In this guest post, Dr. Camila Saraiva discusses the findings of her research on self-building practices in Latin America and introduces Tramas Urbanas, a website she developed with support from a USF Knowledge Mobilization Award.
Self-building urbanisation characterises a large part of urban Latin America. It results from the most varied combinations of actions involving residents, public, private and often religious actors, which accumulate over time and space. Despite this diversity, there are still not enough initiatives that surpass the focus on the absence of the state and dwell on the interweaving of planned and unplanned transformations that have produced it over a long period of time. The relentless struggle of the inhabitants to overcome the various forms of precariousness, for times ending in negotiations with local state actors, is one of the many possible combinations bracing the unique histories of specific territories.
The project, Tramas Urbanas: Trajectories of the Urbanisation of Latin America, was born to approximate the multifaceted histories of territories emerging from self-building processes in Latin America and the planning responses to them over the last half-century. The underlying argument is that understanding urbanisation (in Latin America and elsewhere) as the product of multiple and singular trajectories is more productive for the advancement of urban studies than reinforcing the dichotomy of formal/informal urbanisation processes.
The conceptual idea of this project arose intertwined with my USF-funded post-doctoral research project “Thinking ‘through elsewhere’ and ‘from here’: the politics of slum upgrading in Latin American cities”, in which I sought to examine the historical, institutional (governmental) and territorial processes involved in upgrading intervention policies targeting precarious neighbourhoods of informal origins in Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires and Medellin. To situate Tramas Urbanas website within this larger research project, I will describe very briefly the three distinct but interlinked comparative moments that shaped it.
The first was to historicise slum upgrading, that is, to uncover the emergence of slum upgrading as a circulating planning practice in Latin America. The second involved tracing the trajectories of slum upgrading policies in each of the three cities, which involved identifying the historical events, local political contexts and institutional arrangements that allowed such policies to be implemented. Finally, the third moment involved understanding the territorial translation of such policies by reconstructing – together with the inhabitants of the communities – the struggles and spatial transformations in three territories: Heliópolis (Sao Paulo), Villa 20 (Buenos Aires) and Comuna 2 – Santa Cruz (Medellin).
It was in Heliópolis that the first seeds of “Tramas Urbanas” began to sprout when, during an interview, a leader asked for a timeline that would combine the actions of the inhabitants of Heliópolis with the interventions of the state in the area, all over the course of about five decades! Shortly afterwards, in the light of the KMA call for proposals, I saw the possibility of reconstructing the timeline not only of Heliópolis, together with its inhabitants, but also of the other two communities I was beginning to study: Villa 20 and Comuna 2 – Santa Cruz.
From the beginning, the main aim of collecting this material in a digital platform was to present the results of the research in a more accessible and useful format for the public. This objective was informed, for example, by conversations with activists from the Homeless Movement of Heliopolis and the surrounding region, as one representative told me how useful this type of tool could be for the “learning/capacity development” activities that the movement carries out with its younger members, who often fail to grasp the long-term temporal dimension of social struggles and territorial transformations.
I must add that the inspiration for the “Tramas Urbanas” project also came from the recognition that the global knowledge circuits for the exchange of urban policies rarely include community organisations. Therefore, this project expects to contribute not only to register but also to connect the stories and struggles of different self-built territories in Latin America on their way to improvement and consolidation, taking advantage of the spread of electronic devices and the Internet within these communities. Such a connection opens up many possibilities for knowledge exchange and co-production between communities.
In analytical terms, tracing urban trajectories as a methodological strategy for (re)constructing theory on the urban draws on the Telles and Cabanes (2006) proposition of delving into the urban trajectories of individuals and families, their circuits of displacement in the urban space and ways of surviving, as an innovative methodological perspective to understand the city of Sao Paulo. This strategy resembles Amin and Lancione´s (2022) argument about the need to inscribe the city in the urban, that is, to engrave the dynamics and vocabularies found in the spaces of survival, organization, and resistance, on the public policies and urban theories.
The three areas selected as case studies – Heliópolis in Sao Paulo, Villa 20 in Buenos Aires, and Comuna 2 – Santa Cruz in Medellin – encompass interventions linked to different time periods and different approaches to dealing with precarious neighbourhoods. As such, they can be seen as a microcosm of the evolution of policies targeting popular neighbourhoods in each city. Reconstructing the history of these areas allows us to understand how multiple layers of urbanisation – each a particular set of social and material structures – overlap in the process of their consolidation. To achieve this, partnerships have been established with community organisations and/or collectives that are committed to producing information about their past and present in each area: UNAS – União de Núcleos, Associações dos Moradores de Heliópolis e Região (Sao Paulo), Mesa Activa por la Re-Urbanización de Villa 20 (Buenos Aires) and Corporación Mi Comuna(Medellin). The Tramas Urbanas platform thus complements and articulates the efforts already underway in the communities themselves.
With a team composed of researchers from UFABC at different stages of their academic training and careers (I am deeply grateful to Dânia Brajato for sharing the coordination of this project with me), community research assistants (Luciano Lima from Heliópolis, Marcos Chinchilla from Villa 20 and Christian López from Comuna 2 – Santa Cruz) and two web designers from Coletiva Enxame, the project was organised in five stages: (i) systematisation of data and information, based on a literature review and documentary research; (ii) workshops, group discussions, field visits and semi-structured interviews with leaders and residents of the three case study areas; (iii) transcription of all the collected material and systematisation; (iv) collective insights on the visual identity and architecture of the digital platform; (v) website production, translation and general revision.
The main contents of the digital platform include 1. general information about the cities and their precarious settlements; 2. chronological and contextual analyses of municipal and national public policies aimed at precarious settlements in São Paulo, Buenos Aires and Medellín, divided into categories and organised in the form of timelines; 3. chronological and contextual analyses of the symbolic, political and spatial events (promoted by the state or not) that contributed to the consolidation of Heliópolis in São Paulo, Villa 20 in Buenos Aires and Comuna 2 – Santa Cruz in Medellín. This content is illustrated with maps, photographs and drawings, in a simple interface and straightforward writing that is accessible to a wide Portuguese, Spanish and English-speaking target audience: residents, collectives, movements and social organisations present in Heliopolis, Villa 20, Comuna 2 – Santa Cruz and other Latin American neighbourhoods, as well as academic researchers, technicians, planners and managers from public authorities and the private sector interested in upgrading policies and other ways of urban integration of precarious settlements in Latin America.
Throughout the process, some difficulties arose in the face of our expectations. First of all, we had to adapt the dynamics of collecting material to the different realities we found in the communities and to the different access and relationships we had with them. Naturally, we were more familiar and closer to the Brazilian environment than to the Argentine and Colombian contexts, in terms of idiom and vocabulary. These difficulties, contrary to what one might think, ended up enriching the process. Under the guidance of our community assistants, with whom we had a rich and close interaction, we were able to carry out different approaches to the research: from individual walks and conversations to collective meetings. In the end, we were challenged to bring together the specifics of each area and the work done in them into an integrated web environment.
This platform contributes to preserving the memory of each territory and to sharing knowledge between communities, with a focus on strengthening their specific and collective struggles for better public policies and the construction of more just cities. In a broader sense, it is a relevant contribution to the revision of the history of urbanisation in Latin America, a good starting point for other researchers and an inspiration for alternative ways of disseminating the results of academic research for the democratisation of knowledge. We hope you enjoy browsing through Tramas Urbanas: Trajectories of the Urbanization of Latin America.