Las formas de la informalidad

Abstract

The increasing urbanization of population and poverty has resulted in a growing demand for land, housing and urban services. In the social, economic and political local context of the last decades, this are provided by the market or by the state, although the most cases the population is self-producing their habitat, consolidating situations of urban informality. What and how is the informal production of habitat? Why is produced and reproduce despite the programs and policies implemented by governments? These are some of the questions that this paper seeks to address. The municipality of Cordoba, Argentina’s second largest city by the number of inhabitants, has an urban population of over 90% and about 7% of the population lives informally. Over the past two decades, governments have implemented mitigation actions towards informality; despite these actions, informality still occurs. Furthermore, it consolidates and it increases it density. Informality is a complex problem and, as such, it responds to multiple factors. This paper approaches an analysis of it in the municipality of Córdoba from the relationship between the land accessibility from formal logic, the forms of urban informality and the housing policies, without affirming that the study of the topic is understood only by these variables. Urban informality is addressed in the municipality of Cordoba, where despite many or few and not very diverse programs implemented as part of housing policy, the problem has not been possible to be reduced. Given this, the underlying assumptions that housing policies are based on formal logics that have little understanding of the ways informal occupation of urban space occurs.