*Mobile Housing as an Initial Proposal to Manage Informal Territories Exposed to Disaster Risks DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.108828*

widely discussed between the 1970s and 1980s when the welfare state was in crisis and many families could not access housing and land within the consolidated city. The informal settlement or urban informality moved from a legal-normative definition referring to spaces that conflict with current urban regulations, toward the conception of spaces not integrated into the conventional urban system [22–24]. In parallel, in the last 30 years, numerous investigations have exposed a new perspective where urban informality is referred to as a constituent part of the productive and territorial structure of cities [16, 25]. That is why informal territory concatenates the terms of territory and informality, exposing the sense of belonging and community that the population develops while seeking or developing residential alternatives in response to obsolete or limiting proposals provided by the state.

The concept of informal territory arises from urban phenomena seen in northern Chile, where space is dominated by socio-territorial injustice. In the northern cities, it is possible to find informal territories of different types, located in central, pericentral, and peripheral areas. This evidences their configuration as particular places since they have a heterogeneous condition regarding their creation, construction materials, housing purpose, and those who produce and inhabit them [17]. Likewise, informal territories imply the production of place in any geographic context [18]. However, a highly complex aspect lies in its location close to disaster risk areas, exposure to contamination, the presence of household waste, or in the case of informal settlements, its construction on old dumps. For this reason, we also postulate the informal territory as a socio-analytical and political category that recognizes various territorialities of informality in access to housing and land. It also observes the complexity of the households that produce it, as these spaces are not inhabited exclusively by families inserted in the classic notions of poverty, as was stated in the past. Rather, it is produced by households with reduced social mobility, households that have had to prioritize how to use their limited income (e.g., between paying the children's school fees or paying the rent for the home they occupy). Informal territories are also produced by immigrant households that, due to various situations, cannot access formal, well-located housing at a price according to their family income.

Therefore, informal territories also reflect the dynamic and heterogeneous forms of living that occur within the city, which can vary over time and can differ from one city to another [17]. As an exercise based on observations in northern Chile, we postulate four typologies of informal territories according to their level of consolidation, described in **Table 1**. Informal territories are configured in parallel as an alternative production to housing and as a survival mechanism for vulnerable and low-income groups. For this reason, they make visible different forms of agency, which are defined by the type of dwelling inhabited, the agreements they establish with the authorities, and their place of location in the cities. Following **Table 1**, first, we observe that the marginalized informal territories lack internal organization, being criminalized and racialized spaces, where the morphology of the occupied space complicates their possibility of articulating with other groups. Second, those who live in deteriorated informal territories cannot establish a community, since informal subletting avoids any type of political organization that would show the risks to which families are exposed, either inside the buildings or in their surroundings. Finally, in transitional and consolidated informal territories, there is evidence of a greater capacity for organization, whether in housing committees or cooperatives. Most of our interviewees declare that a consolidated informal territory gives them greater freedom to coordinate collectively, an essential factor for negotiating their self-managed urbanization projects.
