“Thought turned toward difference readies itself for encounters with random, alternative arrangements and events emerging through the dynamic, interactive encounters of materiality”1.

The question of emergent objects with properties not necesarily essencial to its realization is addressed in this text. A case of informal urbanization in Lima, provides the real world analogies to understand both the emergence flux and the materiality of the object. The realization of housing and public urban spaces, requires material elements and human labor. The provision of marginal land and its transformation to a given use and an exchange good is mediated by institutions and the self determination of informal economic agents.

Attention to the context, where the worlds of the objects and the subjects interact at micro-scale, provide a background to identify and describe them and the process of change. Houses, blocks, streets are socially constructed in a contested land. Citizens appropriate their space in land belonging to the commons. The state is far at the begining, its role is filled by local actors, such as municipal officials and land trafficking organizations. The gap between these extremes (State and citizen) and object-subject dicotomies (space and society), is bridged dialecticaly and illegally by several local facilitators or mediators.

Reference

  1. K. Woodward, D.P. Dixon, J.P. Jones III. 2009. Poststructuralism/Poststructuralist Geographies. In: International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. Elsevier. ↩