This study analyzes housing as a process of territorial inscription in Ecuador’s urban peripheries through a comparative examination of Guayaquil’s cooperative formations and Amazonian settlements shaped by cross-border migration. Drawing on oral histories, archival documentation, and community records, the research reconstructs how residents transformed occupation into legitimacy through organizational routines, documentary labor, and negotiated interfaces with public institutions. The methodological design integrates qualitative coding and process tracing across four analytical dimensions: everyday practice, political society, plebeian urbanism, institutional mediation, and hybrid territorialization. Results show that in Guayaquil, cooperative legality and leadership practices produced compact and administratively legible grids, while in the Amazonian corridor, road-edge layouts combined care and associative management to secure recognition under binational governance. In both contexts, housing served as a medium through which popular sectors stabilized daily life and claimed citizenship from below. The study proposes a transferable framework for interpreting peripheral formation in Latin America and offers methodological guidelines for documenting inclusion through community archives, participatory mapping, and local negotiations that transform precarious settlement into durable urban presence.