The reproduction of informal settlements in Santiago: Housing policy, cycles of repopulation and the ‘politics of poverty’ as a regime of government

This article analyses the persistence of informal settlements in the city of Santiago, Chile, between 1990 and 2018, a period of democratic governments characterised by falling poverty rates and – paradoxically – state efforts to reduce informality by increasing the provision of housing for low-income groups. Based on a qualitative study that includes document analysis and interviews with poor urban residents and governmental actors, I describe one mechanism of informal housing reproduction: the cyclical repopulation of informal urbanisations, that is, the intertwined processes of relocation of informal residents and the reoccupation of settlement sites by new families. In contrast to dichotomous understandings of informality that explain informal housing as produced by residents’ poverty, the article shows that repopulation cycles respond to a regime of government structured around what I call a ‘politics of poverty’, a framework that labels informal settlements as ‘spatial concentrations of poverty’, therefore creating spatial zones of intervention. While this helps the state to target informal settlements as subjects of poverty policies, residents mobilise the policy’s categories to legitimate informal practices.