Formality and Informality in Urban Consolidation in the Municipality of Santiago de Cali, Colombia: Revision of Urban Processes of the Last Decades in the Commune

Objectives: To investigate the urban consolidation processes of the municipality of Santiago de Cali, as well as the
transformation patterns of urban surfaces to recognize specific phenomena. Methods/Analysis: Communes as urban
surfaces with administrative and territorial elements (therefore, common attributes) are the basis for contrasting specific
phenomena that mark the links with the population determinants that transform the territory, which accounts for
informality (phenomenon of interest) as a particular way of urbanizing. In this sense, the surface/population relationship
produces indicators that, recognized from the present, allow connecting sequentially and temporally with the origins of
the process, understanding it as a “cause and effect” relationship that can be structured and systematized in matrices of
data that allow to visualize the relationship scenarios. Findings: This vision of formality (on the process of urbanization)
has not been characteristic, since the acceleration of many of the determinants that generate it as population growth or
economic cycles have distorted how it is seen, while other phenomena have occurred where urbanization outside the
perspective of the State became informal, demonstrating the low capacity for intervention. The scenarios of public policies
that sought to ensure those minimum urban conditions were blurred with the increase of that informality, becoming one
of the issues that the State must face; and in the case of the municipality of Santiago de Cali, there are particularities that
have manifested this informality in scales that allow understanding and studying the different aspects that produce it and,
at the same time, to characterize it. Application/Improvement: The development of the present investigation allowed
observing particular conditions in the design of planning instruments that start from the recognition of this informality as
another form of city construction and that complement the study of this type of relations in the territory.