PROPERTY-LED INFORMALITY: Shifting Informal Land Development from Popular Housing to Middle-Class and Elite Speculation in Belo Horizonte

Recent decades have seen a rising interest in the peripheral nature of urbanization processes. While research has put the spotlight on large-scale, transnational and financialized real estate actors, less attention has been paid to informal land developers. Addressing that knowledge gap, this article underscores the key role of land developers in informal urbanization through a case study of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. A mixed-methods approach provides new evidence of the widespread, variegated and spatially uneven development of irregular and clandestine subdivisions over the last two decades, revealing a heterogeneous landscape of informal developers. The study shows that informal development has been shifting from the typical popular and peripheral subdivision, which provided precarious yet affordable housing for working-class families, to new forms of speculative investment for the middle and upper classes, such as country homes and gated communities in peri-urban and rural areas. I argue that this shift is explained by both national and local changing regulatory frameworks and processes of economic restructuring, urban neoliberalism and housing financialization in the periphery. In light of this, I propose the notion of ‘property-led informality’ to refer to a regime of informal urbanization increasingly dominated by commodified, rentiership and speculative land dynamics in the sprawling metropolises of the global South.     

Sovereignty Beyond the State: Exception and Informality in a Western European City

Bridging debates on urban sovereignty and urban informality, this paper argues that relationships between sovereignty and informality may not reside exclusively in the way the sovereign state decides to allow or forbid informality, but also in the way sovereignty is distributed among a range of state and non‐state actors. Drawing upon fieldwork on the early‐2010s management of displaced Romanian Romani families in two emergency camps in the city of Montreuil (France), the paper shows how the NGO responsible for managing one camp acted as sovereign power, allowing a number of informal activities to thrive within its confines. By contrast, inside the other camp, managed by another NGO that resolutely implemented state directives, only formal activities took place. Building on Dean's (2010) concept of ‘disaggregated sovereignty’, the paper mobilizes this disjuncture as a case for critically examining how the ‘state of exception’ takes shape beyond the state's grip. A subtext running throughout is the parallel between the very first camps for civilians in nineteenth‐century colonized territories and these twenty‐first‐century camps for Roma in Europe—both elicited a state of exception partially predicated on camp dwellers’ perceived ethnic/racial homogeneity.     

Tent City: Patterns of Informality and the Partitioning of Sacramento

Unsanctioned tent cities are increasing in number in cities throughout the western United States. Scholars explain the phenomenon as homeless people asserting their ‘right to the city’ or as ‘managed marginality’. These explanations capture much of the socio-political relationship between local government and homeless populations, but do not explain the long-term persistence of tent cities and the fluctuating nature of their visibility. A spatial history of informal encampments in Sacramento at three key moments—the founding of the city, the Great Depression and the Great Recession—reveals a long-term ebb and flow of tent cities occupying close-to-the-center, urban vacancies. Urban vacancies arise from the partitioning of the city into specific purposes, places and people, a taken-for-granted perception of how cities should be. The visibility of tent cities disrupts this aesthetic notion of stability and growth as homeless people use the tent to protest their isolation and exclusion.     

Popular Urbanization: Conceptualizing Urbanization Processes Beyond Informality

This article introduces the concept of popular urbanization to describe a specific urbanization process based on collective initiatives, self-organization and the activities of inhabitants. We understand popular urbanization as an urban strategy through which an urban territory is produced, transformed and appropriated by the people. This concept results from a theoretically guided and empirically grounded comparison of Mexico City, Istanbul and Lagos. Based on postcolonial critiques of urban theory and on the epistemologies of planetary urbanization, we bring urbanization processes in these urban regions into conversation with each other through a multidimensional theoretical framework inspired by Henri Lefebvre focusing on material interaction, territorial regulation, and everyday experience. In this way, popular urbanization emerged as a distinct urbanization process, which we identified in all three contexts. While this process is often subsumed under the broader concept of ‘urban informality’, we suggest that it may be helpful to distinguish popular urbanization as primarily led by the people, while commodification and state agencies play minor roles. As popular urbanization unfolds in diverse ways dependent upon the wider urban context, specific political constellations and actions, it results in a variety of spatial outcomes and temporal trajectories. This is therefore a revisable and open concept. In proposing the concept of popular urbanization for further examination, we seek to contribute to the collective development of a decentered vocabulary of urbanization.     

Urban Commoning as a Vehicle Between Government Institutions and Informality: Collective Gardening Practices in Tampere and Narva

This article examines the processes of urban commoning and its co-produced features of urbanity, making the claim that, through these processes, informality becomes translated into institutionalized city planning. Commoning is analysed through a comparative study that utilizes contingent features of urbanity and three modalities accommodating the informality–formality meshwork during urban change. The article contributes to research on urban transformations by integrating commons, informality dynamics and the constitution of state institutions. This focus is elaborated with reference to collective gardening practices in the context of two of the less studied European cities, Narva in Estonia and Tampere in Finland. The results of the study indicate that urban commoning takes place through delegating a public mandate and enacting uncertainty, two processes that informalize city government practices. Particular differences appeared in regard to the institutional porosity that enables unregulated spaces of collective gardening to be mobilized as part of urban politics. We argue that networked movements appear as an essential part of the urban logic of action producing meaningful connections in an informal–formal meshwork and bringing together multiple sites in the commoning process.     

Accessing the Urban Commons Through the Mediation of Information: The Eliana Silva Occupation,Belo Horizonte,Brazil

This essay demonstrates how mediations (called Dialogues) between the University of Belo Horizonte and the residents of the Eliana Silva Occupation in that city have secured not only the right to urban land and constitutional rights that have been historically violated in Brazil, but also the right to that which is of common interest. The essay speaks to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's contention that what is common goes far beyond the provision of public services. This starting point allows us to see that urban occupations are politically empowered, to the extent that poor people consciously violate the Brazilian law governing the right of possession and ownership over urban land through creative and cooperative actions that are undertaken and extended across networks. This essay will focus on the centrality of the struggle to build a common communication platform serving to nourish social ties and sociability among those social actors who share the same human deprivation—lack of access to what should be widely available to all citizens. On the theoretical side, the essay takes Pierre Bourdieu, Bruno Latour and Milton Santos as its guides to understanding how social actors act in the struggle for socio‐spatial coexistence and urbanity.     

The Dark Side of Urban Informality in the Global North: Housing Illegality and Organized Crime in Northern Italy

This article deals with housing illegality/informality in Italy, where it represents an established aspect of urban development. It presents a case study focused on Desio, a town close to Milan in northern Italy. Here housing illegality occurs by virtue of the well‐established presence of a mafia‐type criminal organization (the ‘Ndrangheta). Three examples of illegal construction in Desio are analysed, forming the basis for a discussion on the distinctive features of illegal house‐building in Italy. In particular, institutional incentives encouraging illegal housing are investigated, with reference to both formal institutions (e.g. planning laws, rules preventing unauthorized housing and building amnesties) and informal institutions (e.g. organized crime). The case of illegal housing in Italy contributes significantly to the wider international debate on urban informality, highlighting the critical need for research along avenues as yet only partially explored (e.g. informal housing in Western countries and the role of criminal activities and actors in the spread of informality) and challenging some common assumptions such as the geographical dualism (‘global North’ versus ‘global South’) which, implicitly, results from the international literature.     

The Regime of Informality in Neoliberal Times in Turkey: The Case of the Kadifekale Urban Transformation Project

Juxtaposing the empirical findings of a qualitative research study of an urban transformation project in the Kadifekale squatter district of Izmir with the changed nature of urban politics in a neoliberal context, this article aims to trace the manifestations of the regime of informality in Turkey. Ethnographic consideration of the motives behind these projects, the way they have been carried out and their consequences for the lives of the inhabitants points to an extended space for informal politics tactically manoeuvred by state officials of various ranks. Particularly during the last two decades, neoliberal urban policies have triggered an intensification of power discrepancies in both the vertical and horizontal dimensions and a fragmentation of community structure in the localities — mainly along socioeconomic divides. This research reveals a transition from positive/passive to negative/active uses of informality in the disposition of the state towards the urban poor when the fast and efficient conduct of urban transformation projects is in question. The characteristics of the locality as a landslide zone, the already fragmented socioeconomic structure in the neighbourhood and the dense presence of Kurdish immigrants facilitate the putting into practice of informal strategies. The immigrants who cannot define a place for themselves in the simultaneously formal and informal context of the project have been seriously disadvantaged.     

The Born‐Again Favela: The Urban Informality of Pentecostalism in Rio de Janeiro

Since the 1980s, the metropolitan spaces of Brazil have seen a significant upsurge of the Christian Pentecostal movement, which today dominates the religious landscape of the favelas. In Rio de Janeiro, the rise of Pentecostalism coincided with the establishment of drug gangs as actors controlling favela territories. Based on an ethnographic field study conducted in a favela complex in the city's Zona Norte, this article examines the role and significance of the Pentecostal churches in Rio's favelas, both in everyday urban life and in the ways these areas are governed. One of my focal points of analysis is the increasing entanglement of actors in the drug industry and church actors. The article posits that the Pentecostal churches' role and significance, their institutional shape and their followers' practices are inextricably intertwined with the favela's social, spatial and political structural patterns. It shows the ways in which the evolving Pentecostal movement has permeated all aspects of the favela's informal way of urban life and government and has produced a new urban religious configuration in which the Pentecostal movement and the favela are intertwined and transform each other.     

巴西城市化模式的分析及启示

巴西是世界上经济较为发达的发展中国家,城市化水平相当高.但是,它的城市化先于工业化,属于过度城市化模式.20世纪30年代之前,巴西主要依靠外来移民推动其城市化进程,属于无工业化的城市化;之后,工业化起步,进一步加速了城市化的发展.但是,由于历史、政策等多方面原因,巴西在城市化过程中出现了区域不平衡和过度城市化、贫民窟等严重的城市问题.研究巴西城市化发展的经验和教训,对我国城市化进程中实现城乡协调和可持续发展具有一定的启示作用.     

Entanglements of Periphery and Informality in Mexico City

Mexico City is a well‐known case of urban expansion. Most of the growth has been in its peripheries, occurring during two phases of housing privatization: a predominantly self‐built urbanization by residents establishing irregular settlements (starting in the 1930s); and a relatively recent surge of mass‐produced small‐scale single‐family housing built by state‐sponsored development companies (underway since the year 2000). Informality, we argue, should not be understood as a mode of housing production setting in opposition self‐build practices against industry‐led and/or state‐sponsored processes, but rather as a dialectical urbanization logic shaped by the entanglements of in/formal processes in governance practices, land privatization and regularization, and urban infrastructure and services deficits. We are particularly interested in a dominant narrative whereby the embeddedness of informality is constantly underplayed and irregular settlements are cast as a residual category, a problem to tolerate or in need of intervention, or the inevitable combination of demographic growth and housing shortage, rather than the direct outcome of urban policies and development processes. Conversely, recent housing policy in Mexico is officially narrated as an economic stimulus, a means to control and order (irregular) urban expansion, and an impulse to democratize homeownership. Our discussion of the entanglements of informality in Mexico City is based on an extended literature review of academic articles and official reports (predominantly in English), supplemented by a series of street and neighborhood explorations (in the summers of 2012 and 2013) across the metropolis.     

Greening Displacements,Displacing Green: Environmental Subjectivity,Slum Clearance,and the Embodied Political Ecologies of Dispossession in Mumbai

In Indian cities, informal ‘slum’ settlements have long been targeted for removal as an environmental improvement strategy, despite their relatively low impact. Slum clearance has escalated with the combination of speculative development and environmental change, creating uneven precarity throughout Mumbai's neighborhoods. State agents play a direct role in slum evictions, but they do not act unilaterally. Diverse lower‐income and middle‐class residents seeking better living conditions have sometimes converged in their embrace of slum clearances and resettlements that advance elite development interests. In other moments, the dispossessing effects of market‐based and elite‐biased slum rehabilitation have fomented contestation. This article analyzes how differently situated groups emerge as ‘environmental subjects’ that embrace or contest improvement projects. It suggests three dimensions of subject formation: governing logics and discourses of urban environmental improvement, the territorial politics of informality, and differentiated embodied experiences of precarity and dispossession. Environmental subject formation is explored through two interventions that entail slum clearance—mangrove and green space conservation and an urban transport infrastructure project. Findings suggest that the connection between displacement and improvement cannot be explained through theories of environmental gentrification but require attention to the simultaneously inclusive and dispossessing regimes of postcolonial development.     

Writing Across Contexts: Urban Informality and the State in Tallinn,Bafatá and Berlin

Urban research has long related informality to a lack of state capacity or a failure of institutions. This assumption not only fails to account for the heterogeneous institutional relations in which informality is embedded, but has also created a dividing line between states. Whereas some states are understood to manage urban development through functioning institutions, others, in this view, fail to regulate. To deconstruct such understandings, this article explores informal practices through a multi‐sited individualizing comparison between three case studies of water governance, parking regulation and dwelling regimes in Bafatá (Guinea‐Bissau), Tallinn (Estonia) and Berlin (Germany), respectively. Our approach to understanding informality starts from the negotiation and contestation of order between differently positioned actors in the continuous making of states. From this point of view, informality is inherent in the architecture of states––emerging through legal systems, embedded in negotiations between and within institutions, and based on conflicts between state regulations and prevailing norms. Tracing how order takes shape though negotiation, improvisation, co‐production and translation not only highlights how informality constitutes a modus operandi in the everyday workings of the state in all three cases, but also provides a way to talk across these cases, i.e. to bring them together in one frame of analysis and overcome their presumed incommensurability.     

An Ethnographic Perspective on Urban Planning in Brazil: Temporality,Diversity and Critical Urban Theory

This article provides an ethnographic perspective on urban planning by presenting the creative practices of marginalized slum residents in Recife, Northeast Brazil, who are affected by planners’ decisions. It argues that such a perspective contributes to current critical urban theory in three ways. First, while many studies of urban planning follow the temporality of the timeframe of a particular project (‘project time’), this analysis emphasizes the timeframe of the lives of the affected residents (‘people's time’). Second, it attends to diversity, taking account of the variety of affected residents and the diverse consequences of urban planning on their lives. Third, it shows how urban interventions — similar to marriage, divorce, the birth of children and the death of loved ones — are high-impact life events for the urban poor. Finally, the article assesses the engagement between ethnography and critical urban theory and argues in favour of ‘grounding’ the latter better in the analysis of actual practices and experiences.     

Democracy on the edge: limits and possibilities in the implementation of an urban reform agenda in Brazil

The 1990s in Brazil were a time of institutional advances in the areas of housing and urban rights following the signing of the new constitution in 1988 that incorporated the principles of the social function of cities and property, recognition of the right to ownership of informal urban squatters and the direct participation of citizens in urban policy decision processes. These propositions are the pillars of the urban reform agenda which, since the creation of the Ministry of Cities by the Lula government, has come under the federal executive branch. This article evaluates the limitations and opportunities involved in implementing this agenda on the basis of two policies proposed by the ministry — the National Cities Council and the campaign for Participatory Master Plans — focusing the analysis on government organization in the area of urban development in its relationship with the political system and the characteristics of Brazilian democracy.     

Sister Communities: Rejecting Labels of Informality and Peripherality in Vanuatu

Some labels have dire consequences. This article takes issue with the labels commonly used to describe the physical and social location of communities living on the edge of Port Vila, Vanuatu—labels that position communities for eviction by entrenching tropes of informality and peripherality into how they are seen and represented. Such terms include informal, settlement, informal settlement, squatter and peri-urban. Based on interviews with around 100 people and two years of ethnographic engagement with urban communities in Port Vila, Vanuatu, I critique the language of policy against the lived experience of those at the urban edge. I use Bourdieu's articulation of power as an accumulation of symbolic capital that enables one to speak the world into being. I conclude that the language of policies and plans is reflective of a dominant discourse in urban studies and international aid, and non-reflective of the experience and identities of people living at the urban edge. My interviewees and interlocutors maintain their identities as sister communities—as places grounded in the formality of customary tenure, and as part of the city rather than outside it.     

A group MCDA method for aiding decision-making of complex problems in public sector: The case of Belo Monte Dam

We review the applications of Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) methods in energy sector and in Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), finding a gap on the non-use of specific methods that deal with divergent opinions, such as a group MCDA method. This way we suggest the application of a group MCDA method to demonstrate how it may be used for aiding group decision-making in public sector. Aiming at analyzing the aforementioned problem, we simulate the choosing of the construction alternatives of Belo Monte Dam. The power plant project was marked by several conflicts among stakeholders due to the generation of diversified environmental, social and economic impacts. The results show that a group MCDA method may be used to aid public sector in the analysis of complex problems, by dividing them into several parts, allowing, therefore, a transparent decision-making process, as well as to solve gaps in the EIA methods.     

BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE: Heterogeneous Governance,Claims Making and Forced Eviction in a Megacity

Residents of informal settlements worldwide face challenges defending their land tenure. In contexts with overlapping systems of governance these challenges are even more complex and claims to land tenure more precarious. How do heterogeneous systems of governance, a characteristic of some global South megacities, affect evictions? This article presents an in-depth case study of the informal Otodo Gbame waterfront settlement's struggle to defend its customary land tenure through multiple authorities in Lagos, Nigeria. The analysis reveals how a heterogeneous system of governance disempowers citizens by obscuring the locus of power and creating confusion when communities make claims on the state. Communities find themselves claiming rights to the city that receive varying degrees of recognition from the many authorities within the heterogeneous system. In Lagos, the state weaponizes this heterogeneous system in pursuit of modern development and urban growth.     

Export-led economic growth and the case of Brazil: An empirical research

The world has been globalized much more than ever before and this process integrates the economies of countries. Moreover, one means of integrating the economies of countries is trade. In this instance, the export-led economic growth emerges as a considerable determinant. Export-led economic growth is beneficial for the countries since it facilitates the inflow of foreign exchange, increases production, creates new employment opportunities and enhances the overall commercial volume. In this study, the correlation between export-led economic growth is explored for Brazil. Therefore, according to the findings of this paper as well as econometric and statistical applications, there is a bi-directional causality in Brazil since 1960s between economic development and exports in the long-run (this could also be termed as feedback); furthermore, in the short-run, there is export-led economic growth. The novelty of this paper is that, it is one of the latest studies investigating export-led economic growth for Brazil.     

Regional Imbalances and Market Potential in Brazil

Abstract

This paper estimates the effects of market potential on regional wage imbalances between Brazilian municipalities. Using data from the 1980, 1991 and 2000 Brazilian Census, which render 3,630 comparable municipality areas, we estimate the NEG's wage equation using a spatial panel data model accounting for endogeneity. Our results show new evidence of a strong relationship between market potential and wages, indicating that regional attributes, as well as individual, are correlated with wages and their regional disparities.

Inégalités régionales et potentiel commercial au Brésil

RÉSUMÉ La présente communication évalue les effets du potentiel commercial des inégalités salariales régionales entre différentes municipalités au Brésil. Sur la base de données extraites des recensements effectués en 1980, 1991 et 2000 au Brésil, permettant de comparer 3,630 municipalités, nous sommes en mesure d'estimer l’équation salariale de NEG en utilisant un modèle de données de panel spatial, en tenant compte de l'endogénéité. Nos résultats fournissent de nouvelles informations sur l'existence de rapports étroits entre le potentiel commercial et les salaires, indiquant la corrélation entre les attributs, tant régionaux qu'individuels, et les salaires ainsi que leurs disparités régionales.

Desequilibrios regionales y potencial de mercado en Brasil

EXTRACTO Este trabajo estima los efectos del potencial de mercado sobre los desequilibrios salariales regionales entre municipalidades brasileñas. Utilizando datos extraídos de los censos brasileños de 1980, 1991 y 2000, que incluyen 3630 áreas municipales comparables, estimamos la ecuación salarial de NEG empleando un modelo espacial de datos de panel que tiene en cuenta la endogeneidad. Nuestros resultados muestran nueva evidencia de una fuerte relación entre el potencial de mercado y los salarios, indicando que los atributos regionales, así como los individuales, se correlacionan con los salarios y sus disparidades regionales.