Urban spatial injustice in informal settlements

Abstract

The settlements of informal origin in Colombia emerged as an alternative to access housing for the socially and economically vulnerable population due to the limited institutional opportunities to obtain a solution. Thus, the victims of the armed conflict have found in this modality of urbanization a refuge in the city as a result of the forced displacement and the poverty. However, the different access modalities to the land relate this type of settlements with an illegal city due to the processes of irregular urbanization and self-production of housing developed far from the fulfillment of the urban norm. This denomination leads to an invisibilization of a set of injustices that the families who live there face off permanently. Given this scenario, the concept of space justice, which  was proposed in the seventies, was adopted with the intellectual movement called Radical Geography, so it could be explored new approaches to settlements of informal origin that allowed to overcome the confused idea of understanding the legal as an action of justice. The exploration is carried out from the revision of the set of political actions derived from those aws designed to guarantee the access to housing to the victims of the forced displacement because of the internal armed conflict in Colombia, and the reality observed through life stories. Finally, it is observed that the design of public policies continues to be thought from a utilitarian perspective, and for this reason the actions of justice are still measured in economic terms and not in social terms.