The Informalization of Formal Housing Projects in the Global South: Policy Failure or Counterhegemonic City-making?

Abstract

Faced with the rampant expansion of informal settlements in cities, many national governments across the global South have instituted formal social housing programs. In turn, however, many State-led housing projects, aimed at curtailing informal settlements, themselves informalize. How and why does this happen? My dissertation interrogates this recurrent phenomenon in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa: the physical, economic, and institutional encroachment of informal practices onto formal, large-scale housing projects. The scarce literature on the topic positions the phenomenon as either a policy failure or bottom-up adaptations to unsuitable policy decisions. Drawing on the intersection between State building theory, Southern Urbanism, and Design Politics, I suggest that it is instead a series of interconnected counterhegemonic city-making efforts that attempt to undo the norms and forms imposed by the national State to guarantee the political and social stability of Southern urban peripheries. As such, informalization operates over a complex matrix of pre-existing regulations and standards, engages in practices of territorial anchoring and economic development, and asserts de facto management status without legal-administrative capacity to address the social demands and conflicts of urban growth.

I base my arguments on the in-depth study of three paradigmatic cases in Buenos Aires (Argentina), Cape Town (South Africa), and Cartagena (Colombia) to introduce the informalization of the formal as a process of counterhegemonic practices transversal --but not exogenous-- to the more formal managerial logic that entail: anchoring people and organizations to their territory, individualizing land to self-manage urban space, incrementing houses to serve the extended families’ needs, unlocking the local economy, and stabilizing tensions and social conflicts of urban management. The study cases show that informalization enhances livelihoods and provides political stability in the short term. Still, as space and infrastructure become more contested, significant new tensions emerge within the community and between the community and governments. In turn, the State has not yet found planning visions or pragmatic alternative solutions, contributing to ongoing neglect of these territories. The findings also bring out the possibilities of a techno-political re-imagination of the planning and design disciplines.