This week-long professional development course provides participants the opportunity to develop knowledge and systematize their understanding of the urban informal economy, as well as to develop instruments of economic analysis on informality, land markets and price formation, and the processes that generate informal settlements in cities of Latin America and the Caribbean. Participants deepen their knowledge of the economic dimension of the urban informal economy, technical intervention mechanisms, planning and scale program management, and mechanisms of regularization of tenure of the land through the analysis of experiences and cases in cities of Latin America and the Caribbean and other regions. The course is developed in collaboration with the United Nations Program for Human Settlements (UN-Habitat), the General Directorate of Planning and Territorial Development (DGODT) and the Agency to Promote Development Initiatives (APID) of Dominican Republic.

This course brings together different and critical perspectives on urban informality and the approach regarding regularization to this phenomenon. It uses theory and debates from sociology, urban planning and law to help students sharpen their concept of urban informality and to design feasible practices that address it. In conceptual terms, it is a question of breaking with stereotypical and one-dimensional images of informal settlements. Students learn to appreciate the formal and functional multiplicity of informal urban settlements.