Constructing ordinary places: Place-making in urban informal settlements in Mexico

Observers from a variety of disciplines agree that informal settlements account for the majority of housing in many cities of the global South. Urban informal settlements, usually defined by certain criteria such as self-build housing, sub-standard services, and residents’ low incomes, are often seen as problematic, due to associations with poverty, irregularity and marginalisation. In particular, despite years of research and policy, gaps in urban theory and limited understandings of urban informal settlements mean that they are often treated as outside ‘normal’ urban considerations, with material effects for residents including discrimination, eviction and displacement. In response to these considerations, this article uses a place-making approach to explore the spatial, social and cultural construction of place in this context, in order to unsettle some of the assumptions underlying discursive constructions of informal settlements, and how these relate to spatial and social marginalisation. Research was carried out using a qualitative, ethnographic methodology in two case study neighbourhoods in Xalapa, Mexico. Mexico offers fertile ground to explore these issues. Despite an extensive land tenure regularisation programme, at least 60 per cent of urban dwellers live in colonias populares, neighbourhoods with informal characteristics. The research found that local discourses reveal complex and ambivalent views of colonias populares, which both reproduce and undermine marginalising tendencies relating to ‘informality’. A focus on residents’ own place-making activities hints at prospects for rethinking urban informal settlements. By capturing the messy, dynamic and contextualised processes that construct urban informal settlements as places, the analytical lens of place-making offers a view of the multiple influences which frame them. Informed by perspectives from critical social geography which seek to capture the ‘ordinary’ nature of cities, this article suggests imagining urban informal settlements differently, in order to re-evaluate their potential contribution to the city as a whole

Changing relationships between multinational companies and their host regions? A case study of Aberdeen and the international oil industry

There has been a revival of interest in recent years in the relationships between multinational corporations (hereafter MNCs) and the host regions in which they operate. The branch plant thesis which generally views inward investment by MNCs in a negative light - as reinforcing power relations between core and peripheral regions - has been challenged, with the suggestion that such developments can play a key role in linking up local economies to important flows of knowledge and information in a global economy. It has also been suggested that MNC branch plant activities are in practice often upgraded over time, leading to the development of important competitive advantage's for host regions. In this paper, such claims are investigated through a case study of the Aberdeen oil region in the north east of Scotland. The changing position of Aberdeen within the oil industry's corporate division of labour is evaluated in terms of the wider theoretical debate