Three theses on informal housing in Europe

Abstract

This editorial introduction to the Special Issue ‘The rules, institutions and politics of housing informality in Europe’ argues for a more holistic interpretation to housing informality in Europe as a critical heuristic for re-thinking the dynamics of informality in the global North. In so doing, it offers three modest theses. First, housing informality is an endogenous phenomenon in the development of European cities, closely connected to the logics of capitalist modernity and currently located at the intersection of new patterns of forced migration and an ever-intensifying housing crisis. Second, housing informality is (also) a by-product of direct forms of public support, toleration and legitimation, as well as the consequence of deliberate (in)action by the State. This results in a clear public politics of informal space, in the framework of which informal housing is an instrument of governmentality in the hands of ruling elites. Third, housing informality is normatively ambiguous. In fact, informal dwelling practices create an archipelago of institutional micro-geographies at the city scale, that generate, in turn, heterogeneous spheres of urban citizenship rights. This selective spatial autonomy can be inhabited as much by processes of rights expansion, emancipation and solidarity as well as by practices of right-restriction, exploitation and precarization.

Keywords

Capitalist urbanization crises Europe housing informality precarity public policies

In the final scene of Vittoria De Sica’s 1956 film, The Roof (Il tetto), a young newlywed couple in Rome are forced to construct a one-room shack on unused land next to the railway lines. Natale, an apprentice bricklayer, and his pregnant wife, Luisa, were homeless, struggling to find somewhere to live in a post-war city undergoing a major construction boom. While illegal shacks were routinely demolished by the authorities and their occupants dispersed, it was commonly believed that the squatters could stay if they were able to put up the residence in one night. Natale and Luisa’s own efforts to assemble a makeshift home were foiled, however, by the police though the couple were able to find a second site and erect a half-finished structure before the police intervened. The film ends as a sympathetic officer fines the couple. He allows them to stay and complete their new home.

Widely praised as a return to his neo-realist roots, De Sica’s The Roof is one of many film’s shot in Rome’s informal settlements in the post-war period including De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (1948), Rossellini’s Europa ’51 (1952) and, perhaps most famously, Pasolini’s Accattone (1961). Informal housing was commonplace in Rome throughout the period. This included small clusters of makeshift jerry-built dwellings known as borgate, and baracche, simple shacks that were constructed using found materials such as loose bricks, planks and corrugated iron. The baracche were often grouped together to form small informal settlements or shanty towns known as baraccopoli (cities of shacks) (Vasudevan, 2023; see also Forgacs, 2014)

These developments were, by no means, limited to Rome. The history of housing insecurity across Europe during the 20th century was, in many ways, marked by informal practices that were commonplace though often overlooked – and even forgotten – in wider accounts of the ‘housing question’ (Hirschon, 1989; Leontidou, 1990; Rosello, 1997; Urban, 2013). At the same time, the study of urban informality itself became increasingly associated with the highly precarious forms of endurance and survival developed by the millions of squatters living in the cities and towns of the global South (Alsayyad, 2004; Davis, 2004; Lombard and Meth, 2016; McFarlane, 2011; Roy, 2005). An expansive and well-established body of scholarship has, in this context, drawn attention to the unjust structures of dispossession, exclusion and violence experienced by the ‘urban majority’, as well as their efforts to eke out a viable – if precarious and often temporary – life in settings of pervasive marginality (Banks et al., 2020; Benjamin, 2008; McFarlane, 2011; Simone, 2004, 2018, 2021; Vasudevan, 2023). Much of this work centred on the emergence of informal labour markets in cities across the global South as well as the incremental (Hart, 1973; Moser, 1978), ‘self-build’ approaches to housing adopted by vulnerable populations in the same fast-growing cities (Perlman, 1976; Turner, 1976).

And yet, in recent years, the study of informality in putatively ‘Northern’ settings has also gained increasing currency. A new wave of research has focused on certain forms of housing informality (political squatting or Roma camps) (Grazioli, 2021; Maestri, 2019; Martinez, 2020; Squatting Europe Kollective, 2013, 2014; Vasudevan, 2015, 2023) complemented, in turn, by studies of other equally significant declinations of informal housing (Esposito, 2022; Esposito and Chiodelli, 2020; Herbert, 2022). Some of these declinations are ‘new’ and closely linked to the emergence of a ‘sharing economy’ rooted in wider processes of financialization and new forms of platform capitalism characterized by short-term rental housing, hyper-touristification and gentrification (see Colomb and Moreira de Souza (2023), in this special issue; see also Ferreri and Sanyal, 2018; Gurran and Shrestha, 2021); other declinations, such as the alternative infrastructures of care and survival assembled by migrants in the face of restrictive and often violent border regimes, although certainly not unknown in the past, have taken on a new centrality (and urgency) and assumed a specific phenomenology in the light of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe (Jordan and Minca, 2023; Kapsali, 2020; Tsavdaroglou and Kaika, 2022); others still are rooted in often overlooked trajectories of informality that shed further critical light on everyday forms of inhabitation in the face of an increasingly unaffordable housing system (Galuszka, 2024; Hilbrandt, 2021; Lombard, 2019).

It is within this framework that informal habitation, in its variety, must be seen today as a key structural feature of European cities. While we recognize the differential and uneven histories of informal housing and property across Europe, we also seek to remain alert to the possibilities of thinking with urban informality as a more expansive ‘site of critical analysis’ (Banks et al., 2020). At stake here, as the papers in this Special Issue show, is a shared understanding of housing precarity in Europe and the uneven geographies of informality and formality that it has come to produce. Against this background, we argue for a more holistic interpretation to housing informality in Europe as a critical heuristic for re-thinking the dynamics of informality in the global North. In so doing, we offer three modest theses – argued concisely for reasons of space – which, although distinguishable from an analytical and communicative point of view, are inextricably co-constitutive of our interpretative hypothesis.

First thesis: housing informality is endogenous to European cities

On first inspection, the evolution of the international academic debate on urban informality points to the idea of a ‘transplantation process’ of informality in the so-called global North. Since the 1970s, scholarly research has focused heavily on informal inhabitation in the global South only to retrospectively ‘discover’ it in economically advanced countries of the North. Such ‘discovery’ coincided with a new body of scholarship that highlighted the relationship between the urbanization of capital and an intensifying crisis in housing provision (Harvey, 1985, 2008; see also: Aalbers and Christophers, 2014; Fernandez and Aalbers, 2017). This may suggest the existence of converging trajectories between different cities worldwide and, therefore, indicate that Southern informal modes of dwelling have found new shape and form in Northern cities (often, so it is argued, for instance by conservative political leaders, as a result of new waves of migration) – thus reinforcing the automatic and necessary association between informality and the South of the world.

This argument belies, however, a colonial framing of informality (Schiller and Raco, 2021). Housing informality, in fact, is, as we argue, an endogenous phenomenon in the development of European cities, closely connected to the logics of capitalist modernity. Indeed, informal and precarious housing was not a temporary and accidental occurrence – resolved by economic development, social struggles and public reforms in the early 20th century – but has run throughout the urban history of Europe in the 20th century and, in particular, after World War II (see Manzano Gómez’s (2023) piece for this special issue). But more than this, it has remained a mass practice, while changing its physiognomy over time, as it is the case in many southern European countries (Chiodelli et al., 2021). In other instances, while fading in terms of magnitude, it has nevertheless persisted as an ever-present possibility, mobilized when needed according to specific purposes, for example to house migrant workers in post-World War II Switzerland and, in more recent times, to provide accommodation for asylum seekers, as illustrated in Felder and Pattaroni’s (2023) article for this special issue (see also Hendawy and Rezk’s (2024) article on the autochthonous matrix of informality in Berlin). In other words, despite the widespread rhetoric on progress and modernization, urban informality has endured as a structural feature of contemporary European urban development and governance, both as a presence and as an opportunity (see among others: Aguilera, 2024; Hilbrandt, 2021; Krammer and Hauer, 2024; Patton and Sophoutis, 1989; Ward, 2002).

Within this framework, and in recent years, informality in Europe has increasingly – though not exclusively – been located at the intersection of new patterns of forced migration and an ever-intensifying housing crisis. Forced migration is currently the main driver of informal housing in its most extreme and fragmentary forms, as in case of the Calais Jungle and its subsequent fracturing into an archipelago of informal camps (Ansaloni, 2020), or the ‘shantytowns’ of seasonal workers in the new ‘plantations’ of southern Europe (Caruso, 2018; Perrotta and Raeymaekers, 2023). At stake here are the macroscopic shortcomings of (failed) reception and integration policies that produce processes of illegalization, marginalization and exploitation of migrants (Geddes and Scholten, 2016; Picker, 2017; Tazzioli, 2023). The housing crisis – especially in large urban areas, where skyrocketing prices and dwindling housing supply are fuelled by financialization and touristification (see the contribution of Colomb and Moreira de Souza (2023) to this special issue) – is the other major driver of current European informal housing. In this case, the informal production of dwelling space takes on more mimetic and scattered forms: the occupation of abandoned buildings, the renting out of technically uninhabitable places, extreme forms of overcrowding within the established urban fabric (Clough Marinaro, 2021; Esposito and Chiodelli, 2023; Lombard, 2019). All in all, contemporary informality in Europe remains a significant component of the housing system, situated at the crossroad of global processes and (historical, institutional and social) local specificities.

Second thesis: housing informality is (also) a product of the State

Research on informality in the global South has long highlighted how the formal and the informal should not be considered as ontologically opposed entities, but as extremes of a continuum (Payne, 2002), that is characterized by the steady presence, albeit in different forms and intensities, of the State (Roy, 2005).

A similar understanding of the enduring role of public institutions in the production of the informal space, on the contrary, has remained ancillary to the debate on housing informality in Europe until a decade ago, when the picture started to change. The ‘discovery’ of the multiplicity of contemporary informal housing practices in Europe was accompanied by the recognition of the informality-state nexus (Haid and Hilbrandt, 2019). This nexus is particularly evident in southern European regions (e.g. Italy, Spain, Greece or Portugal), where the spread of informal housing by the middle class (mainly in the form of both second homes for recreational use and irregular extensions to family homes) is the explicit result of deliberate public practices, policies and laws. The latter, in particular, have not served as instruments for challenging and proscribing the proliferation of informal practices, but have, if anything, knowingly encouraged them; for example, through recurrent amnesty laws (Calor and Alterman, 2017; Chiodelli, 2019; Potsiou, 2014).

This often took place as a process of legitimization for the homeowner class and the construction sector, seen as fundamental pillars of the socio-economic sphere and, more specifically, of the housing system (Allen et al., 2004). Such a legitimization process was (and still is) a powerful tool to build electoral consensus in favour of right and centre-right political parties. The individualist mobilization and anti-statist attitude that this type of informality implies, in fact, fit perfectly with the neoliberal leanings of these parties (Chiodelli, 2023).

Public toleration for middle-class housing irregularities has often been accompanied, especially in the last two decades, by a simultaneous trajectory of stigmatization, blaming and repression of the precarious and irregular dwelling practices adopted by marginal subjects (e.g. Roma people and migrants). Such revanchist approaches did not eliminate housing insecurity and have, if anything, accentuated the fragility and vulnerability of these individuals and groups (Arbaci, 2019; Dotsey and Chiodelli, 2021; Mudu and Chattopadhyay, 2017). In so doing, they have also consciously ensured the survival and reproduction of such precarious dwelling practices. Set against this backdrop, the irregular housing of marginal communities should be seen as a form of calculated informality and, as such, the outcome of strategic public (in)action on questions that the State does not want to address in any other (i.e. more effective, more structural, more costly) way (see Shrestha and Gurran’s (2023) article in this special issue).¹

In sum, it is possible to conceptualize informality not only as a byproduct of direct forms of public support, toleration and legitimation, but also as the result of deliberate (in)action by the State.² Hence, a clear public politics of informal space in Europe can be detected, in the framework of which informal housing is an instrument of governmentality in the hands of ruling elites, who can exploit it for their political, economic and electoral purposes.

Third thesis: housing informality is normatively ambiguous

Over the past 50 years, a growing body of academic literature has pointed to the liberatory and emancipatory potential of informality in the face of marginalizing, sectarian and classist forces at the urban scale (Jabareen and Switat, 2019; Ranganathan, 2014). The subversive character of urbanites’ everyday practices has been interpreted through groundbreaking conceptualizations, such as Asef Bayat’s (1997) quiet encroachment, intended as

A silent, patient, protracted, and pervasive advancement of ordinary people on the propertied and powerful in order to survive hardships and better their lives. They are marked by quiet, atomised and prolonged mobilisation with episodic collective action – an open and fleeting struggle without clear leadership, ideology or structured organisation, one which makes significant gains for the actors, eventually placing them as a counterpoint vis-a-vis the state. (p. 57)

These observations share a critical problem space with James Holston’s (2009) notion of insurgent citizenship understood, in this context, as a key vector for reclaiming the right to the city for the urban poor:

Insurgent citizenship [. . .] destabilized the differentiated, as the urban poor gained political rights by becoming functionally literate, established claims to property through house building, established rights to urban infrastructure, made law an asset through their struggles with eviction, became modern consumers, and achieved personal competence through their experience of the city. (p. 256)

This progressive approach to informality emerged in the context of – and in contrast to – regressive policies, narratives and approaches that view informal settlements as grimy and disease-ridden shantytowns that ‘manifest all the symptoms of social disorganisation’ (Perlman, 1976: 2). They dominated policy and political circles in many countries especially in the 1970s and, despite being radically opposed by academic research and activism, they are still present today, constituting the background of many redevelopment, rehabilitation and modernization urban projects (Bhan, 2016).

Although we believe that it is fundamental to think with the emancipatory and liberating potential of informal inhabitation, a comprehensive reading of informality in Europe highlights its structural and normative ambiguity. As this Special Issue shows, informal dwelling practices create an archipelago of institutional micro-geographies at the city scale, that generate, in turn, heterogeneous spheres of urban citizenship rights. In other words, informality is linked to the making of spaces of autonomy where ordinary practices and rules are suspended or reshaped, thus allowing the emergence of unconventional forms of coexistence and interaction.

Two opposing trajectories can take place in these spaces of autonomy. On the one hand, as mentioned before, informal inhabitation can trigger processes of empowerment of the marginalized that reclaim fundamental rights otherwise denied (such as the right to housing for undocumented migrants, that in ‘fortress Europe’ can often be secured only through informal housing practices). In this framework, informality contributes to nurture ‘an urban citizenship that is emancipated from imperatives of national sovereignty and homogeneity, [thus becoming] a homebase for cosmopolitan democracy’ (Baubock, 2003: 197).

However, examples also abound that highlight the degree to which informality serves as an opportunity for ruling subjects to accentuate and reinforce existing processes of neoliberal marginalization and exploitation. This is the case, for example, of informal rental practices, where any legal form of tenant protections is absent (see Emily Kelling’s (2023) contribution on London’s incremental house extension). But also emblematic are the instances in which the notion of (in)formality becomes a powerful tool for discrimination and subjugation of Roma (Picker, 2017) or migrant communities (Fravega, 2022). Here, rather than fostering local processes of bottom-up inclusion or expansion of rights, informal housing practices reinforce vertical subordination to the logics of capital and to the exclusionary boundaries of national citizenship.

In essence, housing informality is, in our view, a source of selective spatial autonomy that can be inhabited as much by processes of rights expansion, emancipation and solidarity as well as by practices of right-restriction, exploitation and precarization. Rather than a concept which can be univocally connoted from a normative viewpoint, informal dwelling is a structurally slippery notion, a critical site of analysis whose ethical and political interpretation must be necessarily situated in time and space.

Conclusion

At the heart of this Special Issue is a response to Banks et al.’s (2020) recent call for a ‘renewed under-standing of informality, not as a distinct category, sector, or outcome, but as a site of critical analysis, drawing on and extending political economic analysis in specific urban contexts’ (p. 233). While such re-framing has revived and recalibrated our understanding of urban informality and its ‘historical and ongoing centrality in shaping urban development across the global South’ (p. 224), we seek to recognize the cardinal significance of the informal as an enduring structural feature of European cities through three modest propositions.

The papers in this collection thus advance an approach to urban informality that foregrounds the complex historical evolution of informal practices across Europe and their uneven relationship to the logics of capitalist urbanization. At the same time, these are practices marked by the imprimatur of the State whose role in generating and policing informal dwelling practices is a major touchstone of this collection. But more than this, these are ultimately practices that highlight the ambiguous nature of urban informality as both a source of resistance and subversion as well as a tool for exclusion and repression.

And yet, we wish to conclude by holding onto the promise of the informal as a site and source of political action. We turn, in this context, to another film, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 La Chinoise, whose famous tracking shot juxtaposes the informal shacks housing thousands of predominantly North African workers on the outskirts of Paris with the newly built modernist campus in Nanterre. If Godard’s film followed the actions of young student revolutionaries in Paris, it was a largely forgotten book by the French urbanist and sociologist, Henri Lefebvre (1968), that brought the circumstances of post-war uneven development into sharp relief. L’irruption de Nanterre au sommet (The Irruption: From Nanterre to the Summit, 1968) was published in the same year as Lefebvre’s Le Droit à la ville (The Right to the City) and offered a series of short essays that reflected on the events that culminated in the protests of May 1968. Lefebvre had recently joined the sociology faculty in Nanterre and it was the district’s marginal status that, in his eyes, served as a major catalyst for the wave of occupations and strikes that exploded across France (McDonough, 2008).

Such expressions of political defiance and resistance may seem a long way from a collection dedicated to re-thinking our conceptual and empirical understanding of urban informality in Europe. As Achille Mbembe (2024) reminds us, however, this is world of increasingly precarious inhabitation marked by new modes of detention and deportation and sustained by practices of erasure, sorting and enclosing (93). To document the contemporary condition of informal housing across Europe is to therefore recognize the stakes involved in re-imagining the city as a space of dwelling and endurance.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The special issue ‘The rules, institutions and politics of housing informality in Europe’ follows the international conference ‘Houses of Cards? The Rules and Institutions of Housing Illegality in Western Countries’ that took place in April and September 2021 with the support of CRASSH–Cambridge Centre for Housing and Planning Research, University of Cambridge and OMERO–Research Centre for Urban Studies, University of Turin. The special issue has been co-edited by Francesco Chiodelli (University of Turin), Sabina Maslova (University of Cambridge) and Alexander Vasudevan (University of Oxford). The authors are listed in purely alphabetical order.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Francesco Chiodelli

Notes

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