Área 23: Gente de Barrio. Who’s Afraid of the Informal?: slum as an analytical category « Photo montage by Dionsio Gonzales Continuing the dialogical debate between FAVELissues writers about the conflation of informality and slums at the glocal scale.
Following Lubiana’s post about urban informality as a form of protesting economic inequality and my own post praising the social relations engendered by informal spaces both in Occupied space and favelas, Sylvia Soonets, from Proyectos Arqui 5 in Caracas, passionately cautioned against romanticizing informal housing settlements based on political sympathizes or allegiances to various local–global Occupy protest movements. She is right to critique discourses that seem to characterize slums as sanitized bastions of the creative and resourceful human spirit.