Felipe Hernández, Peter Kellett and Lea K. Allen (eds.) (2012)
Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books [Hardback 2009], 249 p.
Reviewed by Patricia Graf
Lehrstuhl für Wirtschafts- und Industriesoziologie, BTU Cottbus
“People don’t know how to cook any more”, said a friend of mine
some years ago in Mexico City, complaining about local food
cultures. He was referring to the many small mobile eateries and
grills you can find on every corner of the city that make cooking
at home redundant. As the book on the informal city in Latin
America shows, this meeting at lunchtime between the operators of
mobile food stands and their customers (that range from bank
assistants to plumbers) is only one example of the complementary
relationship between the formality and informality of capitalism.
The object of the book is ambitious, as the Indian architect and
urban designer Rahul Mehrotra points out in his foreword (xi-xiv).
On the one hand, we find a call for a redefinition of the term
informal: going beyond the understanding of many social assistance
programs of the informal city as the “city of the poor and
marginalized” (xiii) or as something unstable, as informal housing
is often stereotyped. On the other hand, the book reaches for an
understanding of “the process of what makes up informal urbanism
in the Latin American context” (xiii).
The book consists of two parts. The first part, “Critical
perspectives”, is dedicated to research while the second part,
“Critical practices”, subsumes participation in urban planning
practices and the evaluation of public housing programs. The two
parts are headed by an introduction of the editors who show that
informality is no modern concept: the duality of formality and
informality has existed throughout Latin American history.
Hernández and Kellett also point to missing research and the
stereotyping of the colonial city as a story of formal planning:
“most Portuguese cities were mostly irregular in an attempt to
respond to the topographical features of their location” (3). They
also note that it was conquista that displaced indigenous
settlements; changing them from formality to informality and to a
life at the periphery. These forgotten formalities, as well as the
informal and subtle changes in formal city architecture by black
slaves, are still an understudied phenomenon.
The historical insights are not used to attempt a new definition
or approach to the term, but rather to give a collection worthy of
observation. The editors point out that the term is quite new “in
architecture as well as in other disciplines within the social
sciences” (3). From the perspective of a political scientist
dealing with regional and city governance in Latin America, this
sounds a bit odd. This is especially so when one bears in mind
elementary works on informal institutions and informality in city
governance. A more interdisciplinary point of view certainly would
enrich the concept.
The second chapter focuses on revisiting housing policies and planning in Brazil and Chile. With a broader perspective on Brazilian Cities Fernando Luiz Lara deals with the design of the informal. He identifies both formal and informal housing as being inspired by modernist design and shows that elements have disseminated to buildings of medium height as well as to favela buildings. However, the buildings have been variegated due to the availability of space, material and the moral concepts of the inhabitants.
The next two chapters analyze São Paulo and Brasilia. The
contribution of Lima and Pallamin provides an actor centered
perspective on housing in Downtown São Paulo. They
show that the history of housing policy cannot be told without
making reference to strong social movements. The contribution is
also a good example of the shortcomings of decades of Brazilian
social policy that just recently led to new protests.
Jirón’s contribution offers a long-term perspective on planning in
Santiago de Chile. Paola Jirón shows that from Allende through
Pinochet, to contemporary housing policies, a top-down style of
policy making dominated. From an actor’s perspective it can be
read as a continuance of the contribution of Lima and Pallamin, as
Jirón shows; in other words, how the dweller’s movement soon got
incorporated by an omnipotent state. Furthermore, it sheds light
on the stereotyping that was prevalent in leftist housing
policies: state-sponsored self- building programs were stopped by
Allende as they were seen as discriminatory and occupying too much
of the citizens’ labor force. Instead, state-led building projects
were launched to make housing a universal right. Jirón’s
contribution, as well as chapter 6 by Margarita Greene and Eduardo
Rojas, also tell the story of relocating informality from the
center to the periphery due to real- estate market development.
This is a story of gentrification that is repeated day after day
in many cities around the world, and that may be more hidden (and
not with means of physical violence) but still with a social, and
especially cultural, cleansing effect.
What are the implications for practical planning? The second part
of the book is made up of three city cases (Caracas, Havanna and
Rio) and two overarching contributions on urbanity and exclusion
(Jorge Mario Jáuregui) and an urban manifesto (Claudio Vekstein).
Brillembourg and Klumpner treat this question with their Urban
Think Tank by studying the example of Caracas. They introduce two
modes of city planning: to accomplish best-case scenarios or to
avoid worst-case scenarios. The authors recommend the second
choice, as “considering ideal conditions is a waste of time; the
point is to avoid catastrophe”(129-130). They also recognize the
formal logic of informal housing: “roofs in the barrio are
designed to allow for another house to be erected on top, usually
by the future inhabitants” (130). With their Urban Think Tank they
develop examples, such as the vertical gym that enriches social
life or the palafitos, a kind of variable stilts that
protect houses from rain and make houses adaptable to the hilly
ground. One could expect that the next chapter on Barrios in
Havanna by Ramírez shows a similar picture, as Cuban politics
often served as a development foil for Venezuela under Chávez. But
the contribution of Ramírez, based on analysis of six community
projects shows a much richer picture. Despite being partly located
at the margins of, or opposed to, the state; these projects could
be carried out successfully. This also raises questions of regime
type, policy-making and informality. These questions could
potentially open an almost untouched field.
“The formal cannot survive without the informal” (228). This
quote of Claudio Vekstein’s City Manifesto is the essence
of why this book is a very worthy piece of city research and
practice: it makes us rethink and remap concepts and categories of
the city, its shape, its inhabitants and its governance.