Speaker
Description
Introduction and research problem
Urban land regularization is frequently understood as a legal, cadastral, or tenure-security intervention aimed at bringing informal settlements into the formal property system. In many cities of the Global South, however, this interpretation captures only part of the planning problem. Long-established urban territories may be physically consolidated, socially organized, served to varying degrees by infrastructure and public services, and fully embedded in the everyday functioning of the city, while remaining only partially recognized by cadastral, legal, planning, and administrative systems.
This paper asks: how can urban land regularization move beyond property titling to become a planning strategy for addressing the institutional fragmentation of long-established urban territories?
The question is examined through the case of Salvador, Brazil. Founded in 1549 as the first capital of Portuguese America, Salvador has been shaped by a long history of unequal access to land, infrastructure, mobility, public investment, and formal recognition. Contemporary territorial inequalities therefore cannot be explained exclusively through recent informal occupation. They are also associated with historically uneven processes through which different territories and populations have been incorporated into the legally and institutionally recognized city.
This condition challenges a binary distinction between the “formal” and “informal” city. Some territories are neither simply outside formal planning nor fully integrated into it. They may be recognized by one public system and absent from another; receive infrastructure without complete cadastral regularity; contain consolidated buildings and streets while retaining unresolved land structures; or be socially established neighborhoods whose institutional status remains fragmented.
The paper proposes to examine this condition through the notion of territorial incompleteness: a situation in which the material and social consolidation of an urban territory is not matched by coherent recognition across the legal, cadastral, planning, infrastructural, and administrative systems through which the city is governed. Rather than treating such incompleteness as synonymous with informality, the concept is explored as a possible analytical lens for understanding a specific form of planning uncertainty produced by fragmented institutions.
Conceptual framework
Planning scholarship has long questioned approaches that understand informality merely as the absence of regulation. Roy (2005) argues that informality can itself be understood as a mode of urbanization shaped by state practices, regulatory decisions, and differentiated forms of recognition. This interpretation shifts attention from a simple opposition between legality and illegality toward the institutional processes through which urban space is categorized, governed, and legitimized.
Within the Latin American debate, Fernandes (2011) similarly demonstrates the limitations of regularization policies centered exclusively on individual property titling. Legal recognition may substantially improve tenure security, but without integration with urban planning, infrastructure, environmental policy, and social objectives, titling alone cannot overcome broader patterns of socio-spatial exclusion.
The Brazilian framework of Regularização Fundiária Urbana (REURB), consolidated through Federal Law No. 13,465/2017, provides an important context for examining this relationship. Although frequently associated in practice with property registration, REURB encompasses legal, urbanistic, environmental, and social measures designed to incorporate informal urban settlements into the legal organization of cities.
This broader scope creates an opportunity to rethink regularization through planning. Instead of asking only how individual plots or buildings can obtain formal legal status, a planning-oriented approach asks how an already existing territory can become coherently recognized within the multiple systems that organize public investment, land-use regulation, infrastructure, mobility, environmental management, and urban governance.
The paper therefore contrasts two analytical orientations. A property-centred approach identifies insecure or absent title as the principal problem and treats formal property recognition as the central outcome. A territory-centred approach recognizes tenure security as essential but situates it within a larger process of territorial integration.
From this perspective, uncertainty is not restricted to residents being unsure about their property rights. It may also be institutional: public authorities may have incomplete, fragmented, or contradictory ways of recognizing the same territory. This interpretation connects the case directly to the conference theme, which understands uncertainty not simply as a lack of information but as something shaped by institutional arrangements, governance structures, power relations, and decision-making processes.
Methods
The research adopts an exploratory qualitative case-study approach focused on Salvador. It combines three complementary forms of analysis.
First, it examines the Brazilian legal and institutional framework for urban land regularization, with particular attention to the relationship between tenure recognition and broader urbanistic measures.
Second, it examines Salvador’s current municipal planning context to identify how long-established territories can be recognized and incorporated into planning systems beyond a parcel-by-parcel regularization logic. Documentary analysis includes municipal planning instruments, regulatory provisions, territorial information, and materials associated with the contemporary revision of the city’s planning framework.
Third, the paper develops an analytical framework for comparing property-centred and territory-centred approaches to regularization. Rather than evaluating the number of titles produced, the framework examines the extent to which regularization can coordinate different dimensions of urban recognition.
The research is exploratory rather than an impact evaluation. Its purpose is therefore not to claim measurable outcomes from a completed regularization programme, but to use the Salvador case to investigate the institutional possibilities and limitations of reframing regularization as a planning process.
Expected results
The analysis is expected to identify at least four interconnected dimensions through which territorial recognition can be assessed.
The first is legal and tenure recognition, including the clarification of land rights, boundaries, occupation, and mechanisms for secure tenure.
The second is planning recognition, through which territories are incorporated into municipal mapping, land-use regulation, territorial strategies, investment priorities, and long-term planning processes.
The third is infrastructural and service integration, involving the relationship between regularization and access to mobility, sanitation, public facilities, environmental improvements, public space, and other urban systems.
The fourth is social and community recognition, concerning the extent to which lived experience, local knowledge, territorial identity, and community priorities are incorporated into the process through which the territory is understood and planned.
The expected finding is that these dimensions cannot be effectively addressed in isolation. A territory may achieve legal recognition while remaining poorly integrated into public investment and planning systems. Conversely, it may receive infrastructure and services while fundamental land and cadastral uncertainties persist.
The concept of territorial incompleteness is therefore proposed as a way to describe the gap between the material existence of the city and the fragmented institutional systems through which that city is recognized. The greater the disconnection among these systems, the greater the institutional uncertainty surrounding the territory, even when its physical existence and social consolidation are not in question.
Discussion and conclusion
This perspective has two implications for planning theory and practice.
First, it suggests moving beyond the formal/informal binary. Long-established urban territories may occupy intermediate and multidimensional positions within systems of urban recognition. Formality itself can therefore be understood not as a single status but as a combination of legal, spatial, infrastructural, administrative, and political forms of incorporation.
Second, it reframes land regularization as a potential coordination mechanism. If conceived only as a procedure for producing individual property titles, regularization intervenes primarily in one dimension of urban uncertainty. If connected to territorial planning, however, it may provide an institutional opportunity to coordinate fragmented forms of recognition and to link tenure security with infrastructure, services, mobility, environmental conditions, and community knowledge.
This argument is particularly relevant in cities whose contemporary spatial inequalities are embedded in long historical processes. In Salvador, addressing these inequalities does not mean assuming that regularization alone can repair the social and spatial consequences of colonial urbanization. Rather, it requires asking whether contemporary planning institutions reproduce inherited patterns of incomplete incorporation or create mechanisms through which historically marginalized territories can progressively achieve fuller recognition within the city.
The paper’s principal conceptual contribution is therefore the exploration of territorial incompleteness as a form of institutionally produced planning uncertainty. Its empirical contribution is to bring the Brazilian REURB framework and the case of Salvador into dialogue with international debates on informality, tenure, and spatial justice.
The central proposition is that the planning challenge is not simply how to formalize an informal city, but how to recognize and integrate territories that are already socially and physically consolidated while remaining institutionally incomplete.
Salvador is not presented as a model to be replicated. Instead, it serves as a case through which to develop an analytical framework that may be relevant to other cities where established communities coexist with fragmented tenure systems, uneven infrastructure, and incomplete incorporation into planning institutions. Reframing land regularization from a property-centred procedure toward a territory-centred planning strategy may therefore offer a broader way of understanding how planning can respond to everyday uncertainty and inherited spatial inequality.
References
Brazil. (2017). Lei nº 13.465, de 11 de julho de 2017. Presidência da República.
Fernandes, E. (2011). Regularization of informal settlements in Latin America. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Roy, A. (2005). Urban informality: Toward an epistemology of planning. Journal of the American Planning Association, 71(2), 147–158. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944360508976689