A Century of Urban Informality in Latin America

The rent strike of 1925 was the first major social crisis of the 20th century in Panama. This protest arose due to the overcrowding, precarious situation and lack of housing alternatives suffered by thousands of former canal workers in the terminal towns of the Transisthmian Route. Added to this volatile situation was the disproportionate increase in rents by landlords. The shock caused by this crisis was so great that the government called for military intervention by US troops stationed in the former Canal Zone to contain the uprising.

The increase in rents was a consequence of the economic and financial crisis that Panama experienced due to the completion of the canal construction and the poor management of public finances by governments in the first quarter of a century of its existence. Added to this local crisis were the global economic effects of the Great Depression of the early 1930s. Due to inflationary pressures and the situation of landowner abuse, tensions on this issue remained between 1925 and 1932. These tensions were reflected in a series of actions such as street protests, non-payment strikes and even a land seizure.

The Boca La Caja neighborhood – as this first land seizure in 1932 was called – grew out of the occupation of 72 fishing families on the coastal edge near the easement of what would become Paitilla Airport. Built in 1934, the airport was the first airport in Panama City outside the Canal Zone, as architect Álvaro Uribe describes in his book “Ciudad fragmentada” (1989).

The early emergence of informal settlements in the 20th century was not only observed in Panama. This neighborhood was preceded by the 1897 occupation by demobilized soldiers of Morro de Providencia in Rio de Janeiro, the oldest informal settlement in the region. Other similar recordings were to follow and mark the first urban expansion in Latin America. Favela Rocinha, also in Rio de Janeiro (late 1920), Villa 31 in Buenos Aires (1932), Las Yaguas in Havana (1930s) and Boca La Caja in Panama City would be the first settlements of this early wave.

These pioneer settlements would be the precedent for the explosive land occupation that characterized the urban growth of Latin American cities between the 1940s and the end of the 20th century. Barrio Petare in Caracas (1940), Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl in Mexico (1950), Villa 21-24 in Buenos Aires (1950), Ciudad Bolívar, Bogotá (1950), Victoria in Santiago de Chile (1957), Cantegril in Montevideo (1954), La Limonada in Guatemala (1958) and La Ciénaga in Santo Domingo (1958) represent the second wave of a phenomenon that would continue strongly until the end of the 1990s.

These first two waves of informal settlements mark the expansion of self-built housing as a way to create a city in Latin America, both in its narrative and in its social and physical aspects. The informal settlements gave rise to a very Latin American jargon that stigmatized their condition of poverty and precarity. Terms such as “favelas” in Brazil, “slums” in Argentina, “distress district” or “witch district” in Panama, “cantegril” in Uruguay, “callampas” in Chile or “slums” in Costa Rica are among the Americanisms that give this phenomenon its name.

Taken together, all of these cases reflect a common pattern: severe crises (war or economic) drove vulnerable populations—demobilized soldiers, rural migrants, and poor foreign immigrants or unemployed workers—to the urban peripheries in increasing numbers until they accounted for a significant proportion of the emergence of Latin American cities.

Physically, informal settlements were located on the outskirts and peripheries of cities. Hills, swampy areas, industrial areas near ports or railroads, and even landfills and other places that allowed people to live near employment centers but on land that was unattractive to formal urban development.

In general, of these early settlements, few were completely eliminated. Some governments opted for extermination and resettlement – in the case of Cuba with Las Yaguas in 1960. More often there was progressive regularization: provision of services, legal recognition of land and, in some cases, a degree of urban integration. For example, in Villa 31 in Buenos Aires, public spaces were created that strive for greater integration into the city.

Back to Boca La Caja in Panama: This neighborhood is still a community of fishermen and workers today. Located on the coast – surrounded by skyscrapers and shopping centers built so far in the 21st century – it has become a sought-after location for the city’s real estate development. It is in this scenario that a current proposal by the city’s urban planning authorities has emerged to assign zoning regulations to this neighborhood for the first time in its history.

This proposal has caused unease in the community. The reason for the dissatisfaction is that the proposal allocates the property use of individual houses to the group of properties that make up that neighborhood. The residents of Boca La Caja demand that they be assigned a high intensity of use that allows the construction of buildings of up to twenty floors, since they have a higher market value than individual apartments. A strategy apparently aimed at obtaining better sales prices for their properties in the event they are forced to leave their community.

Boca La Caja illustrates the challenge of the Latin American city, where it is no longer possible to maintain informal settlements suspended between institutional oblivion and the constant threat of eviction. The Latin American city must develop innovative models to reduce population displacement to the periphery. Informality in housing and living spaces is a structural condition that affects other economic and social aspects of the city, such as: B. informal work, unemployment, crime, social unrest, health and well-being in general. Therefore, it is urgent to address this if we do not want to accelerate the collapse of the city.

The 1996 report of the Latin American and Caribbean Settlements Commission stated: “Urban poverty may represent the most explosive political and economic problem in the region in the next century. Between 1970 and 1990, the proportion of the urban population in absolute poverty rose from 29% to 39%.” Thirty-five years later, those numbers have only gotten worse. According to UNDP, by 2022, “72% of people living in urban areas will be poor.”

The more than 120 million inhabitants of the region who still live in the precarious situation of these settlements are clear evidence of how little has been done in the last hundred years to respond to one of the fundamental problems of the Latin American city: providing its residents with quality of life, opportunities and dignity.