Urbanizzazioni popolari e pratiche di pianificazione a Buenos Aires

Urban informality in the Global South is widely understood as an unofficial/illegal process exclusively driven by the urban poor, occurring beyond the State and solely enacted by the popular sector’s agency. On the other hand, it is considered a diametrically opposed alternative to conventional conceptions of planning, representing a form of urbanization that is independent of formal frameworks and in violation of planning rules and regulations. Yet, although a fact generally neglected by planning theory, the local dwellers of what have been called “informal settlements” comply with regulatory frameworks and the spatial outcomes of their settlement actions are frequently from the beginning in accordance with planning norms. This phenomenon is crucial for understanding how local dwellers’ rationality is often driven by their expectations in terms of accessing basic services and obtaining securing tenure. This thesis is aimed to theorize how and under what conditions various actors and their practices interact with the regulatory frameworks within the planning system to enable and sustain a mode of popular urbanisation in contemporary Buenos Aires. Therefore, this research centres the analysis on two spatial configurations of popular urbanisation in Buenos Aires – particularly Villa 20 and the toma de tierra of Guernica - and two corresponding positions assumed by policy makers and urban planners, starting from their relationships with local actors from a transversal perspective of governmentality on different focal points of encounter and disagreement. By adopting a relational and socio-material approach to the study of planning practices, the research provides a transversal reading across different actors and their rationalities at play observing their engagement with the regulatory frameworks. Through an ethnography of planning practices, the thesis provides a novel methodology for bringing into view the processes, practices, alliances, and agencies which are often invisible to policy makers. The thesis illustrates that popular urbanisation and planning need to be considered as urban assemblages that have numerous and unexpected ways of interlinking. Firstly, it recognizes the presence of conflicting, competing and conflating rationalities at play in popular urbanisation of Buenos Aires. Secondly, the thesis offers a novel insight into the strategies and tactics employed by planners in attempts to intervene in popular urbanization in Buenos Aires. Thirdly it proposes practices-centred recommendations for institutional change and social justice considering the technical as much as the political aspects of planning and interrogating the agency of materiality in urban processes. For policy makers and urban planners, a better understanding of the socio-technical configurations of popular urbanization can guide their actions to rearrange them toward coproducing urban governance.