As happens in many places, in Montevideo a good part of the urban expansion is associated with rural-city migration and also with immigration processes, mainly from other Latin American countries in the past decades (INE, 2022). Much of this expansion occurs on the periphery of the city, at informal settlements.
Many of the inhabitants of these informal settlements, are poor people from rural areas of Uruguay, who came searching for better opportunities. Migration has been reinforced by structural changes in the productive forms, especially in the increase of monocultures. This process has a long history, but in the last decades, with the expansion of the soybean model, many small rural producers were expelled and migrated to the city.
On the other hand, many poor immigrants, with informal jobs or unemployed, are also the population that inhabits irregular settlements. In particular, they are immigrants from poor countries, who, although they have managed to establish social networks that support them, often get the lowest paid jobs, than in countries like Uruguay, with a very high cost of living and low salaries, it is not enough to cover the needs of formal housing.
Informal settlements are full of conflicts and difficulties. The conjunction of life of local inhabitants with national and international migrants, produces conflicts of different magnitude, ranging from fights over the use of common space, to the organization of criminal gangs and violent disputes over space. This is framed in the settlements in a web of informality that permeates life. But there is also room for conviviality and development of networks that allows organization to demand improvements from local government, as well as a support that enable survival in these contexts. This proposal seeks to analyse these processes.
