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.

The multiple dimensions of risk in the centre of Lima

The first days of fieldwork have started to reveal the complex structural conditions producing and reproducing social-spatial inequalities and precarious living conditions for citizens of Barrios Altos and Cantagallo in the centre of Lima.

A vacant plot in Cantagallo where the former residents accepted LAMSAC's offer of money to vacate the site immediately (c) Chris Yap

In Cantagallo, multiple groups, such as the indigenous Shipibo community, live in highly concentrated makeshift homes, directly on top of a former city dump-site. The entire district is marked for regeneration, and the community is engaged in long negotiations with the municipal authorities over their relocation. However, the private company LAMSAC, working in partnership with the municipality to manage the infrastructure megaproject, Via Parque Rimac, is offering money to families to vacate their plots immediately. Some members of the community have already left their improvised properties, which were immediately demolished and the plots fenced off, to prevent others from taking their place.

For every family that vacates their plot during talks with the municipal authorities, the negotiating position of the remaining families is weakened. Those families that remain face a multitude of socio-environmental risks; unhygienic living conditions and tenure insecurity the most apparent.

In Barrios Altos, only a few hundred metres away from Cantagallo, residents face a different set of challenges and risks. The historic centre of Lima is characterised by its grand, dilapidated buildings. The current residents of the quintas - colonial-era buildings - some of which have lived in the area for generations and others that are new to the district, face daily risks from unstable, unsafe buildings, land traffickers and forced displacement.

Buildings at risk of collapse in Barrios Altos (c) Chris Yap

The central location and cultural significance of the district and the quintas has attracted multiple actors with competing intentions for the area's regeneration. Private sector developers and municipal agencies, such as ProLima, are being pushed to find new solutions for urban regeneration.

The displacement or relocation of residents from the grand buildings is followed by the barricading of the room or building, just as the vacant plots are fenced off across the river in Cantagallo.

A bricked-up former residence in Barrios Altos (c) Chris Yap

Meanwhile, many local private developers are building illegally, without permits, behind the UNESCO-protected facades of the quintas. But whilst the municipal authorities are aware of the problem, they lack the capacity to prevent the developments.

Of greater concern are the cases where private developers have forcibly evicted tenants, or cut water pipes to hasten the collapse of the already fragile buildings in order to acquire the land for development.

The complex reality generated by multiple actors with different interests, capacities, resources and priorities, and multi dimensional realities of risk, are manifested differently in each of the two sites, yet the residents face comparable challenges. Over the next two weeks, students will explore the nature of risk in each of the sites, and the strategies that residents and other stakeholders are using to realise equitable urban development solutions.

A quinta where the water pipes were illegally cut, forcing the residents to leave and causing the structure to collapse. (c)  Chris Yap

Over the past two days, MSc Environment and Sustainable Development students have examined, reflected-upon and interrogated social, environmental and political conditions in Lima, Peru. On Sunday, DPU staff and students were introduced to Lima first by urban environmental expert, Liliana Miranda, and by architect and urban planner with the Instituto de Desarollo Urbano CENCA, Carlos Escalante. The group toured the city by bus and on foot; visiting three of the chosen research districts: Cantagallo, Barrios Altos and Jose Carlos Mariategui.

The stark divide between San Juan de Miraflores (left) where residents access an average of 20-30 litres of water per day and the Surco District (right) where residents enjoy 460 litres per day. (photo by Chris Yap)

First the group walked to a hilltop overlooking the divide between the 'invaded' San Juan de Miraflores and the affluent Surco District (pictured above). The houses in San Juan de Miraflores were built in accordance with the 1961 Law of Marginal Settlements and Popular Neighbourhoods, which gave communities the right to built houses and improve marginal land around the city, so long as the settlements respected the interests of the private sector, state property and agricultural land. Decades on, the settlement is still severely lacking in basic services and infrastructure.

The tour of the city was the first opportunity for many of the students to explore the sites that they have been examining for the past months. 

Today students presented their diagnostic, pre-fieldtrip videos to research partners from each of the four districts. The feedback and discussions that followed challenged the research hypotheses of each of the groups. The discussions will influence and inform the first stages of the fieldwork, starting tomorrow...

MSc students Eva Filippi and Marco Trombetta presenting their videos and case study to research partners from the four districts.

Environmental justice in Lima: Co-learning for action:

Every year, students from MSc. Environment and Sustainable Development at DPU, embark on a fieldtrip to a country in the Global South. Supported by prior research, the fieldwork synthesizes hands-on experience of using the skills, concepts, theories and techniques of environmental justice for development. 

This year the research aims to understand the relations between water, risk and urban development and how environmental injustices are produced and can be tackled; by exploring scenarios and strategies imbedded in the wider socio-political, economic and ecological processes, with the potential for transformative change.

Four case studies: Cantagallo, Barrios Altos, Jose Carlos Mariátegui and Huaycán were chosen with our local partners and offer unique readings of Lima.