Spatial Justice and Informal Settlements

Eva Schwab

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781787430174
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

Spatial Justice and Informal Settlements: Integral Urban Projects in the Comunas of Medellín links the discourses of informal urbanism and spatial justice in the context of public space-based governmental programmes to upgrade informal settlements in Latin America.
It argues for the importance of combining measures for equity and empowerment with positive recognition, i.e. recognition which is based on valuing the social and material achievements of the settlers as a contribution to urban life and culture in its own right. It presents an inquiry into how public open spaces serve the goal of increasing spatial justice and the quality of life in informal settlements. It provides an in-depth study of the Integral Urban Project (Proyecto Urbano Integral/PUI in Spanish) in Comuna 13, a low-income settlement in Medellín, Colombia. Drawing on extensive fieldwork to understand people's everyday spaces and socio-spatial practices, the book assesses the design, production, use, and management of some of the public open spaces established under the PUI programme. It thus also offers an account of the diversity of everyday open spaces and landscapes in this informal settlement. This book is a valuable contribution to the field of open spaces in informal settlements and spatial justice, especially for scholars, researchers, and graduate students with an interest in urban development and upgrading and related socio-spatial issues in Latin America.

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INTRODUCTION

This chapter presents the topic of the ‘new generation’ of upgrading initiatives in informal settlements in Latin America and the rationale for this book, its objectives and research questions, focusing on the issues of spatial justice and public open spaces in informal settlements. It also provides a short insight into the research setting, i.e. the social, economic and physical characteristics of the case study location, Comuna 13 in Medellín, including short descriptions about the three spaces that were investigated in detail. It also provides a brief overview of the research methodology applied.

Keywords: Medellín; PUI; Comuna 13; informal settlement; upgrading

This publication brings together the discourses of informal urbanism and spatial justice; two topics, which independently of each other have gained immense academic interest and political relevance in recent years. However, despite the obvious connection between them and the fact that applied research on spatial justice covers a great diversity of issues, there is little academic research focusing on spatial justice in informal settlements in the Global South.

The study presented in this book is about open spaces in informal settlements in Latin America and how they support spatial justice and people’s quality of life. From a landscape architectural standpoint it enquires into their design, production, use and management in the context of a ‘new generation’ of governmental upgrading programmes which aim at reducing poverty in an integral manner (Riley, Ramirez, & Fiori, 2001). It thus provides in-depth information that is addressed mainly to (landscape) architects, planners and designers, but is also relevant for others conducting urban research such as ethnographers, political scientists or development specialists. This work contributes to a growing – but still scarce – body of literature about open spaces in informal settlements from a spatial justice perspective. It makes the rather elusive notion of spatial justice applicable to urban research from a design and planning point of view and contributes to a Global South perspective to it. It uses as a case study the city of Medellín, one of the recent success stories of integral urban transformation and provides arguments for a critical understanding of this development.

SPATIAL JUSTICE

Spatial justice links social justice concerns to space; it is based on the understanding that both justice and injustice are visible in space as manifestations of the interaction between society and space. Formative conceptions of spatial justice revolve around distributional notions of justice with the goal of achieving equity, but also award a central position to procedural aspects of justice, aiming at people’s empowerment. A distributional understanding of justice strongly focuses on the material quality of spaces, i.e. the equitable distribution of resources, services and access and argues that an equal geographical distribution of the benefits of spatial resources and equal accessibility to them would establish a more just society. Procedural aspects of justice are concerned with fair decision-making processes in urban planning and development to foster empowerment. Opening planning and design processes for those concerned and – more generally – the distribution of authority are main goals. This encompasses questions of how groups of people and their social practices find representation in space as well as which agents influence these representations.

SPATIAL JUSTICE IN INFORMAL SETTLEMENTS

Informal settlements in Latin America are developed through people’s self-help and self-build initiatives but are also formed by public, i.e. state, intervention (Hataya, 2007; Hernández García, 2013) and thus are a combination of informal and formal socio-spatial strategies. Following this understanding, this book focuses the analysis on governmental upgrading initiatives as one of the ways in which informal settlements can reach improvement and consolidation, without neglecting the actors which develop space in an informal manner.

Governmental interventions into informal settlements have come a long way from neglect and eradication to the formulation of more integral approaches, which, since the 1980s, have recognised the importance of a multi-level in-situ approach to tackle poverty reduction and quality of life. Especially, integral neighbourhood policies such as Mejoramiento Barrial y Urbano (MBU) (Rojas, 2009; Torres-Tovar, Rincón-García, Vargas-Moreno, & Amaya-Medina, 2013) or Programas de Mejoramiento de Barrios (PMB) (Bakarz, 2002) are aimed at providing social services and improved spatial infrastructure. They have shaped the Latin American approach to social and physical transformation, albeit always with a focus on housing issues. The new generation of programmes which have developed since the late 1990s and early 2000s follow the same logic, but are new in terms of their scale of interventions, the complexity of topics tackled as well as their link to changed notion of municipal governance. What also unites them is a focus on good design to establish public (open) space as a motor for social integration between the informal settlements and the city, thus to accomplish wider social change (Riley et al., 2001).

Equity, i.e. distributive spatial justice, is a frequently recurring argument in the governments’ motivations and goals to intervene in informal settlements (EDU and Inter-American Development Bank, 2014). There is, however, an influential body of literature that raises serious doubts about whether claims for justice in these fragmented and unjust environments can be answered with arguments of distributive justice alone (Fainstein, 2010; Marcuse, 2009; Sen, 2009; Soja, 2010).

This research therefore questions how spatial justice can be conceived in the context of governmental upgrading initiatives in informal settlements in Latin America and presents an inquiry into how public open spaces serve the goal of increasing spatial justice and quality of life in informal settlements. It draws on a case study of one informal settlement in Medellín/Colombia as an example of the new generation upgrading programmes. There are various examples of the new generation upgrading programmes, in cities of different sizes, with different cultural, social and political contexts and in different regions of Latin America. Apart from Medellín’s Urbanismo Social and the associated Integral Urban Projects (PUI for their Spanish name), Favela-Bairo in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, surely is one of the most recognised programmes (Fiori, Riley, & Ramirez, 2001; Peterson, 2008). It was highly influential on other programmes in other cities, and shares central components such as the improvement of public open space and other urban infrastructure or participatory practices for community development with programmes such as Barrio de Verdad in La Paz/Boliva or Quiero mi Barrio in Santiago de Chile, Chile, Promeba in Argentina and Programa Habitat in Mexico (Rojas, 2009).

Medellín, in this context, offers an especially worthwhile research setting. The spatial and social transformation of the city since the beginning of this millennium, triggered by municipal governments with a new understanding of leadership, has turned it into a showcase for inclusive urban upgrading. The case of Medellín is widely publicised and proactively ‘exported’ by the city government as a globally applicable strategy. Also, it is recognised by institutions such as the UN or the Inter-American Development Bank for increasing spatial justice, and as such widely accepted as a ‘best practice’ example. This situation makes investigating the case of Medellín significant in a global context, with findings offering transferability to cities in a similar context.

This research is motivated by the urban and social realities of most cities in the Global South. The 21st century has been labelled the ‘Urban Age’ (Burdett & Sudjic, 2008); worldwide more people now live in cities than in rural areas. Urbanisation in the 21st century is taking place foremost in countries of the Global South. As cities in these countries grow at an ever faster pace, informal urbanism has become the primary mode of expansion in them (Burdett & Sudjic, 2008; Roy & AlSayyad, 2004). This situation confronts established notions of justice with new dimensions of inequality. It also challenges urban planners and designers to reconceptualise their professional contribution vis-a-vis urban informality. Martin-Moreno (2008, p. 42) goes as far as to claim that in the face of self-build modes of urban space production professionals have lost their relevance; he invites architects, planners and urbanists to develop ‘new tools to find ways to participate in making the city’.

Looking at the Latin American context specifically, we see it is one of the most urbanised places on earth, with 83% of its national populations living in cities, a figure which will rise to 90% by 2050 (UN, 2014). Growth dynamics in informal settlements have become less accentuated in recent years, thus consolidation and upgrading of informal settlements are a central issue in Latin American cities. Work on improving informal settlement has thus become a task for planners and designers, who increasingly find themselves working in cities using ‘equity’ as a marketing tool to be competitive in the global economy (Brand, 2009) and not as an intrinsic value in planning. It is thus important to know on what values these upgrading initiatives are based on and how they can foster justice even better.

Past views on informality were characterised by an attitude of denigration of both the material qualities of informal settlements and the urban poor more generally and have centred around binary and marginalising discourses such as formal/informal, legal/illegal, and planned/unplanned. In more current literature, however, there is a tendency to counter these beliefs by portraying informal settlements as inspirational lessons for planners and designers around the world, as materialised cultural resistance or even as alternative ‘autonomous geographies’, able to inspire new urban paradigms which are based on the particular relationship between people and place, on alternative forms of social organisation and on the human scale of this form of urbanity (AlSayyad, 2004; Beardsley & Werthmann, 2008; Brillembourg & Klumpner, 2010; Brillembourg, Klumpner, & Feireiss, 2005; Mehrotra, 2010; Pickerill & Chatterton, 2006). Geographer Ann Varley (2009) warns of ‘these heroic narratives of informality’, suggesting that they help to reproduce binary opposites between the formal and informal and ‘sugarcoat’ the deprivation and struggle in informal settlements. This is doubtlessly dangerous, especially as this puts ‘a heavy theoretical responsibility’ on the shoulders of settlers and implies a voluntariness in people’s actions that neglects their disadvantaged position in society. Another problematic issue in this is the discursive ‘favela-isation’ of Latin America that only reports a certain image, thus neglecting not only the material diversity of informal settlements but also implying a homogeneity in people’s life realities that stereotypes and neglects existing diversity. I would argue, however, that this view – even though it does show problematic aspects – has helped to overcome the ‘natural’ association of informality with poverty, marginality and crime, and has fostered an understanding of it as an alternative way of doing things in its own right (Hernandez & Kellett, 2010; Roy, 2009). Equally, it shows that informality can be seen as an alternative mode of production of space in which the people producing this space emerge as central. In this context, geographer Jennifer Robinson (2006) has developed a perspective which challenges the dichotomous mindset by advocating the notion of the ‘ordinary city’ to counter the restrictive effect of ‘categorising and labelling cities’. She calls for the exploration of ‘different tactics for promoting urban development. These would be tactics that release poor cities from the imaginative straightjacket of imitative urbanism and the regulating fiction of catching up to wealthier, Western cities’ (Robinson, 2006, p. 11). This understanding, I claim, is the basis on which notions of spatial justice in informal settlements must be built.

OPEN SPACES IN INFORMAL SETTLEMENTS

Public spaces, many of which are open spaces, are the key intervention sites of the new generation upgrading programmes, based on the idea that upgraded public space would trigger wider social and physical change. While this approach to public space as an agent of change has been developed and is widely used in the European context (Paravicini, 2002), there is little knowledge about the applicability of this approach in upgrading informal settlements. This paucity of information converges with the fact that open spaces – whether public or not – in informal settlement seldom are the focus of research from an urbanistic or design standpoint. The housing perspective to a large extent drives informal settlement research, mainly from a quantitative perspective. With some notable exceptions (Hernández García, 2013), this has led to lacking knowledge about the spatial configuration of open spaces in informal settlements and about the spatial practices the residents engage in. An investigation of open spaces in informal settlements, however, needs to be aware that public open spaces are not the only ones which receive public or community use and that thus conventional and idealistic understanding of space as state property accessible to ‘all’ (Carmona, 2010; Ivenson, 1998; Madanipour, 2003; Marcuse, 2003) cannot be applied to the open spaces available in them. Considerations of their usability and accessibility (Hernández García, 2013) suggest addressing them as communally or publicly usable open spaces, or just open spaces, thus including the use value aspects which are important in them.

OBJECTIVES, THEMES AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS

This book explores the material configuration, production, management and use of open spaces in informal settlements in the context of in-situ governmental upgrading initiatives. It does so from a spatial justice standpoint which is based on valuing the social and material achievements of settlers as a contribution to urban life and culture (Samuels & Khosla, 2005) and the ‘design of cities’ (Tonkiss, 2013), seeing them as an alternative way of doing things in its own right (Hernandez & Kellett, 2010). In this way, this work aims to add to the discourse on informality and governmental upgrading initiatives.

The objectives of the study are:

• This work aims to broaden the knowledge about open spaces in informal settlements and people’s everyday practices of use.
• It intends to reflect critically on the relationship between public space policies, design and societal structures with regards to spatial justice.
• It seeks to identify how spatial (in)justice is understood by communities and authorities.
• It seeks to understand better the potential of formally produced public open spaces for a just city use in upgrading popular settlements.

Three main themes will be covered theoretically and empirically in order to pursue the objectives proposed: open spaces in informal settlements, governmental upgrading of informal settlements as well as notions and understandings of spatial justice applicable to informal settlements. While the latter is the guiding theme of this work, it is based on the analysis and discussion of the first two themes.

These themes are addressed by the following research questions. The first, the main research question, is detailed by a variety of sub-questions enquiring into different aspects of open spaces and spatial justice in the upgrading initiative.

• Can formally produced public open space through governmental intervention act as an agent of change towards increased spatial justice in informal settlements?
  • How are contemporary public open spaces in informal and formal parts of the city constituted?
  • What ...