Lombard, Melanie Brigid (2010) Making a place in the city : place-making in urban informal settlements in Mexico. PhD thesis, University of Sheffield.
Abstract
Observers from a variety of disciplines agree that informal settlements account for the majority of housing in cities of the global South. Urban informal settlements, usually
defined by certain criteria such as self-build housing, sub-standard services, and residents'
low incomes, are often seen as problematic, due to associations with poverty, irregularity
and marginalisation. In particular, despite years of research showing otherwise, policy and
academic discourses continue to emphasise a division between the 'formal' and 'informal'
city, meaning that informal settlements are often treated as outside 'normal' urban
considerations. This thesis argues that the discursive construction of urban informal
settlements in this way may contribute to their marginalisation, with material effects for
residents, including displacement and eviction. Moving beyond static, binary
characterisations of urban informal settlements, it aims to use a place-making approach to
explore the discursive, spatial, social, cultural and political construction of place in this
context, in order to unsettle some of the assumptions underlying these marginalising
discourses. Research was carried out using a qualitative, ethnographic methodology in two
case study neighbourhoods in Xalapa, Mexico.
Mexico offers fertile ground to explore these issues. Despite an extensive regularisation
programme, around 50 per cent of urban dwellers live in colonias populares,
neighbourhoods with informal characteristics. The research found that local discourses
reveal complex and ambivalent views of colonias populares, which both reproduce and
undermine binary categorisations relating to 'informality'. In particular, local policies
construct colonias populares in certain ways which may perpetuate their marginalisation,
but also reveal the complexities of power relations affecting neighbourhoods within the
city. However, it is a focus on residents' own place-making activities that hints at prospects
for rethinking urban informal settlements. By capturing these messy, dynamic and
contextualised processes that construct urban informal settlements as places, the analytical
lens of place-making offers a view of the multiple influences which frame them. Informed
by perspectives from critical social geography which seek to unsettle binaries and capture
the 'ordinary' nature of cities, this thesis suggests imagining urban informal settlements
differently, in order to re-evaluate their potential contribution to the city as a whole.
Metadata
Awarding institution: | University of Sheffield |
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Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Urban Studies and Planning (Sheffield) |
Identification Number/EthosID: | uk.bl.ethos.521860 |
Depositing User: | EThOS Import Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 29 Nov 2016 14:39 |
Last Modified: | 29 Nov 2016 14:39 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:etheses.whiterose.ac.uk:14961 |
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