The city I am researching, Patos de Minas, seems to be growing in a very informal way. Informal in this sense must be read as non-formalized, non structured, a natural way. I suppose we all agree that an urban environment needs some sort of structure, or a set of rules to define organizational patterns, to be able to provide good living conditions for all inhabitants.
I am saying this because if no such thing as an overall structure is applied, what happens? Well, Brazilian cities show the answer to this question: we fall back to the law of the jungle; the survival of the fittest. If your neighbor suddenly decides to tear down his house, and is going to construct a 25 story apartment building so he can make more money, you can do nothing against it. Unless you have more money as he does and have more influential friends as he does.
Where people live together there exists a need for organization, whether on a physical, social, cultural or economical level. This is equal for every society, every city, every country. The differences therefore, are noticed by the type of system which is applied. The type of the applied organizational system, and the amount of control/freedom of the citizen, depends totally on the governmental system and the philosophy behind it. We can, for example, distinguish monotonous social housing in communist countries with complete governmental control. A social democratic system in the Netherlands, where regulation is meant to protect the citizens rights, which means in practice an almost completely controlled system with little freedom for individual initiatives. And we distinguish the (maybe developing countries) system, where the government just supplies the basic infrastructure and the free market determines the content of the city. A so called self-organizing system.
The result of the system in the Netherlands is that the individual has many ways to protest against developments which could harm the quality of his territory. Even if the development is of great benefit to the whole society, many times the interest of the individual is given preference. In China however is no space for the individual, and complete neighborhoods and villages are replaced if it is in the interest of society. In Brazil is the importance of the individual determined by his position on the scale of hierarchy in society. The higher the position, the more importance and space (=freedom) is given to the individual. Self-organizing therefore, with no control from above.
