GRADE

Most urbanization processes around developing countries are happening either by rural-urban migration, as it happened in Lima 25 years ago, or by high paced vegetative population growth among second and third-generation migrants, as it is happening now in Lima—and either form exerts pressure on relatively weak public institutions. State-sponsored urban planning is often absent, so new and old city dwellers settle with no guidance, habitually creating a chaotic urban layout that, besides creating unsustainable and violent environments, heightens the costs and lowers the feasibility for any subsequent efforts for urban consolidation—either by the state, utility companies or civil society organizations. As a result, this urban path dependency hinders migrant’s future social and spatial integration to the city.

This kind of informal urbanization will continue all over the developing world for many decades to come, and even though the best solution to this problem would be for state-sponsored planning—or any other form of legal, binding planning—to catch up with such a dynamic process, it is pretty clear that that will not happen in many regions around the world, at least not as fast as it is required.

Nevertheless, the history of Lima seemed to show that there is a viable alternative to formal planning: from the 1960s through the 1980s the informal city expanded through regular urban grids, with lined up plots, proper roads and reserved areas for urban infrastructure and facilities, which greatly facilitated subsequent urban consolidation. This simple observation led us to hypothesize that there were a set of sociocultural elements—that Lima’s first generation migrants somehow possessed, and newer generations have lost—that facilitate cooperation and organization which, in turn, make it possible to coordinate an orderly urban layout.

Henceforth, the project aimed at singling out the organizational elements and the minimum set of spatial criteria that promoted community mobilization for urban planning purposes. By learning from the past and present experience of Lima, where rural-urban migration peaked some 25 years ago but informal urban expansion continues, we would be able to draw lessons that fit the current realities of cities where land-squatting-based urbanization is under way. Thus, the stated main objective of the project was “to foster better, more rational processes of urban expansion in developing countries, in a context of informal urbanization and absence of formal, state-sponsored or otherwise, urban planning.” To do so, the project had two specific goals:

a) To understand the sociocultural elements and basic spatial notions that allow for informal occupations to follow rational, inclusive urban patterns.

b) To design and develop a toolkit composed of simple and cheap methodological cues and urbanization guidelines that can be applied and replicated in most fast-growing cities around the developing world.

The usefulness of this approach is straightforward: Instead of trying to ‘fix’ the state to allow for formal urban planning of expansion areas, we propose that the city could and should be ‘fixed’ at the very moment when their streets are drawn, by working with the people who does the actual occupation of the territory. Just allowing for a rational urban layout and reserving spaces for urban equipment would make a huge difference for these communities’ prospects of future integration to the city and improved quality of life. Likewise, basic urban designs that facilitate community bonding and a sense of ownership of public spaces could help to create safer environments and prevent violent behavior. Therefore, we were confident that a rudimentary community organization with basic urban awareness could serve as a ‘proxy’ to state-sponsored planning wherever this is not being made. This had happened before, the lessons were there waiting to be drawn.