How do we tackle Urban Informality? Comparing Strategies in South Korea and in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)

Urban informality is one of the primary problems faced by countries where urban development has taken place at a very fast pace. Most of these settlements are located in areas vulnerable to disasters, are very inefficient in terms of quality of construction and land use, and often are located in peripheral areas. Today, eight out of ten people in LAC live in cities and one out of three live in a slum lacking basic services and infrastructure. The households living in illegal dwellings have accessed land by irregular means, whereupon they have gradually started self-building homes without complying with the technical and planning regulations. The South Korean development model is an example of successful replacement of informal settlements that in the mid-1960s amounted to 38% of the residential stock in Seoul and posed a substantive challenge for the country’s urban development. South Korea’s model promoted a drastic substitution of informal housing by new higher density units, a process that effectively redefined urban form and land use patterns in existing informal areas. The event will present the current informal housing issues and relevant housing policies in LAC. It will also show the evolution of the housing situation in Korea over the past 40 years and the housing policies that have been promoted to improve the housing deficit and informal settlements, including their achievements and limitations. Additionally, it will offer a comparison between the cases of LAC and Korea that will serve to draw implications for future policy options for LAC to solve housing informality issues.