Postcolonialising Informality?

Abstract

Urban informality has been the subject of renewed attention in recent years, with a resurgence of interest from architecture and planning. A focus on informality has however been criticised as reviving colonial hierarchies, characterising entire cities in terms of lack and rendering them perpetually inferior to Western cities. The call to postcolonialise urban studies has been answered by an emerging literature which has neglected Latin America. This paper therefore examines recent work on urban informality in the region that resonates with other scholarship at the intersection of postcolonial and urban studies. The Latin American work is characterised by an emphasis on informality as resistance and by challenges to the formal/informal binary. Its ‘favela-isation’ of the continent can however perpetuate dualistic interpretations, entrenching or inverting stereotypes rather than disrupting them. The paper also asks what postcolonial readings of informality from elsewhere can contribute to understanding Latin American experience.