Land and Labour in Processes of Urbanisation: The Dialectics Between Popular Practices and State Policies in Peru

Abstract

Questions regarding Indigenous peoples’ rights to land are most often addressed in terms of their struggles for land in rural areas. This article is concerned with Indigenous people’s access to land in an urban context, and explores the spatial dimensions involved and negotiated in processes of urbanisation in Peru. In particular, it will focus on the collective occupations of land on the outskirts of urban centres, and relate this to the development of state policies regarding the growth of new urban neighbourhoods. Since the 1940s and 1950s, marginalised people in Peruvian cities have taken part in collective occupations of land for purposes of housing, and creating new urban neighbourhoods where infrastructure is constructed through collective work and efforts. In response to these practices, Peruvian authorities have created different policies and institutions to facilitate the formalisation of land ownership and to coordinate popular organisational efforts. This illustrates how the approach of the state to these practices has often involved the co‐optation of the initiatives of local movements into official policies, e.g. by making compulsory the collective construction of infrastructure in these neighbourhoods. The article discusses these collective practices of work in relation to the increasing significance of individual land titles and loans, and explores some of the responses of inhabitants to official policies. It demonstrates how this coexistence leads to what can be seen as the re‐creation of a vaguely defined, hybrid space for citizenship.

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