SEGMENTED CITIES WITH FUZZY WALLS: CHANGES IN INFORMAL SETTLEMENTS AS SEEN THROUGH A MULTISCALE ANALYSIS

Cities can be seen as complex urban mosaics made up of a set of fragments that reflect the social inequalities among their residents, and, at the same time, change their actions and decisions. These mosaics are easier to see in metropolises in the less developed world, as in these urban regions, one does not need to be an urban planner or an old city dweller to see that some areas are more attractive, privileged, and better serviced than others. The bigger and more populated a city is, the more visible its social inequalities are likely to be. The fragments of the urban mosaic are divided by walls. Some walls are visible, tangible, and concrete barriers resulting from the built and natural environment. Other walls are intangible or invisible barriers imposed by zoning and social prejudice (Marcuse 1995). The rigidity of the city’s walls may vary according to the scale through which they are analyzed. In this context, the present paper aims to discuss the segmented city in the less developed world, focusing on one particular type of urban fragment: informal settlements. These settlements can be defined as urban areas that have been developed outside the official land use laws and regulations. In general, such areas are occupied by the poor who have not been able to buy, sell or rent a household in the city’s formal real estate market. Normally, these households are built spontaneously, without a previous plan to guide or control the land occupation. The result is the generation of a set of ‘places’ more than just ‘spaces’ - since these places inherently have a strong set of social relations among their inhabitants (Norberg-Schulz 1971), and their morphologies may vary significantly from the formal urban spaces – and it is also possible to say that formal cities have fewer ‘places’ and more ‘spaces’ for the same reason as previously mentioned. The main assumption of the paper is that the walls of informal settlements change from rigid to fuzzy ones, as they are analyzed using finer scales. In order to show this change this paper is divided into four sections. The first section analyzes the changes in two types of urban structure model: the segregated city model and the segmented city model. The former is a synthesis of the traditional ecological models of the Chicago School, as well as the Marxist core-peripheral model. The latter is an alternative and complementary model that reveals the dynamics of the contemporary Latin American metropolises as a result of the fragmentation of the previous segregated city model, and can be described by three basic features: the fractioning of the social classes; spatial roughness; and network-territories. The second section describes the changes in governmental intervention models for informal settlements in Latin American cities, emphasizing what has been happening in the city of Recife, in Brazil. It shows that, since the 1980s, conventional slum eviction programs have been replaced by programs to upgrade slums. These changes have contributed to a much better understanding of the specificity and diversity of the informal settlements, as well as to ‘knocking down’ their previously rigid walls, and accepting the inevitability of their existence. The third section investigates the fact that, despite the changes in terms of governmental intervention models for informal settlements, there are still limits on the official city maps that effectively impede any appropriate representation of them. These limits can be seen through the analysis of the features in the two main databases about the city of Recife: the Brazilian Demographic Census data and the city’s official cartographic base. In order to show the gaps between the official cartographic representations and the reality of informal settlements, the last section of this paper analyzes in more depth the walls of one specific informal settlement in the city of Recife, Brazil, called Brasília Teimosa. This finer scale analysis allows us to see that its walls are even more fuzzy and permeable than the walls of the many formal settlements. This paper was presented on the conference EVERYDAY LIFE IN THE SEGMENTED CITY held in Florence in 2011. It was also published in Research in Urban Sociology, volume 11, 2011.