Informal Appropriations in the Face of the State of Exception. Ethnographic Snapshots of the Right to the City

Composed as a mosaic, the present article brings together a series of urban snapshots, by way of ethnographic polaroids, which proceed from three studies conducted with informal workers in Mexico and Spain. The characters and instances disseminated throughout the text account for the urban “state of exception”, especially experienced by sectors of the population that have suffered not only forms of exploitation but also of expropriation. Those who were previously known as lumpenproletariat refuse to leave the city. While they continue to use the street as a means of subsistence, they are pointed at as the usual suspects when the public order is defied. The literature on urban studies tends to define the publicity of the urban space as a category that results from the public ownership of the street, through which this becomes subject to the rule of law. Therefore, the present study offers a critical counterpoint to this dominant idea, rather showing the role played by liberal democracies in promoting and maintaining exclusive policies of privatisation, commercialisation, and control of the so-called “public space”. Within this analysis, informality is presented as a political response to the inability of the State to guarantee the right to the city, while for the urban dispossessed, it represents a strategy to realise, de facto, this same right