Arts , Humanities & Social Science

Abstract

City planners and politicians view spontaneous and illegal settlements as a threat and an opportunity. By contrast, the squatters strategize to manipulate the planning and political process to create a stable community. The outside researcher can seek a representative sample of communities in like situations or, alternatively, can study adjacent communities seeking to ally or compete with each other to gain formal recognition and become part of the existing urban framework. This common set of antagonisms in the community formation process can be extrapolated to an imagined anthropocene - one that requires a kaleidoscopic perspective that is, at once, formal and informal, normative and spontaneous, representative and case-study oriented.