A place to develop within neoliberal rules

Informal urbanization is a grassroots movement supported by the Peruvian state that has been providing land for self-help housing and the related basic services and material environment demanded by people who cant afford them. This process is mediated by a miriad of public and private institutions, which conform spontaneous networks required to manage contested common resources such as land.

The initial micro-management of the flowing resources take into consideration an self-interest-led cooperation framework shared by both the auto-organized individuals and those mediators. At larger scales of this transaction an implicit compromise is made between these stakeholders operating at marginal land upward towards municipal, regional and national levels of governance, to leverage the range of externalities that the society as a whole is capable to endure in order to allow the development of informal housing for the poorest citizens living in urban areas.

The economic background of anarchic livelihood

Neoliberalism is the economic system, enacted in the Peruvian Constitution (1993), that provides the means and the agency to perform the above mentioned informal conventions. Moreover, housing is afforded in a joint operation of neoliberal rules together with a social practice that avoids the definition of the subjects as mere economic agents.

In this autogenerated system, involved individuals relate to other self-determined individuals in the way they decide to pursue the satisfaction of their particular social an economic demands. This hybrid scheme bypasses and ignores formal institutions because their exchange are not a matter of depicting who is the subject1, but to whom someone is related.

Through this ingenious gimmick, the citizens exchanges goods and services in a anarchic fashion creating an alternative to the opression from the state and financial powers. Moreover, this ephemeral autogenerated informal coordination of rules are common to those of the anarchism in terms of equality, individualism and cooperation. And, which is more, these social practices are also prosaic attempts to achieve pragmatic individual goals matching equivalent workaday demands.

chuquitanta Police activities in an informal settlement during Christmas (Fuente: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DtnfdfeWkAAJiLK.jpg retrieved 26DEC2022)

Commoners and land(lords)

Above mentioned anarchic means to acquire their housing, via land appropriation and self-help building, characterize contemporary urban growth in Lima and several Peruvian cities. Informality is providing a revolutionary alternative based on self-determination.

Whereas no strong ideology and leadership is identified and pursued, guidance and ground rules actualy emerge within the common and specific goals that individuals perceive and accord in issues regarding to the improvement of the physical conditions in their neighborhood. However, this process is conducted along institutionalized paths as a strategy followed by citizens living in contested territories. Ultimatelly, they are seeking help from the State for recognition and support to improve their material environments.

Thus, community elected leaders or committees in turn associate to land brokers, both informal or institutionalized, and in many cases related to illegal land trafficking, in a gray zone at municipal scale. Consecutively, these local agents together press on the larger territorial scales and greater institutional levels, of the very acquiescent and also pragmatic Peruvian polity, seeking the legal recognizance of their newly acquired deeds.

Note

  1. A post-structural definition of a subject admits disapprove and condemn by normative and moral conventions, created by the societal powers (Anarchism from Foucault to Rancière, Todd May. In: Contemporary Anarchist Studies, 2009). ↩