Property rights, urban land markets and the contradictions of redevelopment in centrally located informal settlements in Bogotá, Colombia, and Buenos Aires, Argentina

Following rapid urban growth over the past four decades, informal settlements originally located in peripheral areas of large Latin American cities are now occupying increasingly valuable land in the central city. As a result, these communities are facing intense redevelopment pressures with important implications for housing accessibility. Although this situation is common in the region, central city redevelopment assumes a variety of forms depending on shifting approaches to land titling under different urban governance regimes, resulting in variegated, formal, and informal land markets. This comparative historical case study of Bogotá, Colombia, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, suggests that urban redevelopment planning has drawn on two contrasting discourses of property rights: one privileging private market approaches based in the economic theory of Libertarianism; the other favouring state authority and redistribution building on the ethics of Utilitarianism. In both Bogotá and Buenos Aires, however, de facto land-titling policies have shifted between the principles of Libertarianism and Utilitarianism under different political regimes, and neither market- nor state-oriented approaches have served to safeguard low-income residents’ access to housing. Instead, the shifting influence of each discourse has structured formal and informal land markets in ways that complicate long-standing debates surrounding land titling in informal settlements.