Abstract
Observers from a variety of disciplines agree that informal settlements account for the majority of housing in many cities of the
global South. Urban informal settlements, usually defined by certain criteria such as self-build housing, sub-standard services, and
residents’ low incomes, are often seen as problematic, due to associations with poverty, irregularity and marginalisation. In
particular, despite years of research and policy, gaps in urban theory and limited understandings of urban informal settlements mean
that they are often treated as outside ‘normal’ urban considerations, with material effects for residents including discrimination,
eviction and displacement. In response to these considerations, this article uses a place-making approach to explore the spatial,
social and cultural construction of place in this context, in order to unsettle some of the assumptions underlying discursive
constructions of informal settlements, and how these relate to spatial and social marginalisation. Research was carried out using a
qualitative, ethnographic methodology in two case study neighbourhoods in Xalapa, Mexico.
Mexico offers fertile ground to explore these issues. Despite an extensive land tenure regularisation programme, at least 60 per
cent of urban dwellers live in colonias populares, neighbourhoods with informal characteristics. The research found that local
discourses reveal complex and ambivalent views of colonias populares, which both reproduce and undermine marginalising
tendencies relating to ‘informality’. A focus on residents’ own place-making activities hints at prospects for rethinking urban
informal settlements. By capturing the messy, dynamic and contextualised processes that construct urban informal settlements as
places, the analytical lens of place-making offers a view of the multiple influences which frame them. Informed by perspectives
from critical social geography which seek to capture the ‘ordinary’ nature of cities, this article suggests imagining urban informal
settlements differently, in order to re-evaluate their potential contribution to the city as a whole.
# 2014 The Author. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license