Informal Urban Processes

Social movement, communitarian participation and inter-institutional action

2007-08-17T10:51:00.000-07:00

Human and organizational component of the community is the dominant factor in the development of informal urban processes constituted either by social movements at low and medium scale as by governmental and private entities. To explain relationships into the community, it is necessary to identify the different rolls assumed by participants of the social group in the conformation of settlements of informal origin; various dynamics including the leader roll who litigates and “commercializes” a place, and the roll of communicators or informers of movements in generation taking place in different sectors of the city in and out. Also, the roll of the person in charge of organizing and assembling the community, not to mention those who work on the creation of relationships between social agents from the formal sector and unions constituted to be mediators to make it possible for different dynamics to allow access to soil and the attainment of public services nets as first action of habitability for informal settlements.

Not to forget that social actors are formed within the first steps of the process, which means that the cohesion is generated with the force of union of common interests in order to get the attainment and appropriation of the place and the access to the minimum infrastructure. While the settlement is fortified, initial associations begin to dissipate since particular needs prime over collective ones in later steps of consolidation, although solidarity and support are shown when there is need to get resources and goods.

Among state and private organizations, (specially in the last ones) non-profit organizations stand out, like ONGs that center their work in the endorsement to communities present at settlements of informal origin, which means that they open the door to dialog towards “legality” and “formality”. At the same time, private actors with commercial interests are present and act in the processes of consolidation of infrastructure (particularly, enterprises in charge of supplying domiciliary public services), service suppliers in different areas, and materials and constructive components dealers.

The state, understood as organization, becomes an actor that, at the beginning of the process has an indirect participation in the promulgation of politics and norms not considering informality; then, its presence is tangible through the different institutions associated to it in order to formalize the proceedings and facilitate requirements to legalization. Nevertheless, when dynamics are assured with the appropriation of soil and consolidation of constructions, it assumes a relevant roll with politics and norms, not for absence but for presence, and turns over as determinant in the consolidation of informal urban processes.

Public politics of regularization and improvement

2007-08-16T22:13:00.001-07:00

Important improvements in this matter have been achieved in different countries such as Brazil, Peru and Colombia in the last years. Improvements not exempt of divergences between those in charge of politics and its execution like the multiple organizations, social, political, communitarian and non-governmental involved in processes to change.

The main discussion proposed here is about the impact that may have public politics with no structural vision for development and concrete creative actions by municipal or local organizations to confront a universal phenomenon with their resources and tools. The tension between global order events and local order actions are certain in a reality superior in scale and complexity not only to the state action but to the participation of diverse social and productive sectors in each country.

Economy and real state activity in the informal city

2007-08-16T22:12:00.000-07:00

One of the deepest and present discussions is the formation of an informal city as a market and how programs to improve neighborhoods aim to this target. Is it possible to speak of informal-origin housing as merchandise, as part of different markets and submarkets despite its high production costs, or as speeder for other markets of good and services related to construction? And, in front of an informal city located in central areas, there is a question on weather the construction values worth more that the urbanized soil or the nets for equipment and furnishing? And, in this case, what can constitute merchandise? And in this sense, should programs to develop neighborhoods be considered, coming either from local administrations or state ones and the profusion of programs to generate and support small and medium enterprises as state concern to improve the living conditions of the population or as a way to adapt to production (from soil or through maquilas) to the conditions imposed by big economic powers (real state or any other kind)?

Furthermore, the growth of the city implies urbanizing of more terrains, densification and re-urbanizing of many of its sectors. In this dynamic, interest and real state business move daily. Without considering if origin of settlements is formal or informal, transactions for sell, rent and other are present through supply and demand of intra-city migrants as well as displaced. From the rent of a room to the rent of high category offices both are promoted by entrepreneurs of the real state business up to the renamed brokers or real state indorsed by big real state and construction enterprises. In the middle of all this market, lines of formality cross those of informality. When legality is joint, in other words, formality, real state markets of transactions go to the hands of real state agencies meeting with all requirements of law. Handling of commissions for a transaction or administration begins in those neighborhoods where there was barely a simple poster saying «for sale». While renewed forces of the construction and legality join to the precarious informal zones, where socioeconomic stratus unite in heterogeneous panorama, the verbal mechanisms of sale and rent become as part of new invasions or new illegal neighborhoods.

Transformation of informal urban space (Architectures, urban aesthetics, technologies, threats and risks, environment)

2007-08-16T22:11:00.002-07:00

Since the beginning of informal settlement, the phenomenon in itself has a seal: its own expression for self-organizing, self-producing and self-acting towards its habitat. Proper expression which has been “acquired” through the incessant replica of positive experiences in housing implant achievements; this means that the culture to constitute formality through informality has been informed over time through experimental and oral tradition which has been raw material so the settlements of informal origin would reproduce indistinctly as they are repeated one after the other with the proper variable of environmental conditions of place and idiosyncrasy of the social actors performing processes. What starts as a simple location of a group of spaces sparsely habitable, little by little is transformed in an “ordered structure” established from the previous knowledge of the formal urban thread and the community’s intuition to take advantage in the best way of conditions of location, geographical and topographical. Because of this, settlements of informal origin are not orthogonal, nor rectilinear but most of the time, embrittled and tortuous, pretending to make a copy of established urban models with a start site but without any specific ending point.

Despite logical reasoning and praxis along informal urban processes, some environmental impact coming from implanting spatial sets characterized by the non-concurrence of urbanistic norms are, in some cases, inevitable, as well as it is a deficit in the access and cover of public services and the use of inadequate soil for building; this respects contribute to low appropriate interventions in the geographic context of the housing location.

Displacement, Migration and Resettlement

2007-08-16T22:11:00.001-07:00

Informal urban growth is one of the most impressive expressions of social, economic structures, spatial and environmental of local order, regional and national in countries where it is produced. Mobility of voluntary migrants and groups in situation of forced displacement generates drastic changes in the relations and configuration of the territory, in the departure sites (almost always rural environs) as in arrival sites (almost always urban periphery) of this population.

Internal displacement and resettlement are two instances of only one situation: the tragedy of millions of human beings searching for shelter and protection offered by civilization and modernity which have been denied by circumstances proper to development models and their practices political, administrative and legal of the different States. Much of the primitive human condition underlies in this phenomenon, which, although great advance in the construction of beautiful and functional cities, still has not built effective ways to confront the principal paradox of its major creation: informal urban processes.

Poverty, social exclusion and development

2007-08-16T22:10:00.000-07:00

Poverty has been defined as “…a complex process of lack of economic, social, cultural, institutional and political resources which affect popular sectors and are associated mainly to the conditions of labor insertion prevalent in the labor market: volatility, informality, low salaries, job insecurity” (Ziccardi). The subject of poverty was originally discussed as associated to marginality, mainly on its origins and survival strategies.

The theory of marginality came from reflections on the social change as proposed by defenders of the modernization view. Heiress of the dualist perspective, it tried to explain urban poverty and the non-integration by the poor recently urbanized in urban life and economy. Nevertheless, it quickly changed from a geographical and economical notion to another sociological and psychological, to be understood as the location of poor housing at the cities surrounding areas and at poverty enclaves downtown, to a total lack of influence of this population in making decisions at any level. It changed from opening a perspective of Human Rights placed in the limitations of a populational group to a set of civil, political, economical and social rights into the focalization to demonstrate a strong relationship between marginality and rural life.

Finally, it focused in certain cultural characteristics towards the formation of a subculture which, as it produced typical ways of identification, it generated self-exclusion from legitimate ways predominant in society to relate and interact, to get to the most recent concept of social exclusion that says of a long term unemployment, of an increasing number of people without housing, of new ways of poverty between immigrants, women and youngsters, as much as marginal groups as new groups of those excluded from work, credit, social services, instruction, decent housing, etc.

Conceptually, exclusion collects the concept of marginality and broaden it in order to comprise the new ways of exclusion from different dimensions: like the tridimensional fragmentation of society generated by ethnic differences, alteration of populational pyramid and plurality of forms, family connivance, or how the impact of post industrial economy over employment, generator of occupational backgrounds in diversity of itineraries complex and dilated in time, as a irreversible flexibilization of productive processes in the informal economy, labor deregulations, erosion of labor rights and weakening of schemas or social protection, or like the deficit of inclusion of the welfare state that has consolidated fractures of citizenship, and the disaggregative character of certain markets of welfare with a very weak public presence: the best example may be the market of soil and housing.

Thematic Axles

2007-08-16T22:09:00.000-07:00

According to the objectives formerly exposed, the International Seminar “PROCESOS URBANOS INFORMALES” (Informal Urban Processes) intends to work around the following six thematic axles:

1. Poverty, social exclusion and development.
2. Displacement, migration and resettlement.
3. Transformation of informal urban space (architectures, urban aesthetics, technologies, threats and risks, environment).
4. Economy and real state activity in the informal city.
5. Public politics of regularization and improvement.
6. Social movements, communitarian participation and inter-institutional action.