“That’s nice, but until winter comes and you have to heat your house.” The fact, raised before an interviewer shocked by the clear morning in Parque Sicardi, comes accompanied by another: “Taking my daughters to school, which is in El Mondongo, takes me 45 minutes to go, and it takes the same.” The man (middle-aged and merchant) embodies a project that began with the search for family development, in peace and green, more than a decade ago. Part of the difficulties, due to the presence of electricity as a public service and only one road to connect the city center of an area whose population has risen in two decades from a few thousand to tens of thousands of inhabitants, can be represented in a few lines and one idea – namely, the quality of life – the warning issued by urban development specialists about the progress of the city as a march devouring the stretches of its open horizon towards the pampas.
The search for options is not considered only in terms of taste. Also, regarding land costs, and what may seem like fine print or deception: in the suburbs, plots of land are more accessible, but financially they may lack the necessary papers to later be able to issue titles to the family home. Naturally, specialists agree that a fait accompli scenario with no planning on the horizon puts the city on the verge of exorbitant costs for expanding services and infrastructure works.
In front of the regional table, architect Maria Giulia Roca, specialist in regional sciences and professor of the Chair of Regional Theory and Regional Planning at the Faculty of Architecture at UNLP, explained that “when we talk about city models, we refer to two extreme cases: the case of the compact city and the spacious model, designed for the car. A city like La Plata and the microregion, with Periso and Ensenada, has a compact city, which grows limitedly, and scattered others with low densities, sometimes leaving vacant land, and in others leaving islands in Rural land, and in the region “the organization arises from the sequence of trends that the founding center has that was created as a compact model and then began to flood and leave the land empty,” she warned.
Rocca, who is also director of the college’s Center for Urban and Regional Research and the college’s Observatory of Cities and Regions, relies on data. As he pointed out, at the college they measured how much the city has expanded so far in the 21st century: “The organization has expanded by 30 percent compared to the last century, or about 26 thousand hectares.”
Also from that college, the Center for Urban and Regional Research (CIUT) has collected data according to which, during a decade (2006-2016), the Greater La Plata region increased its urban occupation by 33.84 km2.
El Casco has an area of 25 square kilometers. Of this total, 97 percent belongs to the residential sector and a third of that to gated communities.
Urban pressure leads to displacement in the orchard belt towards the outskirts or directly outside the region.
The former dean of that college and specialist in urban planning, Tomás “Womby” García, analyzed that “the current aerial photograph, with the crudeness of biological
In this sense, he pointed out that there are no longer new roads every 6 blocks, parks or squares at the intersection of boulevards or diagonals, there are fewer trees in the streets and “there is a worrying absence of public spaces as a social and integrated concentrator.”
In short, for the prominent architect, “We have abandoned constitutional rights, and marginalization and social injustice have taken over as an economic basis, which clearly expresses the contradiction between the center and the periphery, and the contradiction between the individual and society.”
Thus, it sparked a state of “expulsion” for many citizens and their families. Some, with more tools: “There are those who, with the economic possibilities to choose, are looking for a place with a greater green presence, in search of the concept of ‘quality of life’. Others are doomed to settle in slums and flood-prone areas without basic health services.” Among them, he pointed to sewage, drinking water, urban structure and squares. At the same time, they are “doomed to the high costs of public or private transportation, which is always in deficit, and energy (bottled gas, several times more expensive than natural gas),” he noted.
It is impossible to access with services
This horizontal expansion of the city makes a solution impossible for any political vision, as a “massive deficit” in infrastructure and services develops.
And with that comes something more serious for Garcia: “It is impossible, with public resources, to reach a city that grows exponentially in four directions in terms of electricity, running water, sewage, natural gas, asphalt, educational and health services, public transportation, cable television, telephone, and modern computer services.”
Specialists warn that even when streets and highways arrive, we will have to get used to living more with the car, in light of traffic and severe congestion, as is already happening in major cities around the world.
Along these lines, Gustavo Casco, president of the College of Architects of La Plata, raised here “the impact of urbanization in cities and the lack of public resources to confront such important and rapid movements.”
The leader said it was a matter of “preempting what is happening and not correcting what has already happened.”
Among these phenomena, he included land grabbing as well as “forms of commercialisation”.
Among the points that must be analyzed from now on are the “need for land for housing” and the lack of land “banks.” It’s all “about planning and politics right now,” he said.
Redefining indicators
For his part, “Wombi” Garcia considered it necessary to “densify” the urban surface. This means creating conditions so that more people can access space that, according to this view, appears to be underutilized. “It is necessary to modify the current indicators of the Land and Land Use Code,” he said, adding that “in order to allow more density and volumetric margin (building heights) equal to the values of the city center (Zone C1) for the entire urban area, and especially for the areas around Circunvalación Street (Zone UR1), there are mostly single-family homes on the ground floor in this area, a very low density of only 150 residents per hectare (as at the beginning of the 20th century) with all service infrastructure, which constitutes A real urban waste,” he said, adding that these numbers have been decreasing in recent years.
“By allowing greater density, supply increases dramatically and in this way lot values decrease, allowing for desirable architectural development and greater economic accessibility in response to population growth and the incorporation of broad sectors into the virtues and freedoms of urban living.”
Densifying the structure, according to Garcia, “encourages greater pedestrian development and greater bicycle use based on accessible distances,” for example.
Rocca agreed on the distance between standard and real densities. “The downtown area and the town as a whole are underutilized, because it has the best ratio between population and green spaces, with a network of streets connecting all parts of the city and infrastructure services. The same applies to social facilities and labor, commercial and administrative reception areas.”
The researcher pointed out that there are commercial areas that do not contain high-rise buildings, “which have been frozen since the founding era.” For example, he mentioned the food sector on Qatar 74 and Zone 1 to 13, where there are many companies installed in establishment houses. “The high-rise buildings are located on the outskirts of the city. So the downtown area is not dense,” he said.
Given this panorama of the city and its surroundings, he stressed that “there are regulations that specify the necessity of building when there are vacant spaces or taking advantage of the potential, while trying not to have vacant lands. There are others that are being promoted, not in the case of central areas, with the transfer of indicators, in low-lying or frozen areas.”
There are examples that can be looked at. And as Roca mentioned, there’s the case of the San Pablo Master Plan. “It has identified centralities in terms of networks and trade corridors, which is happening in a balanced way.” He also contributed to Rosario’s case: “It developed a centralized system that somehow decentralized pressure in the coastal strip area.”
the plan
This is the zoning plan stipulated in the new La Plata Regional Planning Law, which will be voted on next Thursday in the Deliberative Council:
To download the file, do Click here