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Parution : B. Fischer, C. Vorms (ed.), Informal Cities. Histories of Governance and Inequality (2025)

Informal Cities
Histories of Governance and Inequality in Latin Europe, Latin America, and Colonial North Africa

Edited by Broadwyn Fischer and Charlotte Vorms

 

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo249481119.html

An empirically rich reconstruction of how informality became an intrinsic part of urban life across three continents.

Over a quarter of the world’s urban population lives in informal settlements. While informality as a concept has been widely debated, we still know very little about the phenomenon’s urban history or how that history has shaped the evolution of world cities. Spotlighting the historical processes that have created and sustained urban informality for more than a century, editors Charlotte Vorms and Brodwyn Fischer and this volume’s contributors reveal informality as an intrinsic feature of urbanity, shaping not only cities across the globe but also deeper processes of state formation, socioeconomic stratification, and political struggle.

The volume brings together case studies spanning more than a hundred years, drawn from Latin America (Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, and Mexico), Northern Africa (Morocco and Algeria), and Latin Europe (France, Spain, and Italy). Together, they show that informality is neither a contemporary crisis nor a predicament unique to the Global South. Topics include the origins of informal settlements and their relationship with law and institutional power; grassroots efforts to legitimize shantytown communities; mass social movements for rights to the city; the role that shantytown removal campaigns played in populist politics, fascism, and colonialism; and the ways that informality perpetuated racial and ethnic inequalities. Informal Cities is an indispensable guide to the complex and fraught terrain of urban informality in its many historical guises.

 

Introduction: Informal Urbanism as History

Brodwyn Fischer and Charlotte Vorms

Part I: Law, Governance, and the Invention of Informality

1. Four Regimes of Informality: Legal Practices and Revolutionary Politics in Twentieth-Century Mexico City

Antonio Azuela and Emilio de Antuñano

2. From Insalubrious Housing to Unauthorized Neighborhoods: The Conceptualization of Urban Informality in Italy, 1880s–1960s

Francesco Bartolini

3. A Century of Governing with Informal Urbanization in Madrid, 1860s–1960s

Charlotte Vorms

Part II. Urban Informality and Political Struggle

4. “The Order Came from Above”: The Political and Ideological Foundations of Fascism’s Struggle against the Baracche in Rome

Luciano Villani

5. Carioca Favelas and the Catholic Church after World War II: The Case of the Fundação Leão XIII’s Interventions in Praia do Pinto

Rafael Soares Gonçalves

6. Democratizing the Republic by Instituting the Informal: Barrio Irregularity in Caracas and Venezuelan Democratization, 1941–1964

Serge Ollivier

7. The Invention of the Toma: Informality and Mobilization in Santiago de Chile, 1945–1957

Emanuel Giannotti and Boris Cofré Schmeisser

Part III: Race and Colonial Domination

8. Informality, Racialized Governance, and the Cidade Negra in Modern Brazil

Brodwyn Fischer

9. Bidonvilles in France: A New Term for an Old Phenomenon?

Françoise de Barros

10. Urban Risk? Constructing Shantytowns as a Problem of Colonial Governance in Algiers and Casablanca, 1919–1962


OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Cédric Feriel (15 septembre 2025). Parution : B. Fischer, C. Vorms (ed.), Informal Cities. Histories of Governance and Inequality (2025). Histoire Urbaine. Consulté le 10 février 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/14no9


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