ABSTRACT
Legal empowerment provides an important set of strategies for using the law and human rights to confront urban poverty and exclusion, by putting communities at the centre of multidisciplinary approaches to urban development. This chapter introduces this book, by providing a comparative analysis of experiences of informal settlement communities in 10 countries of Latin America, Africa and Asia. From a legal perspective, the challenges of informal settlements are mostly framed in terms of a need to overcome informality. Legal empowerment's defining feature is in deploying a series of strategies and human rights guarantees to confront informality, beyond the classic roles of challenging incompatible or poorly implemented laws, to shift the power imbalances that shape informal settlement life. Additional lessons relate to the role of participation and the use of strategic litigation in spurring citizen-led legal advocacy and reforms — as part of a holistic approach that combines purely political, technical and legal strategies. Together they offer a picture of the law as a potential force for social change and development, which provides a normative anchor, but reflects the law's instrumental limits, if pursued in the absence of a larger set of socio-political strategies. Discussions regarding the right to the city help crystallize the interplay between the legal and socio-political spheres.
