Architecture, Territory, and Networks of Illegality
Feminist urban planning tools in the face of land precarity and territorial violence.
Architecture and Urban Planning as a Political Project
Against hegemonic conceptions that seek to reduce architecture and urban planning to a purely technical exercise, or approaches that attempt to address territorial insecurity exclusively through the deployment of police forces, we understand urban planning as an inescapably political position. Urban space is not an aseptic backdrop; it is the physical expression of the relations of power, gender, and class that run through society. Those of us who produce and think about the city witness every day how the claim of neutrality in territorial design and management has historically operated as a screen that conceals profound inequalities.
In metropolitan peripheries, insecurity and the expansion of networks of illegality are neither isolated phenomena nor merely matters of public order. They are the direct result of cumulative processes of socio-spatial segregation, abandonment of common space, and deregulation of access to land and housing. Attempting to address urban violence solely through punitive approaches—with more police patrols, saturation operations, or coercive control schemes—means acting on the consequences without transforming the structures that generate them. From our discipline, we argue that the real struggle over security and sovereignty takes place in the production of habitat, in land regularization, and in the construction of public infrastructure capable of sustaining and caring for community life.
Within this framework, Feminist Urbanism is indispensable. By placing the sustainability of life, everyday experience, and care work at the center of spatial analysis, it provides critical tools for understanding how territorial insecurity affects communities differently and how public policies must respond through a comprehensive approach that connects the scale of urban projects with the concrete management of popular neighborhoods.
Feminist Urbanism: Conceptual Framework and Disciplinary References
Building a design approach capable of counteracting territorial violence requires engaging with the theory and practice of Feminist Urbanism. This perspective moves away from the androcentric conception of the neutral user—which historically shaped cities around the male breadwinner and his pendular mobility—to place everyday life and the diversity of the bodies that inhabit the city at the center of diagnosis and proposals. As early as the 1960s, Jane Jacobs demonstrated that urban safety is not guaranteed by defensive structures or militarized surveillance, but by the vitality of public space and the constant presence of what she called eyes on the street. When public space is inhabited, when local commerce interacts with the sidewalk, and when a diversity of uses exists throughout the day, the community itself creates an environment of protection. By contrast, blind walls, the desertification of single-use streets, and defensive withdrawal “inward” open these spaces to dynamics of extortion and crime.
In the Latin American context, Argentine architect Ana Falú has been a pioneer in conceptualizing the right of women and diverse groups to a city free from violence, inseparably connecting the gender agenda with historical struggles for access to land, adequate housing, and public services in popular peripheral neighborhoods. According to Falú, there is no possibility of exercising the Right to the City if those who perform care work face structural barriers to mobility, dark circulation routes, and a lack of protection in informal settlements.
The conceptual corpus is enriched by contributions from authors of different generations, geographical contexts, and disciplinary backgrounds, who highlight the need to incorporate the notion of intersectional equity into urban projects. This requires analyzing how dimensions such as class, gender, age, and migration status intersect in people’s everyday experiences and in relation to their privileges and forms of oppression.
To this end, strengthening this approach within architectural and urban planning education is a strategic and fundamental necessity for ensuring the implementation of public policies informed by an ecofeminist gender perspective. Updating pedagogical frameworks is a necessary first step so that future regulations, zoning codes, and public management instruments cease to reproduce patriarchal biases and historical forms of invisibility.
There is a direct connection between feminist urbanism and the structural analysis of land and housing markets. This perspective demonstrates that the reproduction of everyday life does not occur in a vacuum; it requires a material, secure, and properly equipped foundation. When access to land and housing in peripheral areas is left exclusively to market forces and speculation, the minimum conditions necessary to sustain everyday life begin to collapse. Insecure land tenure, lack of basic services, and the absence of land reserves for public facilities directly affect care networks.
These conditions increase the hours of unpaid work performed by caregivers, undermine community health, and expose families to recurring situations of extortion and dispossession. Therefore, examining the dynamics of the informal real estate market, the legal fragility of tenure, and the expansion of networks of illegality is not external to feminist urbanism but rather an essential part of its territorial foundation: without land regulation and secure tenure, the sustainability of life and the right to the city remain unattainable.
From this theoretical framework, feminist urbanism introduces two categories: Comprehensive Care Systems and Affective Infrastructures. The former recognize that care work—including reproductive work, child-rearing, healthcare, and household support—is a collective responsibility that requires physical infrastructure and guaranteed public funding. The latter explore the capacity of the urban environment to support networks of mutual aid, community alliances, and contemporary forms of affective bonds that resist social atomization and the culture of fear.
Networks of Illegality, Land Commodification, and the Trap of Legal Fiction
To understand why metropolitan territories become vulnerable to organized crime, it is essential to examine transformations in the production of informal land. Historically, land occupations in peripheral areas were often organized around collective strategies promoted by families whose housing needs had not been met. In these experiences, community-based approaches deliberately preserved land for squares, schools, healthcare centers, and sufficiently wide streets to allow the future integration of public services. There was a neighborhood project guided by territorial solidarity and the pursuit of progressive regularization in cooperation with the State.
Today, this dynamic has increasingly been displaced by the expansion of speculative informal land subdivision. Clandestine developers and informal actors intensively subdivide properties, commodifying virtually all available land. Under this highly dynamic and lucrative logic, land reserves for community facilities are eliminated, and even spaces intended for streets and passageways are commercialized. The result is hyper-dense, environmentally fragile urban fabrics deprived of public space, where the regulation of coexistence rests not on neighborhood organization but on coercion, intimidation, and economic speculation.
At the root of this phenomenon lies legal fiction. The traditional regulatory and cadastral system operates according to a binary criterion: it recognizes either definitive legal ownership or declares the settlement legally nonexistent. When a neighborhood consolidates outside formal registries and lacks property deeds, the dominant legal framework responds by rendering the territory invisible. Yet the neighborhoods exist, the homes are inhabited, and businesses open every day. This fiction of legal nonexistence paralyzes the oversight capacity of local governments: because there are no registered parcels or formal titleholders, municipalities are unable to process business licenses or building permits for local activities such as grocery stores, furniture shops, building-material suppliers, or workshops. Through its own rigidity, the legal framework itself pushes the neighborhood economy into clandestinity.
Networks of illegality accurately identify and exploit this institutional vulnerability. Insecure tenure and the absence of state regulation create favorable conditions for the establishment of interconnected illicit economies: street-level drug dealing, illegal auto-parts scrapyards, chop shops, and informal moneylending. The latter operates as a mechanism of financial capture: low-income families turn to informal loans during emergencies and, when they are unable to repay abusive interest rates, may face the seizure of their assets and the violent appropriation of their homes as a form of repayment. Land precarity is thus transformed into dispossession and everyday violence.
A Toolbox: Provisional Tenure, Social Restitution of Assets, and Infrastructure
Faced with this scenario of territorial fragility and expanding illicit markets, architecture and urban planning must deploy a set of proactive, technical, and operational tools.
The first consists of Provisional Tenure and Progressive Recognition Mechanisms. Since traditional processes of land-tenure regularization and definitive titling can take years while informal markets expand on a daily basis, urban policy must implement intermediate forms of state recognition. Opening provisional tax accounts, accompanied by municipal occupancy certificates for homes, businesses, and neighborhood organizations, can function as an immediate bridge to legality. This mechanism provides families with legal security against dispossession, enables municipalities to register taxpayers, enforce basic safety standards, issue conditional business permits, and plan the extension of essential public services.
Likewise, reconstructing the actual cadastre through Social and Participatory Mapping constitutes a valuable initial management tool for connecting technical and academic knowledge with the situated knowledge of communities, while identifying care routes, perceived safety barriers, and community assets throughout the territory.
Complementarily, the Materialization of Comprehensive Care Systems and the recognition and strengthening of Affective Infrastructures are fundamental contributions to improving habitat and everyday experience in neighborhoods. Public architectural projects must be collectively agreed upon, validated, and rooted in their specific context, while mobility planning must take care work into account, recognizing the polygonal and interconnected routes it entails. Urban planning must therefore operate at a scale of proximity that reduces travel times and provides safe pedestrian environments.
Specific facilities must also be incorporated to prioritize the needs of children, young people, and older adults, using universal accessibility criteria in their design. These spaces should support networks of mutual aid, cohabitation, and community alliances, creating environments with adequate comfort and lighting that encourage people to remain, interact, and rebuild collective trust.
The Social Restitution of Assets proposed by Lucas Manjon—aimed at economically decapitalizing criminal structures—connects productively with these tools, since the possibility of repurposing confiscated warehouses, industrial facilities, or properties and transforming them into public infrastructure for care returns assets taken from the community back to the community.
A State Policy for Territorial Justice
The crossroads facing metropolitan municipalities will not be resolved by insisting on obsolete solutions. Urban violence and the consolidation of criminal networks are symptoms of a city produced in an unequal, exclusionary, and legally fictional manner. Attempting to restore sovereignty in neighborhoods without regularizing land and housing tenure or building facilities that respond to the actual needs of the communities in which they are located condemns any public policy to failure.
We advocate for public architecture and bottom-up urbanism committed to the ethical responsibility of intervening in real and complex territories with equity at its core. Providing provisional tenure mechanisms to formalize popular settlements, decapitalizing criminal structures, and materializing physical networks of care and affect constitute the pillars of a genuine strategy for democratic security and socio-spatial justice.
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