Centering Property Regimes in Squatter Settlements: A Chilean Counterpoint

Much recent scholarship on urban informality has insisted on both its ubiquity and its close entanglements and overlap with formal legal regimes and structures of power. Still, however, tracing the evolution and significance of informal practices remains both a methodological and historiographical challenge. One area where this is particularly the case is in the establishment and consolidation of squatter settlements. Recently, historians and social scientists have generally interpreted their trajectories from the perspective of the evolution of urban governance and citizenship rights. Few, however, have made property rights and regimes central to their analysis. This presentation draws on the Chilean case, where squatter settlements since the first half of the twentieth century have generally been formalized and granted property titles. While this makes Chile exceptional, it also places the country on a continuum of experiences, in which squatters have gained de facto and de jure property rights. In Chile and elsewhere, moreover, certain practices, expectations, and myths of liberal property relations have animated struggles over housing and the making of home. This presentation brings some of these key elements to the fore, emphasizing how the trajectory of squatter settlements takes place within the context of dominant property relations, even as mass squatting can also change how property regimes operate.