Noel Manzano

I’m currently a PhD student at Universidad de Valladolid / Bauhaus University of Weimar in Spain. I am interested in informal processes, squatting, self-management, segregation, urban planning history and state theory. I studied architecture, sociology, and urban history, and I try to combine these different perspectives in urban analysis. I have worked mainly in the working-class peripheries' sociology and history, with a geographical focus in Paris, Madrid, and Rio de Janeiro. I am currently studying the history of the poor, unauthorised urbanisation processes in Europe during the 20th century. I have carried out a historiographical analysis of the phenomenon in the region, finding accounts about informal urbanisation neighbourhoods in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Stockholm, Rome, Madrid, Barcelona, Lisbon, Athens, Belgrade, Minsk, Bucarest, Prague and Warsaw between 1900 and 1990.

Besides it, I have done archival research about two neighbourhoods of Madrid and Paris, where various episodes of "informal urbanisation" happened between 1900 and 1970. The research's preliminary conclusions show that the development of contemporary urban planning led to a historical process of illegalisation of the substandard areas that, instead of avoiding them, provoked its clandestine development and the birth of illegal housing markets. This historical process, which has been conceptualised as the "informalization" of poor housing development, could have happened in other world regions.

Recent Publications
1. Manzano N. (2021), The reverse of urban planning: informal city and defective urban growth in XX Century Europe. In Max Welch Guerra Contributions to a Pan-European History of Urban Planning in the Twentieth Century (accepted).

2. Manzano N., Castrillo M. (2019), From chabolas to invisible squats. A reflection on the residential informality evolution in Madrid. In Smagacz-Poziemska M., Gomez M.V., Pereira P., Guarino L., Kurtenbach S., Villal J.J., Inequality and Uncertainty, Current Challenges of Cities. Palgrave Macmillan.

3. Bogado D., Manzano N., Solanas M. (2019), Squatting as Claiming to the Right to the City. In Degirmenci E., Morales I. and Venturini F., Social Ecology and the Right to the City: Towards Ecological and Democratic Cities. Black Rose Books. Montreal, Chicago and London.