Urban informality and democratisation in Sao Paulo

Urban informality and democratisation in Sao Paulo: The sinous road to citizenship

Rocco, Roberto
Ballegooien, J.

Architecture and The Built Environment

Urbanism

2015-12-31

There has been a renewed interest in informal urbanization among urban thinkers in the last decades. In their contributions to the discourse on urban informality, we often find an overvaluation of informality’s positive aspects. The underlying argument is that governments and planners should ‘learn’ from informal settlements in the global south, as informal settlements represent a more authentic, ‘honest’ and politically desirable form of urban development. Other authors identify intrinsic formal qualities that should be emulated. In this tekst, we challenge these viewpoints with an account of the political history of São Paulo’s informal periphery and its struggle for rights and democratization. The hypothesis we explore is that the informal urbanization of the peripheries of São Paulo is closely tied to a plea for rights and the emancipation of the working classes during the second half of the twentieth century in Brazil. We adopt the position that exclusion from formal political structures has deep-reaching consequences and is reflected on the built environment as well. In many cases, informal urbanisation can be the physical expression of the absence of rights and deficiencies in the rule of law. In this sense, informal urbanisation is not a pragmatic solution for the lack of formal housing in developing countries, but the sign of non-inclusive political systems. Informality can therefore be seen as the expression of exclusion from the rule of law and the protection it offers to citizens. It often creates all sorts of distortions in the relationships between citizens and political power.

urban informality
democratisation and urbanisation
popular movements
positive rights
self-help

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:5662fe5f-dd7b-4bb6-896c-c13bbd308742

SLAS

Proceedings of SLAS, Society for Latin American Studies Conference, Aberdeen, UK, April 17-18, 2015; Authors version

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) 2015 The Author(s)