Informality is the breaking of the law

By Roger, Sebastián, Maria, Carla,

Conceptual approaches to informality, both labor and urban, define it from the breaking of the law. Authors such as Portes (1997) locate informality as a structural aspect of capitalism, while others, such as De Soto (1990), locate its generating matrix in the State and, in particular, in the law and its high fences of access to education. formality. The common element to these conceptualizations, and around which various authors can be organized, is that agents and actors, commonly guided by economic interest, act outside the law. Actually, more properly, they combine activities between the legal and the illegal, that is, they adopt a spiral behavior, staying or crossing the legal fence according to their interest.

 There are various practices in the cities of this spiral behavior of agents and actors. A very common one, extended to various social classes, are the "closed condominiums" in their type of placement of bars that close streets for citizen security. The same actors that close streets and prevent free movement of citizens and public space — the neighbors and their organizations, in turn, make up the officially recognized citizen security committees, and are part of the municipal registry of social organizations. Their search for citizen security leads them to move between legal mechanisms and, at the same time, violate other legal systems. Another behavior, more common, although generally restricted to low-income sectors, is illegal access to urban land (through invasions or illegal land markets) which is combined with the use of various mechanisms established by law that grant the actor a certain air of legality (for example, obtaining the municipal certificate of possession, being registered in the municipal register of social organizations, among others). These practices could be extended to the «self-construction» of popular housing, the non-legal provision of services such as drinking water, public passenger transport, etc.

 While in labor informality there is a tendency to attribute the responsibility of informality to companies that do not comply with the rigors of the law, in urban informality there is a tendency to consider the social subjects themselves (the inhabitants) as violators of the law to access to the ground, build a house, provide a service or develop an industry.

Cockburn, J. C. (2019). El Estado y la informalidad urbana. Perú en el siglo XXI. PLURIVERSIDAD, (3), 46-67.

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