself, increase the rent-generating capacity of the surrounding landscape, or transfer the informal workers into the formal economy.2 The former two forms of appropriation involve the direct eviction of informal

 1

See Klaufus, C. in this volume on the role of remittances in the developments of cities and architectures in Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, as well as in some Central American countries. 2 See Connolly, P. and Davis, D, both in this volume, about the historical complicity of governments in the production of informality.

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residents from the territory and their relocation or outright expulsion. International events (most notoriously, the Olympic games; Gold and Gold, 2008), national security, and even social justice are all invoked by state authorities to justify such appropriations of informal territories, although the underlying objective is typically to increase the city's appeal to increasingly mobile international capital (Greene, 2003; Davis, 2007). The latter form of appropriation involves “titling” and other schemes to open an informal area to investment. Most of these policy interventions have failed to alleviate the poverty associated with informal urban settlements, and Davis (2007, 81) proposes that their popularity among international financial institutions and national governments lies in the extent to which they align with neo-liberal agendas and promise political gains for relatively little effort. In reality, programmes such as public housing or “upgrading” projects in informal areas typically benefit middleand upper-income inhabitants rather than the poor, who remain marginalised, while the neo-liberal mandate to rely on international private-sector financing generally results in a failure to sustain funding (Fekade, 2000; Davis, 2007). In both cases, the underlying poverty associated with the informal settlement is not resolved, but shifted spatially, thereby exacerbating the geographic rift.

Intra-urban migration and the urban periphery Much of the above-described rural-urban and inter-urban migration flows into the urban periphery rather than into the city centre because the lower rent-generating potential, and the absence of formalised regulation, on the periphery make this space more accessible to informal residents. The arrival of both immigrants from rural and urban areas, including young families and others unable to find housing in the city centre, contributes to population growth on the urban periphery, which rapidly expands under conditions of informality. Housing on the periphery is usually improvised, built from cheaper materials on land which lacks water, electricity, sewage, and transportation infrastructure, and which is frequently unsuitable for urban development. These factors, in combination with the absence of formal legal rights, all contribute to the increased risk and vulnerability of residents, many of whom work in the informal market. Some authors refer to these spatial manifestations of geographic rift as poverty traps to emphasise the vicious cycle that prevents informal workers from escaping (Barrett and Swallow, 2006; Méndez-Lemus and Vieyra, 2013). They also illustrate the structural imbalances of the

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capitalist system that prevent urban areas from satisfying the basic needs of their populations and pose serious risks to food security by converting agricultural land into informal settlements and rural residents into informal workers.

Geographic rift and informality Geographic rift and the informal sector could be said to exhibit a perverse synergy: at the same time that geographic rift contributes to the growth of the informal sector, the informal sector helps to perpetuate the conditions responsible for geographic rift—that is the attempt to appropriate and transform territory to fix the problem of capital over-accumulation. Marx (1990) noted that a “reserve army” of the unemployed is useful to capital, as it allows firms to suppress wages and provides extra workers in times of expansion. Insofar as the informal sector allows workers to survive on wages less than those required to obtain the necessary means of subsistence from the formal economy, it effectively “subsidises” industrial capital by allowing firms to pay lower wages than those required to sustain and reproduce the labour force (Cockcroft, 2010, 85-88). As with any subsidy, this “functional dualism” allows firms to sell their commodities at lower prices without sacrificing profits, thereby increasing their competitiveness in the global market (de Janvry, 1981, 81-93). This process, however, is ultimately self-destructive, as the intensified exploitation of the informal sector under functional dualism undermines the socio-ecological conditions necessary to maintain even a minimal level of subsistence (Cockcroft, 1983; Faber, 1993). The increased international mobility of capital brought on by the neoliberal counter-revolution (Duménil and Lévy, 2004) has allowed the capitalist world-economy to intensify its exploitation of the informal sector, as industries can pursue a spatial fix to the exhaustion of the informal sector by relocating production rather than raising wages and providing the resources needed to maintain the workforce (Katz, 2001). Consequently, the concept of geographic rift suggests that the concentration of a significant proportion of the global population in the informal sector is a structural condition of capitalism rather than a temporary condition that will be alleviated by “modernisation” along lines of neo-liberal economic “development”. Increasing informality and precariousness in both the Global North and South (Bauman, 2002) suggests that continued development along the present trajectory will exacerbate, rather than alleviate, the underlying drivers of informality.

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This perspective on informality raises important issues regarding the future of human development. As official responses to the 2007-2008 financial crisis illustrated, the capitalist class has no plan to integrate the large number of workers in the informal sector into the formal economy, nor is it willing to make the concessions needed to alleviate their immiseration. Although the eventual depletion of the informal sector may trigger organised mobilisation against the political and economic structures responsible for this immiseration, it may also trigger extreme forms of ethnic, racial, and gender violence as informal workers are forced to compete for what few resources remain (Davis, 2007, 199-206). This raises the possibility of even more extreme spatial segregation and replication of the “war on terror” as practised in Iraq and Afghanistan in numerous urban centres in both the North and South (Graham, 2006). With the possibilities for spatial fixes to such internal conflicts greatly diminished, this escalation of intrastate conflicts threatens to exacerbate already growing interstate hostilities, which carry with them the distant but very real possibility of nuclear confrontation (Harvey, 2003; Steinbruner and Gallagher, 2004). Conversely, popular resistance to these trends opens possibilities for greater global solidarity and co-ordinated mobilisation between movements struggling for global social and environmental justice (Harvey, 2004). Consequently, careful and thoughtful engagement and solidarity with the heterogeneous cultures comprising the informal sector now may ultimately help humanity choose between an alternative form of globalisation and a descent into chaos (Davis, 2004)—if not outright extinction.

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PARTICIPATION MATTERS: FROM FAVELA BAIRRO TO THE MEGA EVENTS AND THEIR IMPACT ON BRAZILIAN INFORMAL SETTLEMENTS FERNANDO LUIZ LARA UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

Over the last two decades Brazil has experienced a steady process of economic growth, with income redistribution and political stability as the most notable among other socio-political and economic improvements. However, the protests that took place all over the country in June 2013 threatened the sense of optimism that reigned in the nation. The events of autumn 2013 [in the southern hemisphere] marked a turning point that marked the downfall of the neo-developmentalist project as a solution to all the ills of the city and society.1 More specifically, after the 2013 protests, I can identify three blind spots in the current government’s policies: in the environment, in public safety, and in urban policies. The three are linked to issues of ownership, control, and exploitation of the land, evils that have afflicted Brazil politics and society since colonial times. It is clear that Brazil urgently needs to develop and put in place new policies for environment and for public safety—non-existent at the moment. I will not venture to write about these two issues outside my area of expertise and will, therefore, limit myself to issues about urbanism. It is from this position that I emphasise the urgency of rethinking the cities where 85% of Brazilians live. This is what I saw and heard in the streets of Brazil in June 2013.

1

I have deliberately extended the timeline, from the month of June to all the autumn season in Brazil, as a way of including the conflicts around Belo Monte dam, the demarcations of indigenous lands, and the scandals at the Congressional Commission of Human Rights.

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This Chapter considers the history of progressive modes of urban intervention in Brazil in the last 20 years and argues that the Mega Events of 2014 (World Cup) and 2016 (Summer Olympics) have both already had a negative effect on the country’s policies. Starting with the Favela Bairro and the Participatory Budgeting processes, the 1990s were characterised by inventive new approaches that were consolidated in the early 2000s. The approval of Estatuto das Cidades in 2001, a law defining several instruments for urban intervention, marked a new era of possible progressive policies. After 2005, however, a series of political shifts, with a heavy developmentalist focus, brought about significant transformations in the scale, scope and praxis of favela upgrades. To make matters worse, the preparation for the World Cup and the Olympics has brought about a kind of “opportunistic urbanism” that put all gears in reverse, prompting a return to relocations and slum clearance not seen since the return of democracy three decades ago.

1993-2005—Small scale interventions and participatory processes Rio de Janeiro – Favela Bairro In 1994 Rio de Janeiro would led the change with the Favela-Bairro programme by recognising “the social, cultural and political importance of the favelas in the city, considering these agglomerations as part of the urban structure and seeking their integration into the existing official city” (Duarte and Magalhães, 2009:266; Fiori and Brandão, 2010:182). Favelas have existed in Rio since the beginning of the 20th century, housing about 10% of its inhabitants in 1960 and 13% in 1970. At that point the favelas had become a major issue, and the conservative governments appointed by the military dictatorship evicted 175,000 people from the southern areas of Rio, relocating them to the western outskirts of the metropolis. The infamous Cidade de Deus, whose story became a movie in 2002, is one of these relocations. Nevertheless, during the “lost decade” of the 1980s Rio’s favelas grew even faster, reaching 16 % of the city’s population by 1990 and 19% in 2000, breaking the barrier of one million inhabitants in 600 different settlements. It was against this scenario of poverty and social vulnerability that the city hosted the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in June 1992—the Rio Summit. Inside the conference the conversation was mostly about environmental sustainability but out on the

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streets the issue of social sustainability loomed over all, visitors and hosts alike. The Brazilian army was deployed to control the favelas and soldiers could be seen patrolling the boundaries between the hills (morros) and the asphalt, the names with which the formal and the informal are commonly referred to in Brazil. Coincidence or not, the following year the city announced a new housing policy, based on integration, accessibility and improved public space: the Favela-Bairro programme. A competition was launched in 1994 for ideas on how to intervene in mid-size informal settlements, those of between 500 and 2500 households which house 600.000 people or 60% of Rio’s informal population. The idea was that larger favelas like Rocinha or Complexo do Alemão would require more complex master-plans, while smaller settlements would not yield as much results. Thirty-two local firms submitted proposals and fifteen were selected (one for each of the fifteen prioritised areas). The first phase of Favela-Bairro (1994-1998) had a multi-sectoral integrated approach, in which accessibility and connectivity would be addressed by building roads and public space infrastructure which would also improve drainage and sewage connections, relocating as few families as possible from risky areas and building new housing for those inside each community. In some cases the projects considered providing community centres and, even, commercial facilities when their absence was considered an important factor. Processes of tenurisation2 and legalisation were supposed to follow after the insertion of public infrastructure, but these processes have not reached a significant number yet (Fiori, 2010; Fernandes, 2007). 300 million US dollars were invested in the first phase of the FavelaBairro programme, which benefited half million people in 146 settlements with the improvement of 500 miles of roads and sidewalks, and the construction of 160 miles of new sewage connections and 5 million squarefeet of sports facilities.

Belo Horizonte - Participatory Budgeting In Belo Horizonte the process called Participatory Budgeting (PB) was the flagship of the PT (Workers Party) and PSB (Sociality Party) administrations from 1993 to 2006. The Participatory Budget, first implemented by Olivio Dutra in Porto Alegre in 1989, allocated funds 2 The recent literature on informal settlements uses the term “tenurisation” for the issuing of property deeds or other documents and the term “legalisation” for conforming to city laws.

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from the city’s public works budget to build small interventions throughout the city. Interventions were ranked by the public in a series of assemblies that could be attended by the general population (Nylen 2002; Avriyzer 2009; Lara 2010). The construction of such small interventions, based on the idea of the “right to the city”, started in 1994. The interventions were, initially, fully funded by the municipality, that is, from the city’s own budget. By starting small with a participatory model, Belo Horizonte had time to plan, test and fine tune processes before moving on to large scale interventions, which might have been a blessing after all. In order to receive funding from the participatory budget, every community association needed to elaborate a comprehensive plan. The plans included a detailed survey of the settlement and the elaboration of a series of thematic GIS maps that detailed existing infrastructure, household socio-economic data and other issues considered to be problematic; such as open sewage, garbage dumping or areas controlled by drug-dealers. An interdisciplinary team of no less than a dozen professionals including engineers, architects, sociologists, health workers, economists and social workers, worked on the plan. The process involved numerous meetings with community leaders and several assemblies. In order to make sure that the key problems of the community were addressed and the priorities were set properly, the entire population of the area was invited to meetings. There is no need to say that the process usually took a few years from approval to completion. After the plan was completed and approved by the city administration, it became the guiding document for the area. Any intervention proposed for the PB voting process had to comply with it, as well as projects funded by other sources. Between 1994 and 2006, R$ 174 million (US$ 100 million) from the Participatory Budget were allocated to Belo Horizonte’s favelas, generating 326 projects, 219 of which had been completed in 2010. The execution of those projects demanded another layer of community involvement because any construction implied changes to people’s routines and, sometimes, even changes to their house structures. Therefore, administrative continuity was a key element in the process, allowing the city administration to manage each of those 300 projects that often spanned many years and different mayors’ terms. In the 21 years since the implementation of the PB, 77 favelas and 283,000 inhabitants in Belo Horizonte have benefitted. Both Favela Bairro and the Participatory Budget were praised nationally and internationally. At home the Favela Bairro helped to propel the career of Luis Paulo Conde to vice-governor of Rio de Janeiro, and set the tone for dozens of similar projects all over the country. The

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Participatory Budgeting also became a political brand associated with the PT administrations. The election of Luis Inacio Lula da Silva to the presidency in 2002 brought the promise that both participatory budgeting and, to some extent, favela upgrades would become national policy. It did not quite happen that way.

2006-2010 Change in scale, change in tone The first years of the Lula administration were tranquil in terms of economic policies (due mostly to a strong continuity of its predecessor’s ideas), but tumultuous for the social movements. The expectation that conditions would change with Lula in power seems to have been frustrated by a series of reforms that seemed much more concerned with governability than anything else. Meanwhile, the Ministerio das Cidades was paralysed and the government’s main campaign on hunger eradication (Fome Zero) was going nowhere. Things took a turn for the worse in 2005 when a member of congress confessed that public funds were diverted to pay representatives to vote for Lula’s proposals. The so-called “mensalão” still sends ripples through Brazilian political waters. When this chapter was being written, several high-ranked politicians were sent to penitentiaries where they served time as a result of that malfeasance. In response to all these problems, the Lula administration created a gigantic plan to encourage economic investment in (much needed) infrastructure. Devised and implemented by Dilma Rouseff, the PAC programme (Programa de Aceleração do Crescimento—Accelerated Growth Programme) invested 200 billion dollars in infrastructure all over the country between 2005 and 2009. Half of that sum was invested in sanitation projects and public space improvement, the city of Rio de Janeiro alone received 2 billion dollars from the PAC programme, six times more than the original Favela-Bairro budget (Camara, 2011). In Belo Horizonte the change of scale was even more impressive, the PAC investment of 600 million dollars being eight times more than the largest bi-annual amount ever allocated to the Participatory Budget process (85 million dollars in 2003). What few people seem to have noticed is that the same political scandal that prompted the Lula government to create the PAC programme, with Dilma Roussef as its main executive, also imposed changes at the Ministério das Cidades (Gomez Bruera, 2013: 127). The Ministério das Cidades was supposed to be an innovative articulator of urban policies. However, its innovative underpinnings shifted in July 2005 when Marcio Fortes from the Partido Progressista (PP) replaced Olivio Dutra, a member

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of the PT and former mayor of Porto Alegre where he implemented the Participatory Budget. Fortes was strongly associated with the previous Mayor of São Paulo, Paulo Maluf, and closely linked to the construction industry, thus compromising the programme’s impartiality. The PP has led the Ministério das Cidades since 2005. As we say in Brazil, the foxes were called to take care of the chicken coop. The social housing programme Minha Casa Minha Vida, for instance, was created by this new leadership at the Ministério das Cidades in 2009, and has built over one million housing units so far, the majority of them on the outmost peripheries of the largest Brazilian metropolitan regions. A better analysis of Minha Casa Minha Vida would deserve a chapter of its own but it is worth mentioning here how regressive this programme is. As part of the Minha Casa Minha Vida programme, construction companies are given a fixed sum to build houses of a certain size (40sq m or 400sq ft) and to certain standards. Since the Caixa Econômica Federal purchases the houses to mortgage them to low-income families (with different levels of subsidy based on household income), construction companies have a strong incentive to build houses as inexpensively as possible in order to maximise their gains. This includes finding the cheapest land available, which is usually located in the outermost peripheries where there is little or no infrastructure. In addition, the Minha Casa Minha Vida programme only finances the housing, putting pressure on municipal governments to cover the costs of building the necessary infrastructure: pavements, bus stops, parks and other public spaces. The result is an absolute “lack of urbanity” as Raquel Rolnik (2009), UN Housing envoy, eloquently puts it.

Changes of Scale in Rio de Janeiro Not everything is bad news. After a 10-year hiatus (1999-2009) favela upgrades were resumed in Rio de Janeiro with the funds made available by the PAC programme. The new version of Favela-Bairro, renamed Morar Carioca, invested around 2 billion dollars, this time with most of the investment going to the largest favelas—such as Rocinha and Complexo do Alemão, which were not included in the first phase of the programme back in the 1990s. Morar Carioca also came with important improvements; for example, it included a mandate according to which construction companies were required to hire 40% of their labour force from the local communities. Hiring a local work force has two major impacts: it pours money into the local economy and it facilitates the beginning of a dialogue between the construction crews and the inhabitants (though it is often tense). PAC-financed infrastructure upgrades also included a security

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strategy: the UPPs (Unidade de Polícia Pacificadora). Security is beyond the scope of this chapter but nonetheless makes for an important part of the equation. It is worth mentioning, however, that institutional processes of participation were never implemented in Rio (Cardoso, 2009). There were architectural competitions, but no public participation. While architectural competitions are a good mechanism for achieving design quality, the implementation of such designs falls short if the community is not engaged (Crewe, 2001). Most of the scholarship written about Favela-Bairro so far (Duarte and Magalãhes, 2009; Fiori and Brandao, 2010; Soares and Soares, 2005) corroborates such shortcomings.

Big money in, participation out Between 2006 and 2010 the city of Belo Horizonte was able to capture US$ 600 millions from the PAC programme, which were allocated to a favela infrastructure project labelled Vila Viva. There is no doubt that the proximity of Fernando Pimentel, Mayor of Belo Horizonte, to Dilma Roussef (then Minister responsible for PAC) was a factor in procuring those funds. However, the fact that Belo Horizonte had already produced a comprehensive set of detailed plans—required to apply for funding—was also influential in getting the money from the national government. Between 2006-2010 Vila Viva has built major interventions in the city’s largest favelas. At the Serra agglomerate for instance, an informal settlement of 48,000 inhabitants, the Vila Viva project has opened many miles of roads and attempted to relocate 1,100 families that lived in areas prone to floods or mudslides. Of those 1,100 families, 900 decided to stay in apartment buildings constructed by the new roads so they could remain in their community. The construction of four-story apartment blocks to relocate local families was, however, the most heavily criticised aspect of the Serra intervention. According to the literature on urban design and defensive planning, common areas in low-income multi-storey buildings tend to generate conflict, which jeopardises the well-being of residents in the complex. Various interviews that I conducted with city officials in 2008 and 2009 indicated that construction companies were resistant to the idea of low-rise rows of houses, or more elaborate typologies. Administration officials were persuaded by the construction companies’ arguments and opted for high-rise. On the other hand, talking to construction companies’ executives, it becomes clear that they oppose any kind of “novelty” and

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see change as a factor of risk. The housing built at Vila Viva is no different than public housing built 40 or even 50 years ago. The welcome novelty in this project is the environmental improvement. The high point of the intervention is the management of the waterways that now run free, allowing the creation of parks following the creeks, providing recreation facilities and much needed green areas in a neighbourhood whose density is above 300 inhabitants per hectare. Although planning was carefully thought through, and the participatory channels were well implemented, the bidding process emerged as the Achilles’ heel of Belo Horizonte’s favela upgrade programme. Once URBEL finished the plans, design and construction contracts were given to the lowest bid. If the winning construction company came with a good architect (as was the case with Fernando Maculan at Beco São Vicente; Carlos Teixeira at Parque das 3 águas or Horizontes group at Pedreira Prado Lopes—all three award-winning designs) the quality of design was high and the results optimal. But if the construction company came with a mediocre architect (which, unfortunately, was the case in the majority of Vila Viva interventions) the results were a dismal. On several occasions URBEL refused to go along with poorly thoughtout designs, either forcing the construction company to hire another architect or creating addenda to existing contracts to hire the architects themselves. However, this process was costly, prone to delays and worse, open to lawsuits from all sides, with no guarantee that the result would be as good as it should have been. More worrisome is the report by community associations and local activists that the participatory processes were side lined when the PAC financing office increased the scale (and mostly the budget) of the interventions (Entre Sem Bater, 2012; Guimaraes, 2011). Thus, the participatory budget process that was once celebrated in Belo Horizonte has gradually begun to lose both prominence and prestige. The difficulties I had in finding published statistics on the progress and achievements of the programme are indicative of the decay of the Participatory Budgeting processes. During the first decade of the 21st century the cities administered by the PT (Workers Party) proudly published their participatory budgets in all their publications (printed and online). Nowadays, it requires a substantial amount of data-mining to find and collect such information. The reason for such a reduction in the availability of information became clear when we finally found some data showing a decline in public participation and the stagnation (at best) of public funding. In Belo Horizonte the participatory budget process once mobilised 44,000 people (2001) and ten years later those numbers are below 35,000. If between 1997 and 2008 the participatory budget funded

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over 100 projects per year, this number is now down to 25. In terms of funding amounts, the PB that once had R$ 85M (2001-2002) was kept practically stable to R$ 87M in 2011-12 while the overall city budget grew 275% (from 2.8 billion to 7.7 billion US dollars). Sixteen years of progressive administration and participatory processes are being dismantled while the same PT which created it all turns a blind eye for the sake of governability (Hunter, 2010; Brasil 247, 2012).

2010-2013 Moving forward in scale, moving backwards in procedures At this point it is difficult to establish which of the two forms of urban intervention has worked better. Favela-Bairro, in Rio de Janeiro, is the longer running programme (18 years). There are numerous reports of places where interventions have led to prosperity, but there are also reports of places where communities revert to marginality and abandonment (Soares, 2005). As a testament to the limits of architecture, it is fair to say that the failure or the success of those interventions has less to do with their design qualities and more to do with urban policy in general: accessibility, presence of the state, improvements in employment and wages, etc. My interview with architect Jorge Jauregui, the most experienced designer of favela upgrades in Rio, confirmed this assertion. What is clear after more than a decade and a half of experience is that popular participation benefits from institutional control, which increases the chances of success for architectural interventions (Observatorio, 2011). Individual architects have tried to implement participatory processes on their own initiative but it is clearly not enough to have only one instance of participation. It is important to say that although most of the literature on the subject indicates that public participation facilitates decision-making processes and improves the quality of the relationship among different actors, it does not necessarily lead to significant improvements in environmental quality (Beierle and Konisky 2001; Bloomington et. all 2001). In a few years we will be able to establish whether spaces designed under participatory processes have been more successful than those designed by traditional technocratic processes. More research is needed fully to substantiate this claim but, so far, the interviews and visits that we have conducted over the past seven years suggest that places where interventions have been imposed by the municipality, or have been poorly debated within the community, are prone to vandalism and abandonment. Giving voice to the communities is

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a crucial component to encourage a successful appropriation of space by local residents; Participatory Budgeting processes have been instrumental in facilitating these kinds of appropriations in Brazil. Yet, the literature also indicates, that another important aspect which guarantees the success of public participation is administrative continuity and consistency of implementation (Beierle and Konisky 2001; Brakarz 2002; Donaghy 2013). Another important factor in the success of the favela interventions is the modus operandi of the construction companies. The PAC mandate that a labour force be hired from local inhabitants is a smart and effective way to boost the local economy and improve relations between the community and the construction crews. Although, as explained above, this relation is often tense—after all, builders are digging right under residents’ living rooms—but collaboration helps to build a sense of citizenship. One major shortcoming is that PAC and the PT administrations do not pay enough attention to design quality. The bidding process simply slices the work into areas and phases through a process of reverse auction: the lower bid gets the job. Left to the discretion of large construction companies, interventions are often cheaply designed and poorly detailed. The system of architectural competitions used by Favela-Bairro in its inaugural phase is a much better alternative. Thus, it would be necessary to review PAC practices in order to correct existing deficiencies in the bidding process and financing of projects, while also creating mechanisms to guarantee design quality.

Conclusion Rio should be praised for starting from a competition and condemned for not implementing institutional participatory processes. Belo Horizonte on the other hand should be praised for its participatory experiment between 1993 and 2008 and condemned for its lack of attention to design quality. As I was writing this chapter, it became clear that the hurry to build the infrastructure for the FIFA World Cup of 2014 and the Summer Olympics of 2016 allowed speculative capital to infiltrate the fabric of deprived areas, steamrolling decades of efforts to foster inclusive practices and participatory processes, which caused nation-wide protests in 2013. This kind of “opportunistic urbanism” has threatened decades of progressive policies of which the Favela-Bairro in Rio and the Participatory Budget of Belo Horizonte and Porto Alegre are significant examples. Recent relocations (or plain expulsions) in Rio, in Belo

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Horizonte and in several other Brazilian cities have reversed decades of more progressive policies (Mega Eventos, 2011; Entre Sem Bater, 2012). Meanwhile, PT, which created and implemented the participatory budgeting processes, seems now to be enamoured of the idea that all social problems can be resolved with concrete and asphalt (Hunter, 2010; Lara, 2012). It is ironic that the PT government has embraced the developmental paradigm of the military years. The current model favours urban sprawl, in search of cheap land and the use of the automobile. We have come to a point where buildings almost do not matter, only the buying and selling of land is important. As I briefly explained earlier, the Minha Casa Minha Vida project, for example, transforms cheap land in the furthest fringes of metropolitan regions into expensive land. Houses are just a detail in a transaction whose main purpose is the monetisation of land. The current tendency to resume an old model of relocations to the farthest periphery comes loaded with problems: it forces residents to undertake long commutes in crowded buses which, in turn, contribute to creating traffic jams; isolates the poorest from an infrastructure that is mainly concentrated in central areas; and confuses quality of urban life with property rights. The “market test” says it all: when we compare the value of any house at MCMV developments with the value of any house in a favela—in central areas of Brazilian cities—we discover that property in MCMV developments on the periphery is worth less because living quality is better in the favelas. The recent experience in Mexico should serve as a warning to question current practices in Brazil. Vicente Fox promised to build five million houses when he took office in the Mexican government in 2000 with a programme called INFONAVIT, which resembles MCMV. The goal was accomplished under the government of his successor, Felipe Calderon. After 12 years of building subdivisions in the more distant peripheries of Monterrey, Chihuahua, Ciudad Juarez, Guadalajara, and Tijuana, almost 40% of these houses have been abandoned and many of these developments have become violent. Indeed, large investments have been necessary to correct the failures of the programme. Brazil has already experienced similar situations, and Cidade de Deus, the film by Fernando Meirelles, provides an example. His film shows what can happen, and indeed happened, when a community is relocated in distant and isolated parts of a city. The 2013 protests in Brazil had the merit of bringing these issues to the national debate. The first organised protests in Brazil in June 2013 were triggered by a 9 percent rise in transportation prices in Sao Paulo,

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demonstrating how important issues of mobility and accessibility are to urban residents. Protesters were brutally repressed by the state’s military police, which in turn caused larger protests in Sao Paulo and other Brazilian cities. Soon, the protesters began expressing a wider range of tribulations. But there were also unspoken grievances, particularly for the middle class, which saw the consumer-based cycle under Lula turn sluggish under Rousseff. On one point, the working class, the middle class and the elite all agree: Brazilian cities have not improved at all during the Lula-Rousseff years. The focus on consumer-induced economic growth has brought millions of new automobiles to the same old roads, without any equivalent investment in public transportation. Meanwhile, a large increase in housing prices has pushed the working poor even further away, a lose-lose situation for the 85 % of Brazilians who live in cities. A real improvement in public transportation, whether in the form of significant cost reduction or quality improvement, would have a transformative effect on the urban structure because it would affect the value of land. With good and cheap transportation, land in the periphery would instantly increase in value. Another revolutionary project would be to fully use the imminent domain instruments signed into law at the Estatuto das Cidades to build social housing in the central areas of Brazilian cities, closer to all existing infrastructure, jobs and opportunities. Or to bring the participatory processes back to the forefront of urban policies. As I write the final lines of this article in March of 2015, Brazilian cities are again exploding in protest, both for and against the Rousseff government and pushing for all kinds of different agendas. The streets are the preferred places for Brazilians to express their grievances and put pressure on the government, and I think the answer should also be about the streets: more proactive urbanism (Lara, 2015). Lamentably, the FIFA World Cup in 2014 and the forthcoming Olympic Games in 2016 have brought to the fore a series of economic practices which restrict access to the city, excluding large portions of the population from the dynamics that had been created specifically to include them. This has jeopardised years of negotiations between the government, the elites and deprived socioeconomic groups. As such, recent developments in Brazilian cities reconstitute socio-economic hierarchies, which, in turn, exacerbate conflict. The continuous protests on the streets of Brazilian cities prove the level of discontent and sound a warning to rethink current inadequate, indeed perilous, practices.

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Works Cited Avritzker, Leonardo. Participatory Institutions in Democratic Brazil. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2009. Beierle, T. C. and Konisky, D. M. “What are we gaining from stakeholder involvement? Observations from environmental planning in the Great Lakes.” In Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, vol. 19, no. 4 (2001): 515 – 27. Bloomfield, D., Collins K., Fry, C., and Munton, R. “Deliberation and inclusion: vehicles for increasing trust in UK public governance?” In Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, vol. 19, no. 4 (2001): 501 – 13. Brakarz, J., Rojas, E. and Green M. Cities for All: Recent Experiences with Neighborhood Upgrading Programs. Washington DC: IDB, 2002. Bonduki, Nabil. “Habitação Social na vanguarda do movimento moderno no Brasil.” In Textos Fundamentais sobre História da Arquitetura Moderna Brasileira, vol. 2, Abílio Guerra (org), São Paulo: Romano Guerra, 2010. —. “Política habitacional e inclusão social no Brasil: revisão histórica e novas perspectivas no governo Lula.” ARQ URB, Revista Eletrônica de Arquitetura, no.1 (2009): 70-104. Brasil 247 (2012) Em BH orçamento participativo vira só papel, (online news on April 23, 2012) available at: