From Private to Public: Gender, Illegality, and Legalization of Urban Land Tenure

Abstract

Illegality is a common feature of low-income housing in urban Latin America, Asia and Africa. Tenure legalisation is a basic element of shelter upgrading in such areas. Gender issues have, however, been neglected to date in accounts of informal land markets and regularisation policies. This paper starts to address that omission. It has two separate but related aims. The first is to explore the implications of land tenure regularisation in illegal settlements for women's security of tenure. The second is to consider how the conceptual dualisms of the western intellectual tradition, which are inherently gendered, shape our understanding of illegality/legality and of tenure regularisation. I explore what we may learn about tenure illegality and legalisation as a result of understanding legal/illegal as a variation on the public/private dualism, the subject of debate amongst feminist theorists for several decades.