Interfaces of informality

Abstract

What happens at the interface of states and urban poor populations that live in informal settlements? How are academic disciplines, such as law, architecture or economics, and technical instruments, such as computer software, summoned to the interactions between experts from state or city governments and the laypeople whose housing and lives the former's work is meant to improve? This paper reflects on these questions as it examines two different experiments, one historical and another from the recent past, in housing provision or amelioration for the residents of informal settlements. In post-revolutionary Portugal, the SAAL (Serviço de Apoio Ambulató rio Local) housing program (1974-76) included 'technical' brigades of legal, architectural and economic experts tasked to help shanty town dwellers improve their housing conditions, either by assisted self-building or classic new-build. It was a clear example of the progressive urban politics of the time, or dialogical technical democracy avant la lettre. Some 30 years later, in Lisbon during the late 2000s, as a part of an urban regeneration program devised within the framework of multicultural urban politics and delegative forms of democracy, a detailed survey of non-and substandard houses was carried out with a bespoke computer software, which aimed at representing the technical feasibility of rehabilitation, rather than replacement, of those dwellings. Both experiments constituted platforms with the stated objective of working for the community and through which new state-citizen relationships were to be forged with the urban poor, but how were the latter's knowledges and wishes integrated?

The smart city and the containment of informality: The case of Dubai

“…Third, in Dubai, where the politics of informal settlements do not exist, the contested process of differentiation manifests itself in what De Certeau (1984) described as the dialectical interplay between strategies that delimit movement and behaviour in the production of place – which I contend is a function of Dubai’s formalism – and the motive tactics of resistance and contestation that are productive of space. Informality in Dubai thus exists in alternative spatial practices shaped by the unconventional and informal navigation and use (Ascensão, 2016; Elsheshtawy, 2011a, 2011b) of what is increasingly a formal urban environment. These alternative spatial practices are, in turn, articulated to three disciplinary problems primarily associated with the old city and addressed by the ongoing deployment of Smart Dubai: the limits to knowledge of and within the old city, the disciplinary problems posed by the free and spontaneous movement and behaviour of subjects and the political economic problems posed by informal rents.…”

The right to the City

“…The 'neighbourhood commission', assembling four local organisations, was set up in 2002. New hopes emerged, when in 2007 the 'Initiative for Critical Neighbourhoods' (Initiativa Bairros Críticos) was set-up by the former Secretary of State for Cities andPlanning (2005-2009) João Ferrão (Ascensão, 2013(Ascensão, , 2016. This initiative intended to experiment with the renewal of these critical urban quarters in a combined technological and participatory approach.…”