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Slumification of Consolidated Informal Settlements – a New and Unseen Challenge? Part 2
Abstract Submissions Closed
RC43 Housing and Built Environment (host committee)
Language: Spanish and English
Session Type: Oral
Today most scholars, policy makers, and residents themselves eschew the term "slum" and argue that it is high time to retire the term altogether (Mayne 2017). We agree, and yet we identify and explore counterfactual analyses of Latin American housing processes in which the conventional wisdom of successful housing consolidation appears to be severely constrained or stymied altogether. In the context of self-help ownership, low-income rental housing markets, and mass social interest housing estates which show high levels of abandonment and vacancies, this panel analyze why some types of housing remain heavily deteriorated, or having successfully consolidated, later enter a downward decline of deterioration into what might constitute the erstwhile term of "slums".
Building off the Latin American Housing Network (www.lahn.utexas.org) nine-country study, panelists will present findings from different types of consolidated settlements (30 years after their formation) and now located in the “innerburbs” (“first suburbs”), and where we have argued for new policy imperatives of housing and community rehab to overcome deterioration and dilapidation (Ward et al 2015). Despite the apparent success of self-building consolidation since the 1960s and 1970s, we are now beginning to observe evidence of heavy distress to the physical fabric of dwellings and communities – de facto “slumification”. This is due in part to the failure to rehabilitate deteriorated housing conditions after many years of intensive use. Other triggers will also be examined: title “clouding” due to intestacy; overcrowding and densification; rising informality under neoliberal and post-neoliberal economic conditions, etc.