Barrio Ciudad: Urban Upgrading + Crime and Violence Prevention in Honduras
Colonia Miguel Yares in the Villanueva municipality (Before and After)
A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to visit a Urban Upgrading program in Honduras in which Crime and Violence (C&V) prevention was an active component of the project from the beginning. I was impressed by both the methodology used to achieve this as well as some of the initial anecdotic evidence of the results (A robust Impact Evaluation is on the way). From my previous experience, urban interventions in informal settlements in countries in Latin America are many times leaded by politicians who seek a less violent city – an off course citizens who identify security as one of their main concerns. In Medellin, we can argue that it was violence that started to increase the awareness of a “problem” that was related to (or concentrated in) informal settlements and the urgency to act in those areas. We have seen the same in places like Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo with the upcoming World Cup and Olympic games. However, in my opinion, in most of the urban interventions in which there is a reduction of violence it has been an indirect product of urban upgrading or C&V repression rather than through a real consideration of the C&V prevention tool. I guess it is part of human nature to concentrate on what is consider a problem (C&V, Natural Disasters, unplanned housing development) and try to solve it from there (C&V Repression, emergency response and slum upgrading) instead of focusing on its origins (C&V and disaster prevention, housing policies and harmonic urban planning).
Unfortunately in recent years Honduras has followed the increasing violence trend of Central America and is today one of the most violent countries in the world. Today, official rates indicate that there were 86 homicides per 100.000 inhabitants in 2011 (above 10 homicides per 100.000 inhabitants it is considered an epidemic). The spread of Violence in Central America and other cities in Latin America is linked – in my opinion – to three common issues, namely Poverty, Youth and Exclusion; and one very tempting opportunity of achieving higher levels of social status: belonging to criminal organizations that are usually linked to drug dealing. One mayor of a small municipality in Honduras said: “it is very difficult to solve Poverty at the short term, impossible to “solve” Youth but we might manage to reduce Exclusion”.
Colonia 2 de Marzo in El Progreso municipality (Before and After)
Barrio Ciudad
The Honduras urban upgrading + Crime and violence prevention project is called Barrio Ciudad (I have to admit that I am in love with the name). The main objective of the project is to improve the quality of life of the urban poor through the (i) improvement of their access to basic services, (ii) the strengthening of human and Read More…
For “Bankability” (Part 2)
bank•a•ble, adjective banka’bility noun
1. Acceptable for processing by a bank: bankable checks and money orders.
2. Considered powerful, prestigious, or stable enough to ensure profitability.
3. Dependable or reliable: a bankable promise
My previous post highlighted the repeated use of the word “Bankability” in the Prime Ministers inaugural speech for the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM). The PM used this word a couple of times, the first time to talk about the bankability of the poor the second time to talk about the bankability of our city (through its institutions and projects). This shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but I was struck by how the closely related these two ideas were in the mind of the economist. The previous post laid out how this vision gets fleshed out through the Rajiv Housing Program (RAYs program) which seeks to bring slums into a formal system of property ownership. This vision of development opens up the following questions:
- How does the JNNURM/RAY imagine the poor, the space of the slum and their relationship to the city?
- How does awarding property ownership make the poor slum dwellers and the city bankable?
- Are there any interlocutors that influence this program?
My following posts shall discuss these questions.
"My dreams of owning a house have come true!"
Strong foundations for a Strong India says a JNNURM poster - from http://20twentytwo.blogspot.com/
Creation of the Bankable poor.
The Plans aspiration to create a class of bankable poor who use property as collateral bears a strong resemblance to the ideas of right wing economists like Hernando Desoto. It is reported that in 2009 when Kumari Sheilja was sworn in as the Minister for housing and poverty alleviation the Prime Minister gifted her Desoto’s famous books, “Mystery of capital” and “The other Path”[1]. When Desoto visited the country in 2010 he was actively consulted for RAYs program, a service he gladly extended.
In the Mystery of Capital, Desoto argues that the poor hold trillions of dollars in real estate assets[2]. However they hold these assets Read More…
Worst Urban Practices
Post by Marines Pocaterra [Proyectos Arqui 5]
The adoption of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2000 was a landmark achievement for the international community. They constitute one of the few globally-supported, (193 countries) comprehensive development commitments. They establish specific, measurable benchmarks and targets to eradicate extreme poverty and promote peace and security. The eight goals tackle poverty, education, gender equality, child and maternal mortality, HIV and other diseases, environmental sustainability and encourage a global partnership for development. The targets are set to be achieved by 2015.
If we search the web for Latin American countries that have accomplished MDGs you will find that Venezuela and Cuba excel for their advances. Cuba is a regime that has transformed a country into a concentration camp, not a reference to compare with the free world. Venezuela’s information in the MDGs page, instead of annual publications, shows only a link to a webpage with colorful and very positive news about social advances (updated 2008). Many programs called Misiones are proclaimed but no statistics or charts about results to back the statements, although Venezuela has had the same president for almost 14 years.
Venezuela´s regime manages an extraordinary oil income with no legal controls or limitations. Pedro Palma, ex-president of Economic Science Academy, wonders if there are evaluation mechanisms for the social investment, which according to the government, amounts $ 500.000 Million (USA $) over the last 12 years.
To begin with, the measure for poverty used in the MDG is the “dollar a day” guideline, which cannot be used in Venezuela, due to opaque policies of exchange, with multiple (preferential) rates. It is illegal to even mention the real equivalence of local currency. Thus, if an NGO is offered social financing for a program, it would be very difficult to accept, because any international currency Read More…
Sambinha Architecture, Biophysics, and Cheap Energy
To my friends and family who are unfamiliar with my town, I’ve often described it by asking them to picture the US in the pre-interstate highway era. It’d take about twice as long to drive to Seattle as it does to reach two of the largest three wilderness areas in the contiguous United States. And they are practically adjacent. But for the University nearby to keep things shaken up, it’s a fairly sleepy place. Moose have been known to wander through town often enough to delight or shock newcomers. My wife even ran into a wolf while watching owls in our favorite stand of white pine. Like I said, it’s a bit out of the way. Even so, issues of energy consumption are consistently at my doorstep.
I live a scenic distance from an inland seaport; the seaport that has over the past months been used to import enormous modules of tarsands extraction equipment. The loads are trucked overnight in order to close the long winding stretches of two-lane highway to make way for these “megaloads”
The Lochsa River somewhere near the Idaho-Montana border. Click through for image credit.
The region through which they transport this machinery is among the wildest in the US. There are very few places left where grizzlies, wolves and other predators can live, anthropophobic such as they are. That they are able live here in the Rockies is a testament to the still-healthy ecosystems—around here they are some places that are as close to unsullied as it gets: places that are the least effected by the destructive habits of capitalism. That is until you get to the extraction sites north of Edmonton, Alberta. It brings to mind historic feats of planning and industry, and then tosses them aside like broken toys. Read More…
More Definitions :: Informality vs. Informalities
While reading some of the posts from last week, I couldn’t help but ask myself again ‘What is informality?’ The more I learn about the subject, the more difficult it becomes to give a straightforward answer.
To expand, and piggyback on Paula’s thoughts, although slums are usually informal settlements, not all informal settlements are “slums”. In this same respect, informality is not necessarily equivalent to the action squatting. According to Caldeira and Holston (2008), this generalized definition of “slum”, also adopted by Mike Davis in “Planet of Slums” (2006), homogenizes and stigmatizes all non-formal shelter practices. The urban poor now have to deal with another form of social exclusion and many of these working and living neighborhoods, and communities, are reduced to eviction and demolition.
In 2009, I attended a conference titled “Peripheries,” organized by Prof. of Urban Planning Teresa Caldeira, and Professor of Geogrophy James Holston, in 2009 (UC Berkeley). The conference aimed to understand and deconstruct the label of “peripheries” by searching new perspectives and understandings of different social and urban formations contingent upon this idea. During the entirety of the conference the use of a plural “peripheries” was stressed over a singular “periphery”. In the same way, I am inclined to use the term “informalities” vs. informality. Castells states the following: “Since the informal economy does not result from the intrinsic characteristic of activities, but from the social definition of state intervention, the boundaries of the informal economy will substantially vary in different contexts and historical circumstances.”[1] Stepping away from the term’s stigmatization, there is not only one type of “informality” but various “informalities”. I will argue that informality is not Read More…
The Cycle of Evictions and Re-locations: PART 3
Workers at the CWG Stadium site. Photo Credit: SAMAR JODHA; Source: http://www.tehelka.com/story_main47.asp?filename=hub091010We_Who.asp
The previous posts (PART 1 and PART 2) laid out the context within which the spectacle of the Commonwealth games took place; however, the spectacular nature of evictions as well as the wide spread coercion of unskilled workers employed on CWG sites, presents extreme examples of ‘transient’ modes of existence. The poor of the city were not only disposed off or evicted as the need arose, but also were consumed as labor to rebuild, clean and service the city. Delhi displayed an exhibition of histories, traditions and innovative new futures while also becoming a stage for human rights violations, over-used and under-paid bodies of “footloose”[i] labour couched in conditions of extreme insecurity of everyday life. As the poor were displaced and relocated to peripheral areas of the city, they were simultaneously employed by construction companies to build recreational and residential facilities, urban infrastructure and ‘public’ spaces before the games. Reports have shown that construction workers were employed in extremely unsafe conditions causing numerous deaths and injuries. The workers were hired at wages below minimum wage and several thousand workers still await their meager salaries from employer companies (Basu, 2010)[ii]. An expert committee appointed by the High Court of Delhi – comprising various local and national government officers – recorded large-scale violations of labor laws and human rights at various Games sites and allied projects during the construction phase of the CWG (ibid).
"Staple Recipe: Breakfast cooked in two large pots on an open fire by a visiting cook consists of an unchanging menu of dal, rice and roti. No vegetables. No meat. Just a quick-fix meal before a 12-hour day." (Majumder, 2010) Photo Credit: Samar Jodha; Source: http://www.tehelka.com/story_main47.asp?filename=hub091010We_Who.asp
Under the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition ) Act 1970, and the Inter-State Migrant Workmen (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service ) Act 1979, the principal employer is responsible to ensure that workers are employed under safe and sanitary conditions maintaining minimum wages, over-time payment standards and adequate medical and housing facilities (ibid, 2010). However, the committee’s report submitted to the High court stated that all above regulations were violated, resulting in the loss of worker lives and several on-site injuries. An estimated 70,500 workers were Read More…
Remaking Rio: favela tourism and the tourist narrative, part III
On a tour with Be a Local. Photo from company's website.
This is the third and final post in a series about the portrayal of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas through the tourist narrative. I’m interested in the favela tourist experience because I believe it is both representative and constitutive of the transformation of favela space and the remaking of Rio de Janeiro as an ‘integrated’ city, a global city of an emerging world power. Tourism is a major contributor to the city’s economy, and a priority for both the government and private interests prior to the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics. As discussed in part I, tourism, art, media and local-to-global citizen projects can challenge the subjective sociocultural definitions of the favela in relation to the so-called formal city. These continually contested relational definitions stand to redefine the whole of Rio de Janeiro. Therefore we should scrutinize the imagined favela, the favela produced as a commodity, as a consumable experience.
I scoured travel blogs and Flickr photos looking for patterns of representation in the stories of tourists in part II. The digitized and uploaded ‘metanarrative’ of favela tourism is perhaps unsurprisingly oversimplified, contradictory and rife with factual errors. However this is not cause to condemn the tourist for lack of fact checking or due-diligence, because the same stereotypes and misinformation carelessly reproduced by backpacking bloggers are characteristic of local, national and global media. Indeed, the ‘fact’ that Rocinha is the largest favela in Latin America (it’s not) or the notion that whichever favela visited is too dangerous to enter without a professional guide are most likely planted by the tour companies in order to add a sense of danger and spectacle to the experience. And as Andrew pointed out in the comments section in part II, all tourism is voyeuristic; all tourist agencies cultivate spectacle. For now, it’s important to bracket ethical debates; and I want to stress that more important than a detailed account of the content of tourist-produced media is the recognition that the narrative exists, productively, to transform the meaning and experience of favela-space.
After visiting Rocinha with Be a Local, one blogger wrote, "One reason for the improvement in quality of life is these people who would once beg for money now are being told they must earn it. Whether through baking, painting, dancing, or drumming many of these people are now working hard to make money."
Here I am inspired by Asher Ghertner’s work in Delhi [1]. Ghertner builds on the work of Bernard Cohn [2] who created a number of categorical ‘modalities’ through which to analyze colonial governance. One of those modalities, the travel/observational modality, is useful here. I quote Ghertner at length:
This modality works by providing a narrative for the experience of, or movement through a given space. It creates expectations for how space looks and how it should look. Cohn discussed this primarily in terms of establishing set itineraries or patterns of movement for newcomers to India so that they could easily Read More…
A Pleasant Encounter in a Buenos Aires Market
"Enjoy Public Space" in Buenos Aires. (J.Renteria)
In my previous post, I described my experience navigating what turned out to be just a small bit of the 20 hectares of La Salada, the self-proclaimed “largest informal market of Latin America,” located just beyond Buenos Aires’ southern edge as being, for the most part, chaotic and uncomfortably multi-sensory. This stands in stark contrast to some of what I witnessed within the city itself.
While the massive La Salada remained relatively illegible to me during my visit, having been disoriented most of the time I was there and then having needed an architect with a special research interest in the market explain its workings to me through different kinds of media in order to get some sense of its scale and complexity, the city markets often offered more intimate moments with both the vendors and the spaces out of which they sold their goods. This was largely in the shape of small, itinerant neighborhood, government-registered markets located sporadically throughout the city.
Favela e Futebol V – people’s opium
scene from the movie “Cidade de Deus”, Fernando Meirelles, 2002
In June of 1970 all of Brazil went out to celebrate in the streets. The seleção won its third championship. Pelé, Jairzinho, Gerson and Tostão were not only playing well, they were playing beautiful and it helped that for the first time the World Cup was broadcasted live and in color.
The images of Carlos Alberto scoring the fourth goal against Italy in the final or Tostão scoring twice the day I was born (4×2 against Peru) were inscribed forever in everybody’s memory and are repeated ad nauseum by the Brazilian tv in the last 40 years.
However, the late 1960s and early 1970s in Brazil are not much cause of celebration. A brutal military dictatorship Read More…
Adriana Navarro Sertich
Lubaina Rangwala
Jennifer Renteria
Kirsten Larson
Proyectos Arqui5
Tucker Landesman
Namrata Kapoor
Paula Restrepo-Cadavid
Andrew Carman
Jose Antonio Ramirez
Fernando Luiz Lara
Bethany Opalach
