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Authors
Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
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
(Servic¸o de Apoio Ambulato´ 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 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?
Description
Keywords
Urban informality State intervention Experts and slum dwellers Assisted selfbuilding Assessment of non-standard housing
Pedagogical Context
Citation
Ascensão, Eduardo. (2016). Interfaces of informality: when experts meet informal settlers. City, 20(4), 563-580. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2016.1193337
Publisher
Taylor & Francis