The reverse of urban planning: Towards a 20th century history of informal urbanization in Europe and its origins in Madrid and Paris (1850-1940)

The objective of this thesis was to understand the 20th-century history of informal urbanisation in Europe and its origins in Madrid and Paris. The concept of informal urbanisation was employed to refer to the process of developing shacks and precarious single-family housing areas that were not planned by the public powers and were considered to be substandard because of their below-average materials and social characteristics. Our main hypothesis was that despite being a phenomenon with ancient roots, informal urbanisation emerged as a public problem and was subsequently prohibited in connection with another historical process occurred: the birth of contemporary urban planning. Therefore, its transformation into a deviant and illegal urban growth mechanism would have been a pan-European process occurring at the same pace that urban planning developed during the first decades of the 20th century. Analysing the 20th-century history of informal urbanisation in Europe was an ambitious task that required using a large number of sources. To contend with this issue, this thesis combined two main methods: historiographical research about informal urbanisation in Europe and archival research of two case studies, Madrid and Paris, to make the account more precise by analysing primary sources of the subject. Our research of these informal areas, which were produced mainly through poor private allotments and housing developed on land squats, revealed two key moments of explosive growth across Europe: the 1920s and 1960s. The near disappearance of informal urbanisation throughout the continent seemed to be a consequence not of the historical development of urban planning—which was commonly transgressed and bypassed—but of the exacerbation of global economic inequalities, permitting the development of a geography of privilege in Europe. Concerning the cases of Paris and Madrid, the origins of informal urbanisation—that is, the moment the issue started to be problematised—seemed to occur in the second half of the 19th ...