Falling in Love with the “Barrio,” the risk of toying with informality

This week, the Venezuelan Supreme Court declared land invasions legal in rural, agricultural land.

Based on the right peasants should have to the land, an unprecedented sentence made it illegal to apply any sanctions against those who use private land to develop agricultural activities (read more). Of course, this news have generated a huge national polemic, mostly dealing with the implications on private property and legal security, as well as with the fear that this type of regulation could soon by applied to urban areas. Even before the sentence, some figures suggested that in 2011 the number of invasions were 750% superior to those which happened in the previous year.

Immersed in such grave problems, few have stopped to think about the impact that massive invasions could have on our already complicated cities. Because beyond the growing difficulties individual owners are facing, all inhabitants will be impacted and will suffer a city without rules.

Could we even begin to conceive of a city where everyone can build anything anywhere? Does it make any sense to even use Planning in that city? When rules disappear not only is the built environment affected, but it also has a direct implication on the manner in which people relate with each other and with the public spaces, thus generating a perverse process that feeds on informality and generates more informality.

Like a monster, cute and interesting when little, it might end up destroying everything around. It is that little cute monster, the one we should fear.

Most interventions addressing informal settlements fall grossly in two categories: those proposing visible and impacting new structures, infrastructure or art work, and those that work deeply inside the settlement, in small scale, aiming to preserve its lifestyle and communitarian sense.

Different in their formal character, both share the appreciation of the settlement as something worth preserving, as a source of valuable lessons and a representation of legitimate life style. Nevertheless, from these different points of view, there is an important dose of romanticism -in both approaches- that is increasingly worrisome.

People living in the slums deserve all our respect, and they should receive all the available support to improve their living conditions (Kirsten Larson touched on an interesting point in this regard). Nevertheless, at the same time, I am convinced this way of living is not sustainable, and that there is no reason why some should be permitted to live without rules or restrictions. No part of the city should be allowed to have a different set of laws.

This is not a local forum, and I’m sure that for many readers, it is impossible to imagine what is happening today in Venezuela. We are a strange spectacle that is difficult to believe, and very likely, our experience is not directly applicable to other realities… However, this is why, from a different perspective and urban environment, we shout out in caution that recent manifestations of the occupying movements, openly supporting-or perhaps even imitating- concepts of informality and invasion, can very easily be feeding the monster.