Endorsed transgression: Informality beyond poverty in Managua, Nicaragua

Keywords: Latin America, Urban Informality, Informal Housing
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Within a conceptual framework in which informality has less to do with socioeconomic level and more with a social practice engaged by different social groups to meet their goals, this project highlights the policy context of housing developments in Managua, capital city of Nicaragua. By analyzing 342 housing projects that exist in the formal real estate market of the city, I focus on identifying the spatial and regulatory urban features of “legal” housing developments in Managua over the last 20 years. Despite these housing projects appearing to be formal, correct, properly or orderly, these developments embody the concept of informality – as a state sanctioned practice – and are enabled by the granting of “exceptions” to individual projects, but which has become the norm. Either through evasion or exception, this pattern is enabled by a regulatory logic of urban development that rationalizes the granting of exceptions through the dissonance between planning and actual practices of development, with the latter not being able to respond to the actual existing conditions of development in the city. The discussion would allow us to expand the reading of informality by exploring the case of a central American city through the analytical lens of the global North.