*Celebrating Spatial Planning at TU Delft: 2008-2019. Edited by Stead, Bracken, Rooij & Rocco

50 Spatial Planning & Strategy
Informal Urbanisation
ROBERTO ROCCO
Fig. 31: Peripheral neighbourhood of Cabuçu, in São Paulo, Brazil. Photo by R. Rocco.
Many countries in the Global
South are relatively young
democracies. The resilience
and legitimacy of their political systems
depends largely on their ability to politically
integrate and represent millions of citizens
who are currently “excluded” from formal
social, political, and economic structures.
Exclusion from those formal structures
has deep-reaching consequences and is
reflected on the built environment as well,
as many of the so-called excluded live in
informal settlements.
On the other hand, countries in the
developed North have been struggling
with the inability to redistribute prosperity.
Financial capitalism coupled with austerity
measures seems especially ill-fitted to
provide welfare for a larger swath of the
population of these countries. Inequality
is on the rise and so are different forms of
urban informality.
Democracy’s success depends not only
on the ability of formal institutions to respond
to the legitimate demands and rights
of its citizens, but it also depends on how
these citizens are able to enter the political
realm in order to formulate demands and
claim their political rights. In this sense,
informal urbanisation is not a solution for
lack of housing in developing and developed
countries, but a step for the formulation
of legitimate demands and to the
inclusion of citizens in the realm of politics.
By this token, processes of informal urbanisation
might lead to the affirmation of
civil rights, to the reinforcement of the rule
of law, to the inclusion of citizens in formal
institutions and processes and might therefore
result in the formalisation of the built
environment. Along the way, however, informality
may lead to conflict and oppression,
as informal dwellers have initially very little
rights and are most commonly in breach of
the law when they build their dwellings in
property that does not belong to them. The
path to citizenship is long and sinuous.
This research hub investigates the mutual
relationship between struggles for rights
and processes of informal urbanisation
and subsequent formalisation in different
socio-political and cultural settings.
It tries to find a middle ground between
two opposing perspectives on the political
meaning of urban informality. The first, the
“emancipatory perspective”, frames urban
informality as a practice that fosters autonomy,
entrepreneurship, and social mobility.
The other perspective, more critical, sees
informality predominantly as a result of political
exclusion, inequality, and poverty. Is
urban informality indeed merely the result
of a democratic deficit caused by governing
autocratic elites and ineffective bureaucracies?
Or do we see urban informality as
a fertile breeding ground for bottom-up
democracy and more political participation?
What are urban rights in the context of
failing governments? Can markets provide
sufficient and adequate housing to ever
growing urban populations? What is the role
of governments? (extract from Rocco, R.
and J. v. Ballegooijen, Eds. (2018). The Routledge
Handbook on Informal Urbanization.
New York, Routledge).
Website: https://informalurbanisation.com