**3. Mobile housing as an initial proposal and strategy to reduce risk**

From the analysis of northern informal territories and the experiences of their inhabitants, the mobile housing proposal arises. More than a housing typology with certain construction characteristics, we propose mobile housing as a government housing program for cases of residential vulnerability, including those who have been evicted or displaced, to leave informality given their situation of helplessness that can directly lead to homelessness. Specifically, mobile housing would answer an intermediate stage of the residential trajectories of individuals, located between the complete housing precariousness, common in some informal territories, and access to permanent housing.

This program also would allow access to formal housing under a provisional scheme that recognizes their possibility of choosing where to reside for a certain time without leading directly to own a property, in addition to being able to decide how to continue their residential trajectory. The most explicit example of this situation would be the residential choices of immigrants, who could be temporarily living in a northern city, and then continue their journey to other latitudes if they wish so. In this sense, mobile housing would also make it possible to avoid highly detrimental conditions for wellbeing, such as overcrowding, lack of privacy, exposure to precarious living conditions, including construction with inappropriate materials that generates concentration of humidity and lack of natural light, and the experience of various types of violence or aggression, all especially present in the sublease of rooms in central spaces.

In practical terms, mobile housing would allow renting available housing in the built environment of urban or rural areas, considering the extensive difficulties exposed by the state to build social housing. This housing program should have more flexible beneficiary selection criteria than the current rental subsidy, contemplating a reduced time to be applied, while it seeks to avoid homelessness. Likewise, the program should consider that the beneficiaries reside in rented houses for a range between 6 months and 1 year. In terms of management, the program could contemplate a monitoring and orientation process by public officials that allow individuals and their families to make the best decisions about their residential trajectories and their future actions. With this, the mobile housing program would incorporate nomadism as a process of constant re-territorialization, as it allows negotiation between the new context where people are about to settle residentially and their previous experience in other places where they have lived [33].

At the same time, recognizing the significant amount of population that currently resides in informal territories, the mobile housing program would also consider improving the risk exposure conditions of these spaces. This line of intervention in

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


## **Table 2.**

*Proposals to reduce risk in informal territories.*

informal territories does not necessarily seek the formalization or immediate regulation of informal settlements and deteriorated housing, but instead acknowledges that their inhabitants live at imminent risk and a planning response must be given. As a result, we suggest a series of proposals that cover various dimensions of living, reacting, and preventing risk, as shown in **Table 2**.

Finally, with these preventive steps, the constant absence of the state in informal territories would be compensated, since the condition of informality should not exclude its population from receiving adequate protection against risks. Likewise, historical disasters registered in northern cities show that any event affects formal and informal spaces transversally. Consequently, it is time for a territorial planning that projects adequate and safe conditions for all inhabitants.
