Insediamenti informali e rivendicazioni urbane in Sud America

As South American cities grew in the XX century, informal settlements spread rapidly. They began to be an important part of the discourse about urbanization and became the subject of public policies. A variety of organizations sprang up in these spaces, supported by labor unions, political parties, Catholic or Protestant churches, worship centers, and recreational or neighborhood associations. It is possible to observe that in some informal settlements and at certain historical moments, urban claims and communitarian associations raised. While sometimes they have remained in a local dimension and disappeared rather quickly, other times they became more sustained cycles of protest and mobilization, or more structured organizations. In this monographic issue we ask about the processes of politicization that took place in the informal settlements of five South American cities during the period from the end of World War II to the 1970s. In this introduction we try to frame the researches in the South American context, and then we analyze both the peculiarities of each case, and some cross-cutting themes, that provide working hypotheses for future researches.