Patterns of self-urbanization

While talking to urban planners in Lima, it was interesting to note a frustration with the morphology of self-urbanization. Lack of structure and organization, poverty and the persistent presence of street vendors were referred to as a “crisis”, where urbanization is characterized by a patchwork rather than a coherent master-plan.

It is interesting to see how the rational, modernist search for a grid like urban plan is still very dominant in the urban planner’s minds. The desire for coherence, structure and efficiency seem to reflect an urban dream that never became possible but that nevertheless is still pursued with the construction of highways and sophisticated mega-projects aimed at reclaiming occupied lands.

The problem is that the unsettling landscape of slums will never really disappear if it continues to be rejected rather than embraced. What would the city look like if more effort would be directed into understanding, including and improving self-urbanization?

Photo by Iris Kuhnlein

Learning the City through the Barrio

Each case study on the field trip provides a unique lens through which we learn about the wider city of Lima. By exploring power relations, the challenges facing citizens, and the strategies they are adopting at the barrio (neighbourhood) level, we can gain insight into the wider drivers and dynamics of urban change.

Cantagallo is changing at an accelerated rate. The area is divided into three distinct levels: referred to as levels one, two and three. Each level has a distinct socio-economic and spatial character, and risk is manifested differently in each.

Whilst the negotiations with residents over their relocation to make way for the Via Parque Rimac infrastructure and urban greening project are ongoing, the developers have begun the process of displacing residents and services. The most imminent developments are leading to the relocation of a row of houses across levels two and three, and a school, into an open space alongside level one.

Land in Cantagallo is in short supply but the original school has been closed, and construction has begun on a new temporary structure in one of the few public spaces in the area, where the school will be located in the short-term.

One week ago this site was a community sports pitch in Cantagallo. The new structure will temporarily hold the displaced school. Photo by Chris Yap

Some of the residents in level one told students that community members facing imminent displacement by the infrastructure project are considering occupying the thin, steep, green strip of land that divides levels one and two; where conditions would be highly precarious. The incremental development into the Cantagallo district will force the remaining residents to live in even higher density housing, as access to services and infrastructure become increasingly strained. 

Whilst this process of displacement within the area is an isolated case, the drivers of the relocation, the residents' strategy of occupying unsuitable, unsafe land, and the short-term thinking by the Municipality-LAMSAC in building a temporary, costly structure to relocate the primary school, mimics wider challenges and processes at the city-level. 

However, whilst exploring social, economic and spatial injustices at the barrio level offer insight into the macro challenges facing the city, the barrio is not a microcosm of the city. The ways in which citizens interact with state and private actors, the challenges they face in accessing secure housing, services and infrastructure, and their agency, must be reexamined and reinterpreted at every scale, from the household to the city-level. By exploring social and spatial justice at the barrio-level, we can identify scalable strategies and imagine scenarios for more equitable urban development for the wider city.

The old settler, the newcomer, the tourist and the corrupt

One of the four areas where the ESD group is working comprises Jose Carlos Mariátegui, an area commonly known as 'the expansion of the expansion of the expansion' in San Juan de Lurigancho, Lima's largest and poorest municipal district.

Photo by Adriana Allen

Back in the early  1990s, the first settlements on the slopes were formed through collective occupations (or invasiones in Spanish), followed over the years by further waves of occupation further up the hills. Such invasiones are in fact the main mechanism by which the collectives of the poor have accessed land in Lima for many decades. At points in history this process was not only tolerated by the state but even encouraged and supported through what is known as the planned occupations that built most of the areas occupied nowadays by the popular sectors of the population. However, unlike the earlier collective occupations, the periphery of Lima is currently expanding through a complex web of practices that constantly reconfigure the actual border of the city. Some of these practices are still driven through collective organisation as a means to reclaim the right to the city, others through what is often locally described as 'informal speculation'.

During one of the field visits, one of the first settlers in the area explains who is driving the occupation of the slopes, how and why. "This area is the outcome of four groups: the old settler, the newcomer, the tourist and the corrupt. The former are people like me...those who came to the area almost two decades ago in search of a place to live. The newcomers are those in need who keep on coming to the area because they have no alternative options elsewhere in the city. The tourists are people from the lower part of San Juan de Lurigancho and other parts of metropolitan Lima, who come to see how things go, hoping to grab a piece of land which could be turned into a plot either for their children, or to be sold to others. They come and go, and often give up before their dream materialises, this is why we call them the tourists." Last but not least, the 'corrupt' describes the land traffickers, those who speculate at scale, opening roads and carving the hills in search of profits through practices that range from negotiation with existing settlers all the way to intimidation and coercion.

These four groups - the old settler, the newcomer, the tourist and the corrupt - operate in the same territory but with very different rationales, motives and expectations. While some are just deploying individual and collective coping practices to claim a place within the city, others deploy different forms of speculation ranging from the individual expectation of capturing a small surplus by carving further plots on the slopes, to that driven by organised networks of land traffickers driving the expansion of the city in the interstices of the legal and the illegal, the formal and the informal. These practices are however often homogeneised from the outside, feeding into narratives that render the current occupation of the slopes as a form of illegal informality.

Both the groups working in Jose Carlos Mariátegui and Huaycán set up to explore the different processes that drive the urbanisation of the slopes, an understanding that holds crucial clues to seek transformative strategies capable of addressing the production and reproduction of socio-environmental injustices.