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 Ambulatório 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 sub-standard 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?