Informal Urbanization In Latin America

Download or read book Informal Urbanization in Latin America written by Christian Werthmann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-07-14 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Various kinds of informal and extra-legal settlements—commonly called shantytowns, favelas, or barrios—are the prevailing type of urban land use in much of the developing world. United Nations estimates suggest that there are close to 900 million people living in squatter communities worldwide, with the number expected to increase in the coming decades. Informal Urbanization in Latin America investigates prevailing strategies for addressing informal settlements, which started to shift away from large-scale slum clearance to on-site upgrading in Latin America over the last 40 years, by improving public spaces, infrastructure and facilities. The cases in this book range from one micro intervention (the Villa Tranquila Project in Buenos Aires) to three large-scale government-run projects: the celebrated Favela Bairro Program in Rio de Janeiro, the social housing program in São Paulo and the famous Proyectos Urbanos Integrales Approach in Medellín. The cases show a collaborative and sensitive transformation of landscape and public space, and provide designers and planners with the tools to develop better strategies that can mitigate the volatility that the residents of non-formal neighborhoods are exposed to. The book is a must-read for all who are interested or working in the global urbanization as well as social equity.

Download or read book Cities From Scratch written by Brodwyn Fischer and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-28 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays challenges long-entrenched ideas about the history, nature, and significance of the informal neighborhoods that house the vast majority of Latin America's urban poor. Until recently, scholars have mainly viewed these settlements through the prisms of crime and drug-related violence, modernization and development theories, populist or revolutionary politics, or debates about the cultures of poverty. Yet shantytowns have proven both more durable and more multifaceted than any of these perspectives foresaw. Far from being accidental offshoots of more dynamic economic and political developments, they are now a permanent and integral part of Latin America's urban societies, critical to struggles over democratization, economic transformation, identity politics, and the drug and arms trades. Integrating historical, cultural, and social scientific methodologies, this collection brings together recent research from across Latin America, from the informal neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City, Managua and Buenos Aires. Amid alarmist exposés, Cities from Scratch intervenes by considering Latin American shantytowns at a new level of interdisciplinary complexity. Contributors. Javier Auyero, Mariana Cavalcanti, Ratão Diniz, Emilio Duhau, Sujatha Fernandes, Brodwyn Fischer, Bryan McCann, Edward Murphy, Dennis Rodgers

Download or read book Regularization of Informal Settlements in Latin America written by Edesio Fernandes and published by Lincoln Inst of Land Policy. This book was released on 2011 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In large Latin American cities the number of dwellings in informal settlements ranges from one-tenth to one-third of urban residences. These informal settlements are caused by low income, unrealistic urban planning, lack of serviced land, lack of social housing, and a dysfunctional legal system. The settlements develop over time and some have existed for decades, often becoming part of the regular development of the city, and therefore gaining rights, although usually lacking formal titles. Whether they are established on public or private land, they develop irregularly and often do not have critical public services such as sanitation, resulting in health and environmental hazards. In this report from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, author Edesio Fernandes, a lawyer and urban planner from Latin America, studies the options for regularization of the informal settlements. Regularization is looked at through established programs in both Peru and Brazil, in an attempt to bring these settlements much needed balance and improvement. In Peru, based on Hernando de Soto's theory that tenure security triggers development and increases property value, from 1996 to 2006, 1.5 million freehold titles were issued at a cost of $64 per household. This did result in an increase of property values by about 25 percent, making the program cost effective. Brazil took a much broader and more costly approach to regularization by not only titling the land, but improving public services, job creation, and community support structures. This program in Brazil has had a cost of between $3,500 to $5,000 per household and has affected a much lower percent of the population. The report offers recommendations for improving regularization policy and identifies issues that must be addressed, such as collecting data with baseline figures to get a true evaluation of the benefit of programs established. Also, it shows that each individual informal settlement must have a customized plan, as a single approach will not work for each settlement. There is a need to include both genders for long-term effectiveness and to find ways to make the regularization self-sustaining financially. Any program must be closely monitored to insure the conditions are improved for the marginalized, as well as be sure it is not causing new informal settlements to be established.

Download or read book Rethinking the Informal City written by Felipe Hernández and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Latin American cities have always been characterized by a strong tension between what is vaguely described as their formal and informal dimensions. However, the terms formal and informal refer not only to the physical aspect of cities but also to their entire socio-political fabric. Informal cities and settlements exceed the structures of order, control and homogeneity that one expects to find in a formal city; therefore the contributors to this volume - from such disciplines as architecture, urban planning, anthropology, urban design, cultural and urban studies and sociology - focus on alternative methods of analysis in order to study the phenomenon of urban informality. This book provides a thorough review of the work that is currently being carried out by scholars, practitioners and governmental institutions, in and outside Latin America, on the question of informal cities.

Download or read book Housing Policy in Latin American Cities written by Peter M. Ward and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-06-03 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the 1960s, rapid urbanization in developing regions in Latin America, Africa, and Asia was marked by the expansion of low-income "irregular" settlements that developed informally and which, by the 2000s, often constituted between 20-60 percent of the built-up area of metropolitan areas and other large cities. There has been a variety of research directed at the housing policies involved with these informal settlements, yet apart from the activities of Latin American Housing Network (LAHN), there has been minimal attention directed at the earliest portion of settlements that formed some 25-40 years ago that now form a large part of the intermediate ring of the cities. This volume breaks new ground by opening up a new generation of housing policy in Latin America cities with broader application for other developing countries. Its editors bring unique perspectives: Peter Ward coordinates the LAHN, and Edith Jiménez and María Di Virgilio are founding members of the network who have led project teams in Guadalajara and Buenos Aires respectively. Developed as a coordinated collaborative research project, the volume encompasses nine Latin American countries and eleven cities. The editors and contributors offer original perspectives on the policy challenges facing much of the low income housing of Latin American cities; document the changing nature of the "first suburbs"; present comparative survey findings in order to better understand the types of consolidated settlements that exist today; describe the physical nature of the dwellings themselves; identify the reasons behind market dysfunction that impede the operation of consolidated housing informal markets in Latin American cities; and outline a new generation of housing policies that will support the processes of densification, rehabilitation, and regeneration of these settlements. This book is the first and only composite overview of the research findings and advocacy of the generic policy lines that the LAHN identifies as central to a new generation of housing strategies and approaches. Researchers and practitioners working on housing theory, housing policy, comparative spatial and sociological research, and urban development issues will find the book highly significant.

Download or read book The Mystery of Capital written by Hernando De Soto and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2007-03-20 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A renowned economist argues for the importance of property rights in "the most intelligent book yet written about the current challenge of establishing capitalism in the developing world" (Economist) "The hour of capitalism's greatest triumph," writes Hernando de Soto, "is, in the eyes of four-fifths of humanity, its hour of crisis." In The Mystery of Capital, the world-famous Peruvian economist takes up one of the most pressing questions the world faces today: Why do some countries succeed at capitalism while others fail? In strong opposition to the popular view that success is determined by cultural differences, de Soto finds that it actually has everything to do with the legal structure of property and property rights. Every developed nation in the world at one time went through the transformation from predominantly extralegal property arrangements, such as squatting on large estates, to a formal, unified legal property system. In the West we've forgotten that creating this system is what allowed people everywhere to leverage property into wealth. This persuasive book revolutionized our understanding of capital and points the way to a major transformation of the world economy.

Download or read book Radical Cities written by Justin McGuirk and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2015-10-13 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What makes the city of the future? How do you heal a divided city? In Radical Cities, Justin McGuirk travels across Latin America in search of the activist architects, maverick politicians and alternative communities already answering these questions. From Brazil to Venezuela, and from Mexico to Argentina, McGuirk discovers the people and ideas shaping the way cities are evolving. Ever since the mid twentieth century, when the dream of modernist utopia went to Latin America to die, the continent has been a testing ground for exciting new conceptions of the city. An architect in Chile has designed a form of social housing where only half of the house is built, allowing the owners to adapt the rest; Medellín, formerly the world’s murder capital, has been transformed with innovative public architecture; squatters in Caracas have taken over the forty-five-story Torre David skyscraper; and Rio is on a mission to incorporate its favelas into the rest of the city. Here, in the most urbanised continent on the planet, extreme cities have bred extreme conditions, from vast housing estates to sprawling slums. But after decades of social and political failure, a new generation has revitalised architecture and urban design in order to address persistent poverty and inequality. Together, these activists, pragmatists and social idealists are performing bold experiments that the rest of the world may learn from. Radical Cities is a colorful journey through Latin America—a crucible of architectural and urban innovation.