Paper short abstract:

Informality is a methodological place to rethink power relations related to dwelling and confined housing. This paper develops a practice approach towards urban informality and demonstrates that informalization is deepening precarity across classes in Urban Latin America.

Paper long abstract:

The relation of informality and formality receives ongoing attention in the social sciences, often related to urban space (Boudreau and Davis, 2016; Pasquetti and Picker, 2017). Avoiding reiterations of the dichotomy of both spheres in practice fields such as housing or street vending, informality now should be conceived as a power relation. As such, it is a methodological place from where to rethink building blocks of social sciences. Contributing to this development, this paper discusses four approaches to informality, first, as an objective fact coterminous with state failure; second, as related to the access to goods, implying a differentiated citizenship; third, as a discursive process, as when informality is constructed as threat; forth, as practice. Drawing from fieldwork in socially polarized and fragmented peripheries of Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro this paper takes this practice-approach further. It develops informality as a procedural category to address practices and power relations in urban land use and housing-related conflicts. In particular, it looks at four facets of performing informality: in mundane ways of "dwelling"; as being embodied through encounters; as conscious, yet situated acting out of norms, and as shaping the confinement of housing which conversely impacts on social positions, relations and actions. I show that informalization is deepening "precarity" which, although "lived differentially" (Butler 2015: 21), normalizes the life experiences of insecurity across classes. Methodologically, this implies to look at emerging alliances related to the built environment that form dwelling, and more broadly, the urban as an assemblage.