Caminata por la orilla: 51 días de expedición por el Valle de México - Nacional - CNNMéxico.com
Feike de Jong es un periodista holandés radicado en la Ciudad de México, ganador del Premio de Periodismo Walter Reuter 2010. Hizo una expedición por la periferia del Valle de México durante 51 días: 700 kilómetros recorridos entre noviembre y diciembre de 2009. El video describe algunas de las imágenes que encontró en su ruta, donde no todo es asfalto y concreto.
Feike de Jong, journalist from Holand, now lives in Mexico city, winner of the Walter Reuter journalism price 2010. He made an exploration around Mexico city periferia during 51 days, 700km between november & december 2009. This video describes some images tha he found on his route, where not everything is asphalte & concrete.
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Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Human Settlements
Much has been said and written about the informality of the economy and human settlements, mostly in countries in Asia, the Far East, Northern and Southern Africa and Latin America, regions subsumed under the term “Global South”. As a question of political economy, informality in urban spaces is usually seen as being related to economic development in capitalist terms, and as an obstacle to the free spread of the effective market inclusion of certain parts of a country’s population. A legalistic approach centers on the illegality of informal practices, while a cultural pluralism approach understands informality as a creative self-help response by the forgotten and sees the evolving social ties in informal settlements as strong bonds between the excluded.
A major reference point in the debate on informality is the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto who regards the legalization of the work and property of “the poor” as a key solution to the overall success of capitalism in urban planning issues. In this regard the UN-Habitat reports (2003) and the World Bank Report can be seen as influential actors in the debate. These positions relate informality to poverty; the informal sector continues to be “the margin” and in some cases, outside the legal sphere. But not only the fact that almost half the urban population in these regions, or 32% of the global urban population lives in what is called “informal” human settlements (UN 2006) should raise doubts about the adequacy of the center-margin model of spatial representation. Moreover, the controversial debate and the persistent material obstacles to providing housing under “formal” conditions demands that scholars search for the reasons behind urban division and inequality in the deeper socio-political construction of legality.
Could informality also be seen as a guiding principle of urban politics? Could it be understood as a category of inequality – a relation constructed by the most powerful actors in urban political and economic society that has the power to define the dividing lines between formality and informality? Can we find proof of what Ananya Roy called “elite informality”?
This year’s INURA Conference organizers invite you to discuss informality from the perspective of its production and practice: Mexico City, its power structures and different forms of inequality and exclusion provide enlightening examples of the mutual interdependence of formality and informality, local political actors and researchers.
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