The politics of hyperregulation in La Paz, Bolivia: Speculative peri-urban development in a context of unresolved municipal boundary conflicts

Abstract

In Bolivia, urbanisation increasingly takes place in peri-urban settings situated outside the boundaries of cities. Unlike previous research that considers peri-urban developments such as rural-to-urban land use transitions to be characterised by state absence and little regulation and planning, this article demonstrates that such developments occur precisely because of the presence of particular multi-scalar governance configurations. Drawing on case study material from peri-urban La Paz, the article demonstrates how legislative reforms by Bolivia’s national government on decentralisation and municipal delineation, which failed to establish clear jurisdictional boundaries, create a situation of hyperregulation whereby multiple local authorities claim political control over the same territory by deploying distinct and at times conflicting, legal and planning frameworks. While hyperregulation enables a loose coalition of elite actors, including government authorities, resident leaders of peri-urban settlements and private sector representatives, to advance specific political and socio-economic interests, it puts ordinary residents in a situation of permanent uncertainty. The article contributes to and further nuances conceptual debates on calculated informality which uncover how states deliberately create legally ambiguous systems to facilitate speculative urban developments. Unlike previous studies which highlight that this is mainly achieved through state engineering, and particularly by suspending or violating the law, this article demonstrates that legal ambiguity and irregularity can also be generated through multi-scalar governance configurations that (1) involve a number of elite actors, including state authorities but also private sector and civil society representatives and (2) create a situation in which different regulatory systems co-exist without coordination.

How to unravel pathbreaking trajectories in the left‐behind areas of Istanbul?

“…Recently, academic studies have put more emphasis on ‘left‐behind areas’ that are characterized by high vacancy rates, a lack of a property market, and diminished authority in urban land (Herbert, 2018). Some others refer to the ‘deliberate speculation’ (Horn, 2022) on the left‐behind areas in valuable locations by holding prime sites off the market in anticipation of future appreciation, and creating an artificial scarcity of land available for development (Rybeck, 2020). The ‘soft’ characteristics of these spaces are also highlighted for their existence outside, alongside, or in‐between the formal statutory scales of governance (Haughton et al, 2013).…”

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“…For example, Monkkonen and Ronconi (2013) found for the three major metropolitan areas of Argentina that ‘municipalities with higher levels of regulation have lower rates of compliance with property laws, and lots selling legally in these municipalities have lower land prices’ (p. 1951), while Wigle (2010) and Lombard (2016) have explained the effects of land reform in informal settlements in Mexico, outlining the nature of the in-situ social relations and land conflict in these areas. Similarly, Horn (2022) illustrates how the hyper-regulation of peri-urban growth in La Paz (Bolivia) results in ordinary citizens’ permanent uncertainty and promotes a ‘calculated informality which uncovers how states deliberately create legally ambiguous systems to facilitate speculative urban developments’ (p. 2489). These examples provide nuanced ways of conceptualising land conflicts, informality and the regulatory powers of the local state.…”