Beyond their legal status, these territories reveal profound meanings and, at the same time, demonstrate the organizational capacity, resilience, and creativity of communities excluded from formal access to housing. In the case of Panama, the state response remains fragmented and limited, prioritizing market logic over comprehensive approaches to social justice.
On the other hand, authors from a critical territorial perspective, such as Lorena Zárate (2019), highlight that “these are not informal settlements, but neighborhoods and cities built by the people”; they generate their own space with their own meanings, and by creating their habitat—even in informality and illegality—they represent a struggle for the right to dignified housing. Faced with these perspectives, it is necessary to rethink the concept of informal settlement, because despite their generally accepted characterizations, there are contradictions between the legality of the land and the quality of the habitat. This dichotomy between the formal and informal, the legal and illegal, masks a much more complex reality where poverty, lack of access, territorial exclusion, community organization, and social cohesion converge.
Self-construction cannot be reduced to an improvised solution; it is, rather, a form of social production of habitat. Thus, informal settlements are seen as urban anomalies, peripheral cancers, formations external to the natural growth of cities, and not as expressions that are part of our Latin American cities.
**Conclusions**
Informal settlements can no longer be conceived solely as failures of urban development, but as legitimate expressions of citizenship that claim their right to inhabit. Recognizing informal settlements as a constitutive part of the city implies overcoming stigmatizing discourses, making their contributions visible, and moving towards inclusive public policies that integrate self-management, community imaginaries, and technical accompaniment as pillars of a more equitable and humane urban transformation. From the same author's perspective, it is justified that in the absence of the state, there is community strength.
**Panama and its role in the issue**
In the current context of Panama, the phenomenon of the boom in private housing developments and the expansion of informal settlements results from fragmented urban policies that favor the real estate market over the well-being of vulnerable sectors without access to their own and dignified housing. It is in this scenario that the contradiction between legality—linked to the formal fulfillment of the norm—and legitimacy—related to what is morally just and socially accepted—emerges.
**Informal settlement?**
The concept of “informal settlement” according to the Ministry of Housing and Territorial Planning (MIVIOT) refers to inhabited spaces that do not meet the legal, technical, and social requirements necessary to guarantee orderly urban development and a decent quality of life for its inhabitants. Faced with the reality of Panama, there is no access to legalization with the required agility, but this does not determine the community's progress from the settlement.
**Constructed imaginaries.**
The theory of social imaginaries, developed by C. Castoriadis (1975), proposes the conceptualization of the dominant imaginary, the generally accepted and reproduced; and the dominated imaginary. More than a simple expression of poverty, this problem reveals deep structural inequalities in the distribution of space, resources, and opportunities, as well as the persistent limitations of the State in guaranteeing this fundamental human right. In this context, the housing issue is configured as a problem of social justice that involves various actors: the State, social movements, international organizations, the private sector; and especially, the affected communities, who are forced to generate their own forms of inhabiting in the absence or insufficiency of effective public policies.
As the economist and urbanist Samuel Jaramillo points out, this is a complex process that requires planning, prior savings, and community organization that precedes the occupation of the land. At the end of the road, it is not about the legal and illegal, but about having the vision that we are Panamanians with pending struggles and legitimate rights to obtain. This approach applied to informal settlements shows that the generally accepted and reproduced versions move away from the social reality lived by the actors within the built spaces. Valentina Abufhele (2019) warns about how the State and other actors define and intervene in settlements through the language of poverty. This “politics of poverty” creates a narrative that depoliticizes the struggles for urban land and reduces its inhabitants to passive subjects, depriving them of their organizational capacity.
State housing plans are insufficient, and in many cases have failed to comprehensively address the housing needs of popular sectors. An example of this is that currently the Ministry of Housing and Territorial Development (MIVIOT), develops four central plans: “progress plan”, aimed at Panamanian citizens with a property title who can expand their homes having a business in their residence, second “housing savings fund” finances financing to authorized institutions and corporations, third “real estate leasing” regulates the activity of financial leasing of real estate, offers incentives to the real estate sector and last “surveying and legalization” that involves legalizing land tenure, vision to improve urban development with technical and social advice. Of the four programs developed by MIVIOT, the first is linked to people with their property title, the following are directed to structural programs at the level of larger financing related to real estate markets and institutions; and the last one that is linked to the topic developed of informal settlements.
**Two-story shack in a country where inequity prevails.**
By Maryorie Centeno Sociologist, teacher and researcher at the University of Panama
In the case of Panama, the state response remains fragmented and limited, prioritizing market logic over comprehensive approaches to social justice.
**Informal settlements: A legitimate form of access to housing?**
Access to dignified housing for socio-economically vulnerable sectors remains a historical struggle that, in the current context of unequal urbanization and exclusionary development models, acquires new dimensions. Affirms that 65% is advancing in different stages of the administrative process, which range from the summons of the parties and field inspections, to the carrying out of proceedings, drafting of resolutions or mediation sessions and of the rest of the percentage was not informed. Despite the numbers being discouraging, regarding legalization procedures or their absence, there are other variables that are decisive in the settlements examples: community organization to achieve obtaining basic services, such as electricity to the community; water boards; place of waste disposal; construction of sidewalks or paths; improvement in housing infrastructure; among others. Legalizing an informal settlement can be a legal advance, but it does not guarantee substantial transformations in living conditions. In fact, formalization can lead to new forms of precariousness if it is not accompanied by investments in infrastructure, services, and access to basic rights. The ideas fundamentally arise from the direct actors and from a critical perspective, contrary to the dominant imaginary. The latter, from the official page of MIVIOT, under the Directorate of Informal Settlements informs that it has approximately 500 settlements in the process of legalization. Based on your 2023-2024 report from MIVIOT, the Legal Section in charge of Informal Settlements has 230 active files under its management. That, between 2023 and 2024, only seven of these cases have been concluded.
