Year: 2009
Type: article
Abstract: What explains the evolution and dynamics of land squatting in Montevideo, Uruguay? Over the last few decades squatter settlements have increased dramatically in this city that lacked a "frontier" of poor illegal settlements until the 1980s, with the exception of a handful of very precarious neighborhoods dubbed cantegriles that started appearing around the 1950s. Today, about 11 % of the city's population lives on illegally occupied land (INE 2006). The more than 400 current squatter settlements have expanded the city limits, leaving a very concrete trace of urban and social change. Squatter settlements mushroomed without natural disasters setting people in motion and without population growth due to rural to urban migration processes, frequent causes of land squatting elsewhere. Thus, both knowing how and why land squatting has developed constitute interesting puzzles. No one has yet written about the history of land squatting in Montevideo. This dissertation recovers this history from oblivion and puts it in dialog with the literature on popular politics. From a social movement/contentious politics perspective, in this dissertation I challenge the assumption that socioeconomic factors such as poverty were the only causes triggering land squatting. I test whether political factors also shaped the cycle of land invasions and examine the mechanisms through which those factors - known as political opportunities in the literature - translated into different types of mobilization. Through statistical analysis, in-depth interviews, document analysis, and multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, this project will describe and explain the origins and trajectories of squatting as an elusive form of collective action during the last half of the 20th century (1947-2004). The project seeks to a) describe and explain the cycle of squatting and its timing; b) compare trajectories of different kinds of mobilization involved in land seizures and the mechanisms that activated them, and c) understand squatters' politics through a thick description of squatters' experiences and memories of their relationships with state agencies and politicians and through the experiences and memories of politicians, technocrats and bureaucrats as well.
Author: María José Álvarez‐Rivadulla
Language: English
Topic: Latin American Urban Studies
Subfield: Urban Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2141644887