Historicising informal governance in 20th century Brazil

This is an article about what urban informality means when it is understood historically. In particular, it explores the relationship between urban informality and three vital threads in Brazil’s contemporary history: the evolution of racialized governance and inequality, the tense coexistence of private and public forms of power, and the complex contradictions embedded in Brazilian social struggles. Paying special attention to the way in which regulation creates informality from everyday life, I argue that Brazil’s modern urban law, from its very inception, has naturalised a version of urbanity that was both out-of-step with Brazil’s urban realities and economically unfeasible for many urban residents. By compounding poverty with the stigma of illegality, and especially by disproportionately channelling Afro-descendants into systems of urban power relations that denied them both citizenship and resources, Brazil’s urban legal and regulatory practices perpetuated racial inequality, undermined the legitimacy of liberal institutional governance, and channelled social activism in directions that, while often locally emancipatory, ultimately perpetuated Brazil’s deepest inequalities.