Gated communities, or informality of the rich (Global)

Gated communities, or informality of the rich 🌍
Location: Global
Definition: Informality is primarily a normative notion, but even from a normative perspective, informal housing of the poor and the rich differ substantially
Keywords: Global – Global South – Gated communities - Informal housing
Author: Udo Grashoff
Affiliation: University of Leiptsig, Germany

By Udo Grashoff, University of Leiptsig, Germany

Research on informal housing has focused primarily on analysing informality of the urban poor in the Global South. There is widespread informality in housing practices of affluent urbanites, but these practices have mostly been ignored by informality studies.

First reason for this is that informal housing of the rich is less visible; it’s not as iconic as favelas and shanty towns. As a result, it has been overlooked in the Global North, especially in the United States (Durst and Wegmann 2017).

Second reason for the disregard of informal housing of the affluent is that the focus of scholars of informal housing on the Global South is often accompanied by a neglect of regions where informal housing is not necessarily associated with poverty, such as the Global East and the Mediterranean region. In Italy, Croatia or Greece, normally seen as part of the Global North, informal housing has become a widespread urban development practice. Here, informality has a different function and meaning than in Africa or Latin America. Instead of people of low-income building on land owned by someone else, informal housing outside the Global South predominantly involves the middle-class people, who build without public authorization on plots they rightfully own.

The third reason is that there are fundamental differences in the moral assessment of informal housing, labelling informal housing of the poor as motivated by need, and the other by greed. So far, there exist only a few studies on informal housing beyond the notion of the self-help of the poor. A pioneering study on informal housing for high-income residents in the protected forest area of the eastern hills of Bogotá (Vieda Martínez and Chiodelli 2021) is a rare attempt to fill this research gap. The authors observe three important features of this informal practice – clustering, isolating, and concealing. They note that informal housing of the rich is similar to living in gated communities, which makes it looks like normal, formal housing of the rich. In a similar vein, widespread informal housing in the Mediterranean, in countries such as Albania, Egypt or Israel, looks like normal middle-class housing, since the violation of land laws and building codes is hard to see.

Informality is primarily a normative notion, but even from a normative perspective, informal housing of the poor and the rich differ substantially. In order to integrate unlawful housing practices of the affluent into the field of informality studies, it is necessary to adjust existing notions and make subtle distinctions. There is often no clear-cut boundary between need and greed, and planners must draw a fine line between the two when regulating informality. The preferred reaction to illegal practices aimed at tax evasion might be law enforcement. For informality driven by need, it might be advisable to tolerate it as ‘justifiable noncompliance’ (Alterman and Calor 2020).

However, the reality of informality of the rich is more complex. Apart from non-compliance, there are forms of ‘calculated’ informality in the Global North such as non-enforcement and deregulation (Durst and Wegmann 2017), which means passing the buck onto public authorities and regulators. With its different manifestations and causes, the ‘dark side of informality’ (Chiodelli 2019) challenges and complements the somewhat one-sided image of informal housing as self-help of the poor or a weapon of the weak. It can be an expression of selfishness, asocial behaviour and of the abuse of power, too.

References

Alterman, R. and Calor, I. 2020. ‘Between Informal and Illegal in the Global North: Planning Law, Enforcement and Justifiable Noncompliance’, Grashoff, U. (ed.), Comparative Approaches to Informal Housing Around the Globe. UCL Press: 150-185.

Chiodelli, F. 2019. ‘The Dark Side of Urban Informality in the Global North: Housing Illegality and Organized Crime in Northern Italy’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, np.

Durst, N. and Wegmann, J. 2017. ‘Informal Housing in the United States’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 41: 282-297.

Vieda Martínez, S. and Chiodelli, F. 2021. ‘Informal Housing of the Rich: Clustering, Isolating, and Concealing in Bogotá, Colombia’, Habitat International: 112.