Claim territories

Informal settlements in Resistencia, Argentina

Abstract

The article presents the problem of informal settlements in the city of Resistencia, Chaco, northeast of Argentina, which since the late 1990s have acquired particu‑lar spatial, socio‑organizational and physical organization features, all of which dif‑ferentiate them from the traditional villages of emergency of the years 60’s‑70’s. Among all these features, the most outstanding is the condition of vindication to include the occupying families into the urban structure, so as to enable a new politicity to these settlements in their dialogue with the formal city. The theoretical approach is that of the social production of space. We start from a conception that understands territory and habitat as the results of complex processes of dispute between asymmetrical social actors. The basic study of this article is predominantly qualitative: it seeks to understand the transformations observed in the production of informal habitat, in Resistencia, in order to investigate the meaning that informal land occupants gave to their solution to their housing problems. This required an ethnographic approach to settlements in the city, and interviews with technicians, state officials, and representatives of land owners (real estate agents), as well as the analysis of material from the local press and official documents. This approach was complemented with secondary information, which con‑tributes to the weighting of the magnitude of informal occupations of vacant land in the last 20 years in Resistencia. The persistence of the occurrence of illegal occupations is also an indicator of the poor effectiveness of urban policies to solve the sprouting of new settlements, as well as to regularize and provide adequate housing solutions.