"Carlos Brillembourg In your Praxis Journal article “Urbanism of the Informal,” you discuss the contemporary history of Lima and Mexico City, pointing to what you call the globalized situation of settlements where 60 percent of the inhabitants live in “favelas, barriadas, kampong slums, villas miseria, bidonvilles or asentamientos irregulars.” Is this “urbanism of the informal” a new urban condition?
José Castillo Informality is not an exclusive phenomenon of the twentieth century (nor of underdeveloped countries, for that matter); there has been ex-urbis housing, “outside” the legal, planning and professional realms of city making, for centuries. What is remarkable is that informality became the dominant mode of city making in the twentieth century. The high point of informal urbanization was probably during the late ’60s and early ’70s, when large demographic growth, high migration, an economic boom and misguided urban and housing policies formed a scenario in which housing provision and land appropriation could not take place through traditional means. This meant that over half of all urban housing stock had to be provided through non-traditional channels such as squats, illegal land subdivisions, land invasions and other schemes of appropriation.
Now, even 40 years after the zenith of informal urbanization, we still face the same issues. We have not modified urban and housing policies that have proved—if not outright failures, at least limited in their impacts.
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| Open-air markets in Mexico City, 1996 Photo: Carlos Brillembourg |
CB Would self-built settlements be a better term than informality? What exactly is informal about these settlements?
JC Informal is a deliberately ambiguous term. In my description of the phenomenon of urbanization as it relates to Mexico City, I address a three-tiered definition of the word: First, it incorporates the notion of the casual; second, it refers to the condition of lacking precise form; and finally, it relates to the realm outside what is prescribed. I use the term urbanisms of the informal to explain the practices (social, economic, architectural and urban) and the forms (physical and spatial) that a group of stake holders (dwellers, developers, planners, landowners and the state) undertake not only to obtain access to land and housing, but also to satisfy their need to engage in urban life. These practices are characterized by tactical and incremental decisions, by a complex interaction among players and a distinct set of spatial strategies that produce a progressive urban space and reconfigured hierarchies."
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