State intervention and the urban poor: major issues concerning housing, planning and servicing in Latin American cities

The main objective of this study is to improve understanding of the social conditions and the role of the poor within urban society in Latin America. More specifically, the aim is to understand how the needs of the urban poor with respect to housing and servicing are articulated and satisfied. The study examines the aims, development and implementation of government policies towards low-income housing dwellers, tries to relate those policies to the wider interests of the state and the constraints within which it acts, and examines governmental success in meeting the needs of the poor. We examine the needs of the poor, their understanding of the main constraints on barrio servicing and improvement, their involvement in community organizations and the role that the community and its leaders play in influencing state action. Since housing and servicing directly impinge on the interests of politicians, bureaucrats, landowners, and real-estate developers, as well as those of the poor, they represent critical elements in the relationship between the poor and the wider urban society. Essentially, therefore, the research is interested in how resources are allocated within urban society and how political and administrative power operates at the municipal level.

The research was conducted in three Latin American cities, Bogotá, Mexico City and Valencia, as a reaction to the dominant trend in urban studies to concentrate on a single centre.

The different responses to housing and servicing in the three cities cannot be adequately understood without examining the nature and policies of the state both at the national and the local level. For land, housing and servicing are only elements in the total relationship between the state and the poor. Without some understanding of recent trends in economic and social change and of state participation in that process, our explanation of policy towards the urban poor is bound to be superficial. For this reason the chapter examines first the broad patterns of economic growth in each country, second, the nature of each country's political and social development and, finally, the economic, social and political characteristics of each city. This resumé is included in the hope that individual state responses to the specific issues of land, housing and servicing for the poor can be related in the later chapters to the wider issue of how the state conceives the whole dynamic and objective of development and change.

The national economies

There are numerous similarities between the Colombian, Mexican and Venezuelan economies. All showed quite high rates of growth during the late sixties and early seventies (table 2). All have a common dependence on the export of primary products, though the nature of the commodity and its role in the national development process differs.

We now focus our attention at the barrio level and examine the structure of the community organizations that have emerged to defend and develop settlement interests. The need for brevity obliges us to concentrate our analysis around two key issues. First, how much impact does community mobilization have upon the upgrading process? What is the extent of resident participation and how far does participation significantly affect the likelihood of servicing? Second, what governs the response that the state makes to community-development issues? Here our concern is to identify the motives of the state and to account for the way in which it handles community issues. Is the state basically sympathetic, attempting to help the poor as much as it can with limited resources, or is it concerned with maximizing social control by containing demand making to acceptable (and probably low) levels? Our aim is to understand the forms and levels of community participation relating them to the structural characteristics of each city and society.

Few observers doubt the potential value of community participation in development although many question its practice in Latin America. Such a paradox has become increasingly obvious through time. A major gulf exists between reality and the way in which community action and participation should operate. Such a statement is true whatever the political stance of the observer. That right and left might agree about the state of community participation is at first sight surprising.

The details of the settlements are summarized in table 1 on page 24 and the locations are depicted in figure 2 on page 26.

Bogotá – Atenas

Atenas is located on the mountain slopes along the road which leaves Bogotá for Villavicencio. Most of the settlement is on sloping terrain although there are several relatively flat sections. It is largely surrounded by low-income pirate urbanizations although there is still a limited amount of open land to the northwest. The settlement was developed in two parts beginning in the middle sixties, the first of which is now largely occupied and serviced, the second of which is less consolidated, lacks services and contains open ground.

The pirate urbanizer divided land which had been inherited by his father in the late twenties. He began to sell this land in the early sixties and provided certain services in an attempt to comply with the then ruling planning code: standpipes, road layout with paving stones and rough street surfacing. He later became a member of the Bogotá council and was identified with a campaign to service not only Atenas but several surrounding settlements. He used his contacts in the Liberal party to obtain services for these communities. He lost his position on the council in 1970 and indeed lost political influence generally. This has to some extent affected the recent servicing of the settlement.

Most of our findings have been presented in the summaries at the end of each chapter and will not be repeated here. There are, however, a number of general statements which need to be made about our results. In particular, we would like to take this opportunity to emphasize those elements of our work which we believe to be original, affect planning practice or which warrant further development.

Our work has clearly underlined the point made in the recent social-science literature that issues such as housing, land use and servicing cannot sensibly be isolated from the wider social, economic and political environment. In the past, planners too often tried to separate these issues in order to better resolve urban problems; the practical mistakes that have been made often reflect that error. Work in the social sciences during the seventies has clearly shown that such a separation is unjustifiable. In this study we have tried to place the land, housing and servicing issues facing the poor in their broad socio-economic context. We have emphasized how home improvement depends upon income levels of the poor and upon the costs of land and materials. We have shown how tenure is less a matter of individual choice than an outcome of the broad working both of the capitalist land market and of the action of the state. We have demonstrated how methods of servicing low-income settlement vary with the nature of bureaucracy and political practice in each country.

As we noted in chapter 1, there are few truly comparative studies of Third World urban development and we regard this as an important feature of our work. However, as we quickly discovered, comparative analysis of several cities undertaken by a group of researchers is not easy, and generates a whole host of methodological problems that the lone researcher working in a single context does not have to face. Therefore, we feel justified in including here a detailed account of our methodology in the hope that the staff of future projects might learn from our experience and from our mistakes.

Levels of field-work analysis

The team was formed in April 1978 and worked together until September 1980, when funding of the project formally ended. The first four months were spent in London making revisions to our methodology, refining our research questions and propositions, and in agreeing an outline questionnaire. In August, Ward and Raymond went to Mexico City where they stayed for one year, while Gilbert and Murray left for Bogotá where they spent seven months before moving to Valencia for their final five months. Midway during the period of field work a two-week meeting was arranged in Mexico City to allow the teams to discuss progress and to make whatever revisions and adjustments were necessary and practical at that stage of the programme.

Insofar as any sensible distinction can be made between the various social science disciplines, ‘human geography’ has traditionally been distinguished by its concern with three relationships. First, there is the relationship between the social and the spatial: between society and social processes on the one hand and the fact and form of the spatial organization of both of those things on the other. Second, there is the relationship between the social and the natural, between society and ‘the environment’. Third, there is a concern, which geography shares in particular with history, with the relationship between different elements – economy, social structure, politics, and so forth. While the ‘substance’ disciplines of the social sciences (economics, sociology, politics) tend to focus on particular parts of society, however difficult these are to distinguish and define, human geography's concern with ‘place’, with why different localities come to be as they are, has often led it to the study of how those different elements come together in particular spaces to form the complex mosaic which is the geography of society.

The way in which each of these relationships has been conceptualized has varied widely, and often quite dramatically, even in the recent history of the discipline. All have had their extreme versions. The most absolute of environmental determinists saw human character and social organization as a fairly direct and unmediated product of the physical (natural) environment.

The centralized nation-state was the outcome of political evolution. Whatever the merits of the nation-state, it became apparent in the twentieth century that it did not prevent the mounting horrors of war, and that alone it could not ensure economic prosperity. As a result, efforts were made to develop new political devices. The preferred solution among those of liberal outlook was the ‘international institution’. The aftermath of the First World War saw an attempt at institutional order through the League of Nations; the close of the Second World War brought the United Nations and a range of other more specialized bodies, some almost worldwide, others of lesser scope.

In Europe, the cradle of the nation-state, the most advanced attempts to develop a new institutional order are to be found. The idea of the nation-state as an ultimate, compelling reality was brought into question in Western Europe by the Second World War more widely and profoundly than had been the case after the First World War. The governments that had fused extreme nationalism and dictatorship, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, were buried in the war of aggressive brutality they had unleashed. International relations were restructured by alignments of states dominated by the new military superpowers. The battered nations of Europe were corralled into one or other of the two great blocs as world politics became dominated by the Cold War.

The fact that ‘Geography matters’ has been an underlying argument of the whole of this book, but in each section we have treated it in a different way. In the first section we looked at the social significance of conceptualization and at its relationship to developments both within and between societies. In the second section we looked at the significance of ‘geography’ in the constitution and operation of a number of very different social processes. Our argument there, and throughout, has been not only that the geography of society is socially constructed and that, to understand it, that fact must be recognized, but also that social processes and phenomena are constituted geographically. The corollary, therefore, is that to understand them account must be taken of their geography. In that second section, we considered this proposition in relation to the organization of the city, the constitution and reproduction of cultural forms, and the operation of international law. In the third section we turned our attention to the central question of the construction of ‘place’ and of geographical variation within the wider system, whether that be international or national.

In this final section we tackle the question at the broadest level of all, the level which allows us to pull together all our arguments: why does geography, in the sense in which we have defined it, matter to the development of society as a whole? Let us take an example which builds upon the conclusions of the last section.

In the preceding section each of the three chapters focused upon the internal characteristics and relations of a particular aspect of society and drew out their geographical significance. It was apparent, however, that none of the three social aspects – cultural forms, urban economic activity, and the processes of international law – could be conceived in isolation from other aspects of society. Although a series of interrelationships was lightly sketched between cultural, political and economic processes in varying degrees in the analyses, the actual links and connections between the social processes that shape and structure the different aspects of the social world were not developed. This development involves a process of synthesis, a process that takes the results of analysis, the detailed studies of particular aspects of society, and draws out the web of relationships that integrates and binds them to the wider social sphere. Sketched in this manner, the task of synthesis is to construct a more complex geography of social relations from the different geographies of culture, housing, employment, law, and so forth.

By synthesis, however, we wish to convey something more than a simple integration of the various subdivisions of the subject matter of geography. The conception of synthesis we wish to employ is not one of an exhaustive quest for each and every social relationship down to the last detail that comprises the geography of an area.

‘Nature’ is a complicated word: it has different meanings and these meanings affect each other. To discover how nature has been represented in Western culture, it may help to distinguish three very basic meanings: (1) the essential quality or character of something (the corrosive nature of salt water); (2) the underlying force which directs the world (nature is taking her course); (3) the material world itself, often the world that is separate from people and human society (to re-discover the joys of nature at the weekend).

If nature is usually taken as referring to the world ‘out there’ – from the smallest grasshopper, through the Grand Canyon, to the most distant galaxy – it is also believed that there is a force at work, that nature is working according to certain principles and that if we study nature we can deduce a moral lesson.

And that is why nature has a history. Nature cannot simply be regarded as what is out there – a physical universe which preceded the world of human values, and which will presumably outlive the human race – because what is out there keeps changing its meaning. Every attempt at describing nature, every value attributed to Nature – harmonious, ruthless, purposeful, random – brings nature inside human society and its values.

This essay is about how views of nature have changed through the centuries, and what these changes tell us about human history.