Civil Society, Development & Aid, Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean, Population, Poverty & SDGs

LATIN AMERICA: Building Unity – and Decent Housing

Gustavo González*

SANTIAGO, Jun 23 2006 (IPS) - In Uruguay, 16,000 families have a proper home as a result of housing construction cooperatives, while in Bolivia people living in the ravines of La Paz have a system to deal with housing risks thanks to a non-governmental network.. And further south, in Chile, self-build social housing projects are mushrooming.

Improvement in urban living conditions, mainly ensuring basic sanitation, drinking water, security of tenure, adequate size and safety of location, is one of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) adopted by the United Nations in 2000. The world target is to achieve significant improvement in the living conditions of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020.

About one billion people worldwide live in slums, of whom 134 million are in Latin America and the Caribbean, according to an extrapolation to 2005 by the U.N. Centre for Human Settlements – Habitat.

This is precisely one of the issues being debated by the international community at the third World Urban Forum, which ended Friday in Vancouver, Canada, and at which urban safety and the inclusion of urban social movements through local initiatives are also being examined.

The World Urban Forum (WUF) was instituted by the U.N. in response to concerns about the rapid urbanisation of the planet and its impact on communities, cities, economies and public policies. The first Forum was held in Nairobi in 2002, and the second, WUF2, in Barcelona in 2004.

“The housing shortage problem has still not been fully solved to date,” said Pablo Cid, whose 2005 thesis at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, of the state University of Chile, was on social housing in this country of 15.6 million people.

In contrast with the policy during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) of eradicating slums and forcing their residents to the outskirts of the cities, the centre-left coalition governments that have ruled Chile since 1990 have opted for intervention programmes in settlements of precarious dwellings that “attempt to provide a comprehensive solution for poverty,” Cid said.

In the fast-expanding port city of Iquique, 1,800 kilometres north of Santiago, a project for “Participative Self-Building of Housing”, aimed at providing housing solutions for the lowest income sectors, was initiated in 1996.

The programme organised 14,000 families to build their own homes and, together with the municipality, provide the new neighbourhoods with basic infrastructure including a sewage system, power and piped water, as well as building community health clinics, shops and industrial and craft workshops.

In the coastal areas of the Araucanía region, 700 kilometres south of the capital, the private Indigenous Institute Foundation, together with the private Universidad Mayor and the Housing Ministry’s urban housing service, have embarked on another innovative initiative.

The programme involves participative architectural design and self-building with mutual aid among Lafkenche (Sea People) communities, a branch of the Mapuche ethnic group who live on the coast, supporting themselves by fishing and collecting algae and shellfish.

The aim is to provide indigenous communities with housing that improves their quality of life, while respecting their culture, “their particular way of building their houses, the importance attached to each part of the house, and the world vision that underlies how and what they do,” Alejandra Fernández, director of organisation in the Foundation, told IPS.

In Uruguay, the Uruguayan Federation of Mutual Aid Housing Cooperatives (FUCVAM), founded in 1970, at present has 330 affiliated cooperatives of industrial workers, service workers, public employees, and workers who have been forced into the informal sector.

According to the latest figures, from 2004, 16,000 families have adequate housing thanks to FUCVAM. These are low and middle income families (earning between 200 and 500 dollars a month) from all parts of this country of 3.3 million.

FUCVAM’s methods are based on voluntary efforts, since the members of the cooperatives are mostly workers who are not in a position to save, so they participate by contributing their labour in the construction of the houses and in the building works administration. As the houses are completed, they are allocated by lottery.

FUCVAM’s main work is focused on the exchange and systematisation of experiences, as well as supporting grassroots groups and facilitating access to state and private financing. Administration of funds is in the hands of the cooperatives belonging to the Federation.

This Federation, which survived the 1973-1985 military dictatorship’s crackdown on the cooperative movement, joined the Habitat International Coalition in 1994, and thanks to a strategic alliance with the Swedish Cooperative Centre is now carrying out a campaign to publicise its model for building houses by mutual aid in several Latin American countries, including Brazil, Nicaragua and El Salvador.

Of equal importance is diminishing the risks posed by precarious dwellings. The Risk Management Project of the non-governmental Habitat Network in Bolivia has been instrumental in creating a community alert system in La Paz, which is located 3,650 metres above sea level.

Seventy percent of the population of La Paz live on the sides of a huge canyon that crosses the city from north to south, and are exposed to danger during the rainy season from landslides, flooding, collapsing buildings and overflowing rivers.

Habitat Network set up its office close to the foot of the Cotahuma mountain, in the southeast of the city, where 11 landslides, collapsed walls and floods have occurred in the last 10 years. In 1996 a landslide killed 27 people and destroyed the homes of 80 families.

In Cotahuma, which has a population of 150,000, the Habitat Network is organising and training the residents in early warning drills. It encourages volunteer participation, supports the operation of an emergency communications network, and promotes organising in neighbourhood councils aimed at saving lives.

Carlos Mendieta, a spokesperson for the Network, told IPS that the average income of families there varies from 50 to 186 dollars a month, hence the precarious nature of the houses, which are made of bricks of mud mixed with straw and are built on steep slopes.

In the urban alert network in La Paz, as in the Uruguayan housing cooperatives and the self-building initiatives in Chile, community participation stands out as both the driving force and the major impact of these projects.

* With additional reporting by Franz Chávez in Bolivia and Raúl Pierri in Uruguay.