Slum and Informal Settlement Upgrading Actions: A Comparative Perspective for Rethinking Policies in Latin America
Thinking about the Latin American city means turning our attention to informal and low-income neighborhoods. Doing so from the premise of territories, regeneration, and climate change means recognizing that, for decades, these neighborhoods have concentrated — almost normalized and simultaneously — the greatest urban inequalities and the greatest environmental vulnerabilities in Latin America. Often located on hillsides, riverbanks, and risk zones, with deficits in services, infrastructure, and secure tenure, the climate crisis in these areas is not an abstract threat but a daily experience of flooding, landslides, and degradation of the ecosystems that sustain life. Understanding and transforming these territories therefore remains a condition for any agenda of urban regeneration and regional environmental justice.
At the same time, these are spaces of social production of habitat in which communities have, for decades, developed practices of self-construction, environmental stewardship, and collective organization. This territorial knowledge today engages with technical, digital, and public policy instruments, in a productive tension between tradition and innovation that is central to rethinking the Latin American city in a sustainable key, in territories of great social and economic complexity.
Various countries in the region have developed programs for comprehensive neighborhood improvement, urbanism, tenure regularization, climate adaptation, and community strengthening. Analyzing these experiences from a research, policy, and comparative perspective makes it possible to document their scope –the incorporation of multidimensional approaches, community participation, monitoring and evaluation mechanisms, and coordination across governance scales– and, at the same time, critically examine the tensions that run through them: fragmented interventions, policy discontinuity, insufficient integration of the environmental dimension, risks of gentrification, and gaps between design and implementation.
The purpose of this symposium is to present, from a research perspective, an updated overview of current urban improvement actions in informal neighborhoods that can inform reflection on public policy. The aim is to understand which interventions are effective, sustainable, and replicable when viewed through the lens of territorial regeneration and climate change response, what institutional, financial, and community conditions make them possible, and what aspects need to be rethought in light of available evidence.
Topics convened by the symposium include practices, programs, and urban and rural improvement policies; land policies, regularization, and access to housing; territorial governance, community participation, and public management; urban risks, climate change, and socio-environmental vulnerability; and innovation, monitoring, and evaluation of programs, discussed through research and experiences from different national contexts.
By bringing together experiences from various countries, the symposium aims to compare approaches and instruments, discuss the relevance of shared regional lessons, and move toward policy guidance that integrates social equity and environmental sustainability while capturing Latin American distinctiveness.
