At the doors of legality: Planners, favelados, and the titling of urban Brazil

Urban land policy design and administration are undergoing a profound democratization throughout the developing world where many housing systems operate outside planning codes and "lawyers' law." City planners have emerged as gatekeepers of legal property when only a generation ago federal agencies controlled most land reform programs. Simultaneously, legislation such as Brazil's Statute of the City, has accommodated adverse possession and a wider gamut of tenure that individual titling programs often discredited. To date, however, there has been little agreement on what interventions enable planners to incorporate a continuum of land rights.;This dissertation examines the emergence and implementation of three flexible models of property legalization in Brazilian informal settlements. These include community-designed zoning on municipal land (Recife's PREZEIS), regularization of individual plots on unauthorized subdivisions (Rio de Janeiro's Nucleo de Regularizacao de Loteamentos/Morar Legal Program ), and a program sponsored by Brazil's Ministry of Cities that offers leasehold to residents on federal property (Papel Passado). This research addresses how property markets are formed through interaction between titling 1 logics from above and individual motivations of residents (favelados) from below. It identifies which communities are being legalized, which are being excluded, and the processes responsible for these patterns.;This project applied a mixed methods framework. Semi-structured interviews with residents were used to probe incentives for land formalization while multiple regression and spatial analysis were utilized to estimate the association between titles awarded and contextual variables, including location and public investment in the community. The coding of transcripts from public hearings between residents and planners involved in legalization illuminated the conversation between customary land tenure and planning regulations.;Findings confirm research from socio-legal studies that illustrate the construction of legality through subjective notions of property rights, but reject the notion that registration benefits communities uniformly. Legalization was found to occur selectively in older communities with active residents' associations and a high level of preexisting infrastructure. Conversely, the research describes cases where high registration costs, mobility, and violence impeded legalization. This dissertation suggests several courses of action for improved land policy formulation and advances theoretical debates on property theory and participatory planning.