Social Urbanism in Latin America: Cases and Instruments of Planning, Land Policy and Financing the City Transformation with Social Inclusion

By Carlos Leite, Claudia Acosta, Fernanda Militelli and 5 more

This book highlights current concepts of Social Urbanism, the contemporary set of multiple and interdisciplinary urban studies that have emerged mainly from the complex realities of Latin American cities. The discussion that follows places special emphasis on public land policy and the innovative urban instruments developed in that region to promote social and territorial inclusion.

 

Critical reflections throughout the pages of this book shed light into the local context of each case-study in order to understand their specific set of challenges and opportunities. Relevant lessons are extracted from the three cities here analyzed, the medium-scale city of Medellin, the large-scale city of Bogota, and the megacity of Sao Paulo, as well as from local innovative experiences in Argentina and Uruguay.

 

These cities underwent promising transformation processes over two decades, applying planning and financing instruments of land policy which have produced significant shifts in the urban development paradigm in the region. The quest for social inclusion has emerged as the common denominator in these cities, awakening growing interest across several fields of urban studies, from public policies and city management to urban law, city financing, urban development, and innovative community participation processes. The book brings implications on urban land policy for transition cities in the Global South.

 

The question of social inclusion in Global South cities is however far from being solved; the analysis presented in this book shows advances and hope, besides a long path still ahead, which can only be faced through a continuous and challenging incremental process. May this book be an incremental step.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Springer
• Release date: Oct 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9783030160128

Book preview

Part IConcepts and Context

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

C. Leite et al.Social Urbanism in Latin AmericaFuture City13https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16012-8_1

1. Social Urbanism in Latin America

Innovative Experiences in Latin American Cities

Carlos Leite¹, ² , Claudia Acosta³, ⁴  , Fernanda Militelli¹, ⁵  , Guillermo Jajamovich⁶  , Mariana Wilderom⁷, Nabil Bonduki⁷, ⁸, Nadia Somekh¹, ⁹   and Tereza Herling¹  

(1)

School of Architecture and Urbanism, Mackenzie Presbyterian University, São Paulo, Brazil

(2)

PPG-CIS-Uninove and Institute of Advanced Studies, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

(3)

Fundação Getulio Vargas, São Paulo, Brazil

(4)

Lincoln Institute of Land Policy for the Latin America, Washington, DC, USA

(5)

Universidade Paulista, São Paulo, Brazil

(6)

Institute of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, University of Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina

(7)

School of Architecture and Urbanism, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

(8)

University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

(9)

Institut d’Urbanisme de Paris, University of Cergy-Pontoise, Cergy, France

Claudia Acosta

Fernanda Militelli

Guillermo Jajamovich

Nadia Somekh

Tereza Herling

Abstract

The chapter introduces some current concepts and its historical precedents in regard to social urbanism, a contemporary strand of multidisciplinary studies about cities that emerge from the Latin America’s complex reality, which is the most urbanized of the continents, and other transition cities from the Global South.

In these terms, social urbanism aims to promote the improvement of urban life quality and territorial inclusion, especially by directing investments toward socially vulnerable areas and integrated solutions of social housing and urban support infrastructure. In that sense, social urbanism is explained to be a relevant part of the New Urban Agenda when it is contemplated as a city science of the twenty-first century, with emphasis on social inclusion.

The text contextualizes the historical social demands of Latin American cities, the urgent demand for urban public policies, as well as presents some local innovative experiences in different countries on land policy, its instruments of urban planning and financing, local integral urban projects, social housing and neighborhood upgrading programs, city management, urban law, and new forms of community participation processes.

The cities for all and sustainable city demands are approached as an integrated agenda for the Global South incorporating social innovation aspects related to the inclusive cities.

Keywords

Social urbanismLand policyFinancing instrumentsSocial inclusionLand value captureSocial housingLatin AmericaGlobal SouthSocial innovationInclusive citiesUrban agendaNeighborhood upgrading programInformal territoriesCities for allSustainable cities

1.1 Introduction

A public space amid the dense jungle of buildings in Sao Paulo’s center – most of them occupied by movements of homeless residents, sheltering dozens of families, including children – remains empty throughout the day. Like a little green oasis, unused. People do not enjoy it; children do not play in it. Drug dealers and panderers of nightly prostitution do not allow its usage, and they are the owners of the place. Meanwhile, common lower-income citizens hide in their tiny apartments and substandard houses.

In 2013, after a few months studying the area along the valuable participation of the local community, the municipality of Sao Paulo launched its first pilot project in the Open Center Program, through a process conducted by the city’s public urban planning company – São Paulo Urbanismo (SP-Urbanism). The program embodied a tool kit of small-scale recreational equipment for urban public spaces, aimed at the activation of existing – but unused – public areas around the city. In this case, the urban designers’ proposal was to promote activities for children: equipment, playful exercises, circus presentations, street music and theater, and so on. The hypothesis was that if children occupied the area, families would join in with immediate adherence. However, the battle had not yet met its end: as the municipality sets up the equipment during the day, drug dealers destroyed everything by night. It took 6 months for the dispute to come to an end and the traffickers finally gave up.

This is the story of Largo Paissandú, whose image depicted on this book’s front cover reflects the conflict over the city territories’ usage. The community’s success will be further described in Chap. 4, but it is worth pointing out that it was one of the first actions stemming from a visionary, integrated, and local-specific urban policy, developed during the first year of mayor Fernando Haddad’s term (2013–2016). This action represents many of the issues addressed in this book, such as access and use of the land by the community, with emphasis on greater social and spatial inclusion.

$$ \ast \ast \ast $$

On the first day of my first visit to Medellin, I had the opportunity to hear about the life story of a young woman living in the region of Comuna 13 (one of the most violent regions at the time when Medellin was dominated by drug trafficking). When in high school, she had both her grandfather and father murdered by drug dealers, while all her friends surrendered to trafficking, since it was the only option for a youngster in that area. However, her life began to change in 2008 under the new urban management, with the arrival of Metrocable and its associated public facilities. According to her words, then we were able to know the city, to go to the city. That is, it was only from that moment on that the people from Comuna 13 began to feel part of the city of Medellin.

In this case there is, among other factors, an interesting process of social mobility through a public transportation policy connected to urban planning and community participation processes. The Metrocable is a cable car which allowed access to the hills inhabited by less economically favored communities. That portion of the population was physically excluded from the city and therefore more prone to drug trafficking, but the implemented transport integrated actions toward the construction of public spaces and facilities in order to implement the Proyectos Urbanos Integrales (PUIs – Integral Urban Projects), thus guaranteeing the promotion of social inclusion.

$$ \ast \ast \ast $$

In 2017, when I participated in the First International Congress of Public Space in Bogota, I was introduced to legal urban instruments originating within public policy aimed at funding public spaces; they had been developed by the organizers of the congress – the Departamento Administrativo de la Defensoría del Espacio Público (DADEP – Administrative Department of the Public Defender’s Office of Public Spaces).

In them, public spaces are regarded as structural elements of the territory that add value to the surrounding private properties and, through the process of land value capture (LVC), revert the incremental value to public funding. Urban instruments concerning the feasibility of the principles of the social function of property and the city are therefore being applied from the standpoint of public urban policies.

$$ \ast \ast \ast $$

Bogota, like Medellin, has entered a recent cycle of inclusive urban transformation, thanks to its strong public policies and continuous actions to enhance public spaces and urban mobility. The city has successfully started a gradual process of overcoming its dramatic history of social exclusion and territory domination by drug trafficking. Chapter 3, which discusses Bogota’s case, as well as those discussing the cases of Sao Paulo (Chap. 4) and Medellin (Chap. 2), will address some of these key issues, such as land use planning in priority for collective and public usage and inclusive planning instruments, as well as instruments of urban financing via land value sharing and land base tools. These topics are presented in Chap. 7.

One of the concepts we will use in the book is support infrastructure: a set of basic urban infrastructure such as electricity, sanitation, and networks of public transportation, community facilities/public equipment, and public spaces that constitute the territorial support which, along with housing, can build a respectable city where everyone is able to enjoy a decent life quality.

Unfortunately, not nearly enough support infrastructures can be found in the largest Latin American cities, which host higher population densities. The peripheries of our cities are informal territories, where millions of people live without adequate infrastructure. Central areas, on the other hand, while presenting lower population density, are endowed with this kind of infrastructure. This is a serious symptom of the land use imbalance, which reflects an incongruity in the urban, environmental, and social development of our cities. Social urbanism comes to advocate the improvement of urban quality and social-territorial inclusion, especially by directing investments to socially vulnerable areas, thus promoting an integrated solution to the immense urban housing concern and its support infrastructure.

The urban transformations of Bogota and Medellin are internationally well known and published in the academic world. The Medellin case became a city brand for the twenty-first century: social urbanism equals Medellin. However, it is not the goal of the book in either naming best practices patterns or reinforcing a social urbanism model that can be replicated by any city with problems of social inequality. Naive or superficial processes do not fit here, in the highly complex, serious, and historical context of high poverty levels present in Latin American cities. In this sense, there is no possible way to replicate the miracle of Medellin (Angotti and Irazabal 2017).

Even so, as researchers, urban planners, and public managers holding a progressive vision and attitude, we believe in the continuous and incremental process of acting through a political and pragmatic approach toward a feasible territory transformation in regard to land planning. One can make an example out of the gradual urban transformation process that has been taking place since mayor Sergio Fajardo’s office term (2004–2007) in Medellin, bringing inputs and fundamental reflections, among challenges still existing there, in relation to the transition cities, each obviously possessing their own specific context. The same goes for Bogota, particularly in the administrations of Anatas Mokus and Enrique Peñalosa in 1995 and 1998, both being reelected for office in 2001 and 2016, respectively. As to Sao Paulo, less glamorous in terms of urban design, architectural visibility, and international recognition, it bears important advances to local-specific public policies for the city’s invisible structural transformation, whose concrete results are gradually emerging over the years.

It is not a question of exalting pioneer transformation experiences that are disconnected from the historical, social, and political contexts of each respective city. Naturally, in the three investigated cases, there are specific complex backgrounds and urban renewal initiatives that influenced the processes analyzed here. To mention just a few other cases of extensive international knowledge that preceded the more recent Medellin, Bogota, and Sao Paulo ones, let us recall the housing cooperatives in Uruguay: the experimental project PREVI (Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda), created by the Architect-President of Peru Fernando Belaunde Terry in Lima in 1968; the Favela-Bairro program, developed by the Architect-Mayor Luiz Paulo Conde in Rio de Janeiro, as the pioneering Neighborhood Upgrading Program (NUP – Mejoramiento de Barrio); and similar initiatives in various places such as Buenos Aires (Barrio 31), Mexico City, Ecuador, Chile, and others. There are also innovative laboratories of alternative experiences in social housing, putting in practice and qualifying the urban reform ideas in the 1990s in the city of Sao Paulo (Bonduki 2018), including the pioneering bus rapid transit (BRT) transportation system, implemented in Curitiba in the 1970s, and its similar system in Bogota, the Transmilenio , inaugurated in 1998 during the mandate of Mayor Enrique Peñalosa.

We all know that the few decades’ course of those experiences does not provide sufficient time in terms of structural urban transformation, which yield concrete results in the daily lives. Especially in cities with a strong history of territorial exclusion and urban violence, the state absence as an urban development regulator contributes to serious social inequalities imprinted on the cities’ areas.

The book shows, from the first to the last chapter, the process of urban transformation that demands various articulated factors and clear public policies and choices – political choices. To perform urbanism with an inclusive public prospect is to address public policies from the access to infrastructure-served land. Land policy could then be called the value sharing process, based on the fact that any public action should generate public benefit, as has been advocated by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (2018) in its extensive work in Latin America through urban and legal instruments. Land, the most valuable resource of a city, should be used as a redistribution asset to achieve balanced urban development.

1.2 The Book’s Structure, Goals, and Key Issues

The book highlights current concepts of social urbanism, the contemporary set of multiple and interdisciplinary urban studies that have emerged mainly from the complex realities of Latin American cities. The discussion that follows places special emphasis on public land policy and the innovative urban instruments developed in that region to promote social and territorial inclusion.

Critical reflections throughout the pages of this book shed light into the local context of each case study in order to understand their specific set of challenges and opportunities. Relevant lessons are extracted from the three cities and analyzed on Chaps. 2, 3, and 4: the medium-scale city of Medellin, the large-scale city of Bogota, and the megacity of Sao Paulo.

These three cities underwent promising transformation processes over two decades, applying planning and financing instruments of land policy which have produced significant shifts in the urban development paradigm in the region. The quest for social inclusion has emerged as the common denominator in these three cities, awakening growing interest across several fields of urban studies, from public policies and city management to urban law, city financing, urban development, and innovative community participation processes.

Section 1.5 of this chapter addresses some innovative experiences that have emerged in recent decades in other Latin American cities and countries, in addition to Colombia and Brazil, with emphasis on NUPs. Additionally, Chap. 6 addresses the experience of large-scale urban projects in Buenos Aires and Rosario, Argentina, from the just city concept.

Critical analysis come from land polices, urban plans, projects, and actions in different and complementary scales from these Global South cities, not as an extensive map or best practices list, but as a selection of those who show complementary and unique situations whose interesting lessons and challenges could advance the knowledge on urban development studies and future cities, transition cities.

The third part presents how the transformations could be implemented and financed, through land policy. It brings out evidence of advances in land use policy as a promoter of social urbanism in these cities: urban and legal instruments, developed in the new innovative urban regulatory frameworks, providing the mechanisms for planning, induction, funding, and financing these initiatives. In the last chapter, experiences learned from the analyses are discussed, as well as the challenges still to be overcome for the evolution of the promotion of social urbanism in Latin America.

From the recent experience in these cities, the discussion leads to the urgency in our Latin American society to perceive its territory as a collective asset as opposed to just a collection of private properties. This way, the notion that the use of land is public domain arises, and therefore, land policy must be regulated by public policies that apply urban planning instruments for social inclusion.

Besides the mandatory critical approach – for the problems of the massive poor population living in poor territories here are too large to be solved in just two decades – the analyses of the cities presented on the book bring some important lessons and challenges on the fundamental question of land usage for all. There is some hope in terms of local instruments of social urbanism financing, urban public polices, land polices, and creative and new urban planning approaches developed within the strong population participation in the twenty-first century in the Global South, with local