underpinning informal urbanisms the barrio and the rancho
urbanism | caracas by virginia fernandez rincon
Barrios start with an invasión , the illegal occupation of a plot of land that belongs – or once belonged – to the military, the national or municipal government, or to a private entity. Depending on the agenda of the local and national government of the time, these invasiones are either tolerated, or the land is cleared by local police or the National Guard, often repeatedly as houses are rebuilt overnight. Many of the people that migrated to the city in the early 1920s were from the Andes region and accustomed to terracing the sides of the hills for cultivation. They used the same method to occupy the hills of Caracas; it is still done this way: the terrain is cleaned and flattened before a rancho is built. This terraced land is the base for the single house that will start a barrio. However, land’s pragmatic and symbolic value increases when it is connected to services. In informal settlements where land is scarce and infrastructure inadequate, this value increases exponentially. When building the informal city, barrio residents not only appropriate a piece of land, but in what is maybe a more remarkable act, they illicitly connect it to the infrastructure that makes a plot of land liveable. Construction in the barrio operates outside any legal framework. The land is invaded and water, electricity and sewer systems are accessed illegally and seldom paid for. This has allowed new settlements to occupy sites that were never prepared for construction. If infrastructure can support growth without directly shaping its form, it can also bypass the abstract requirements of any city by-law or building code, instead conditioning the land for informal occupation – an improvement on current practices of informal development.
The barrio 1 , its rancho on the improvised steps up the hill 2 and all its illegal water and electricity connections are, literally, weak. It would not take much more than a couple of days of torrential rains, or one of the seismic events that sporadically shakes the country, to suddenly knock the system out – power lines, streets, ranchos and the land they sit on. This is the weak that is precarious, unsafe and uncertain. Conversely, as a whole, barrios are also weak in a more optimistic and productive sense: they are adaptable, ingenious and resourceful; bottom-up and personal. A barrio is a surprisingly resilient system made out of inherently fragile parts. The incidental forces of economy and geography that created the barrios have influenced Caracas’s urban fabric more evidently than any national or local government, official urban plan or city by-law. These informal settlements have been and still are the solution to the lack of housing and to ineffective city planning, relegating the urban poor to live with sporadic or no basic services and on steep slopes, unstable soil and in floodplains. As in many other Latin American metropoli, the barrios at the edge of Caracas have the highest population density in the city. Within these peripheral areas, and for more than seventy years, informal housing has sprouted on the steep slopes that today hold more than half of the population of the city.
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1 Barrio : Venezuelan name for informal settlements (known as favelas in Brazil and villas miseria in Argentina). 2 Rancho : a shack in a barrio, usually made out of recycled construction or packaging materials, plywood, corrugated zinc and plastic panels.
facing page: Site plan and sections over time The spine of services, public buildings and civic spaces acts as a framework for growth that is itself developed in stages as the barrio grows.
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