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Amedida que las ciudades costeras continúan enfrentando las amenazas de un clima cada vez más volátil, las marejadas y el ascenso del nivel del mar, todas las cuales están relacionadas con el cambio climático y pueden llegar a ser muy costosas, desarrollar un mayor nivel de resiliencia se está convirtiendo en una prioridad principal de planificación. Sin embargo, la resiliencia posee varias dimensiones: no sólo significa construir cosas tales como compuertas contra inundaciones y estructuras más sólidas, sino también conservar libres de desarrollos sistemas naturales como los pantanos, y, en muchos casos, tomar la decisión de no construir nuevamente en los lugares más vulnerables. Y aquí yace un problema complejo y en continua evolución que afecta los derechos de propiedad privada.
Al menos desde los albores del siglo XX, la Corte Suprema ha estado lidiando con una pregunta básica: ¿cuándo la regulación del uso del suelo constituye una expropiación que requiere pagar una compensación a los propietarios, según la 5º enmienda de la Constitución de los EE.UU. (“…la propiedad privada no podrá ser objeto de expropiación para uso público sin la debida compensación”)? Desde los casos Pennsylvania Coal contra Mahon, 260 U.S. 393 (1922) y Euclid contra Amber Realty, 272 U.S. 365 (1926), la esencia de los fallos ha sido que el gobierno posee una libertad de acción considerable a la hora de ejercer su facultad de regular el uso del suelo. En el caso Kelo contra City of New London, 545 U.S. 469 (2005), el tribunal supremo afirmó la facultad que posee el estado de utilizar la expropiación a los fines del desarrollo económico en el siglo XXI.
No obstante, en junio de 2013, una decisión en cuanto a un proyecto de desarrollo en Florida pareció indicar un cambio sutil en otro sentido. En el caso Koontz contra St. Johns River Water Management District, los jueces fallaron 5 a 4 que el gobierno presentaba un celo excesivo al imponer requisitos de mitigación a los desarrolladores como condición para obtener permisos de construcción. Coy Koontz, padre, cuya intención había sido construir un pequeño centro comercial en su propiedad, objetó las demandas de un distrito de administración del agua de Florida, según las cuales debía pagar por la restauración de los pantanos que se encontraban fuera del sitio con el fin de compensar por el daño ambiental causado por la construcción. Koontz citó dos casos, Nollan contra California Coastal Commission, 483 U.S. 825 (1987) y Dolan contra City of Tigard, 512 U.S. 374 (1994), con el fin de sustentar su aseveración de que los requisitos constituían una expropiación por exceder una “proporción aproximada” entre dichos requisitos y los alcances de los daños causados por el desarrollo. En el año 2011, la Corte Suprema de Florida rechazó el argumento de Koontz, pero en junio de este año el tribunal supremo falló que los requisitos de mitigación impuestos al constructor eran excesivos.
Este fallo alarmó a algunos ambientalistas y grupos, como la American Planning Association, quienes temieron que se establecieran nuevos límites a la facultad del gobierno de controlar el desarrollo e imponer requisitos para restaurar y conservar áreas naturales. Este motivo de preocupación se extendió hacia las regiones metropolitanas costeras que se estaban preparando para los impactos del cambio climático; un ejemplo de esto es la Ciudad de Nueva York que, en el mes de mayo, propuso un plan modelo de 20 mil millones de dólares consistente en una combinación de estrategias para vivir con el agua y mantenerla alejada. Los expertos en derechos de propiedad especularon que los desarrolladores podrían citar el caso Koontz como justificación para negarse a pagar un fondo para dichas iniciativas.
A un nivel más amplio, la pregunta permanece en pie: después de una situación como la del huracán Sandy, ¿tiene el gobierno derecho de prohibir la recon-strucción o de modificar las regulaciones con el fin de evitar nuevas construcciones? La respuesta legal es, básicamente, “sí”, según Jerold Kayden, abogado y profesor en la Facultad de Diseño de la Universidad de Harvard, quien participó en el Foro de periodistas sobre el suelo y el entorno construido llevado a cabo por el Instituto Lincoln el pasado abril.
Especialmente a raíz de la mayor disponibilidad de datos sobre el ascenso del nivel del mar y las marejadas que se tiene hoy en día, el gobierno tiene el derecho legal de evitar que los propietarios construyan en lotes vacantes expuestos a las inundaciones y al ascenso del nivel del mar o que reconstruyan una vivienda que fue destruida. Sin embargo, según Kayden, “desde el punto de vista político, esta es otra historia”.
Nueva York y Nueva Jersey representaron dos enfoques muy diferentes en cuanto a la reconstrucción que tuvo lugar con posterioridad al huracán Sandy. El gobernador de Nueva York, Andrew Cuomo, y el alcalde de la Ciudad de Nueva York, Michael Bloomberg, abogaron por una serie de normas destinadas tanto a la reconstrucción como a una “retirada estratégica”, mientras que el gobernador de Nueva Jersey, Chris Christie, se enfocó en la asignación de fondos destinados a los residentes para que éstos pudieran reconstruir en las parcelas afectadas por la tormenta, aun cuando dichas propiedades permanecieran dentro de la zona de riesgo.
Por otro lado, la ciudad de Boston ha comenzado a requerir a los desarrolladores de zonas costeras que se preparen ante la posibilidad de ascensos del nivel del mar y marejadas, mediante la reubicación de las maquinarias que guardan en los sótanos a pisos más elevados, entre otros requisitos. A medida que el caso Koontz despeja el camino hacia un escrutinio más rígido de las medidas impuestas por el gobierno municipal como condición para la construcción, los desarrolladores podrían demandar al gobierno por estos costosos requisitos relacionados con el clima, argumentando que dichos requisitos son demasiado onerosos y podrían constituir una expropiación reguladora.
Aunque las demandas por derechos de propiedad relacionadas con la reconstrucción y las restricciones sobre nuevas construcciones en áreas costeras indudablemente continuarán proliferando, Pratap Talwar, director de Thompson Design Group, presentó una alternativa para la planificación a largo plazo que podría evitar que surgieran dichos conflictos. Talwar detalló ante un grupo de periodistas el caso de estudio de Long Branch, Nueva Jersey, una ciudad que, hace varios años, se replanteó su proceso de planificación con el fin de incluir normas más rígidas y a la vez un proceso más rápido para el desarrollo que estuviera de acuerdo con las pautas. Según Talwar, Long Branch fue la única milla de la costa de Nueva Jersey que soportó las inclemencias del huracán Sandy de forma relativamente intacta.
Foro de periodistas sobre el suelo y el entorno construido: La ciudad resiliente
Treinta y cinco escritores y editores de primera línea que cubren noticias sobre problemas urbanos asistieron al 6º Foro de Periodistas sobre el Suelo y el Entorno Construido, llevado a cabo el 20 de abril de 2013 en el Lincoln House. El tema del foro fue “La ciudad resiliente” y abarcó desde los municipios costeros que se preparan para el ascenso del nivel del mar y las marejadas hasta las ciudades tradicionales que intentan evolucionar a pesar de la reducción de sus poblaciones y de su actividad comercial.
Kai-Uwe Bergmann, director de Bjarke Ingels Group, abrió el foro dando un panorama general sobre las innovaciones en diseño urbano que maximizan la eficiencia en el suelo, la vivienda y los proyectos de infraestructura de gran envergadura. Johanna Greenbaum, de Kushner Companies, quien ayudó a poner en funcionamiento la iniciativa de microviviendas del alcalde de la Ciudad de Nueva York, Michael Bloomberg, dio detalles sobre dicho proyecto y otros de similares características en diferentes lugares del país destinados a personas solteras y parejas que pueden vivir en espacios de 28 metros cuadrados.
Alan Mallach, coautor del informe sobre enfoque en políticas de suelo del Instituto Lincoln titulado Regeneración de las ciudades históricas de los Estados Unidos, observó señales de resurgimiento en lugares tales como el Central West End (St. Louis) o el barrio Over-the-Rhine (Cincinnati), a la vez que reconoció los desafíos que en-frentan Camden, Nueva Jersey, Flint y Detroit, Michigan y Youngstown, Ohio. Antoine Belaieff, director de innovaciones en MetroLinx, dio detalles sobre el uso de las redes sociales para obtener la opinión de los ciudadanos con respecto a una inversión de 16 mil millones de dólares en infraestructura de transporte resiliente dentro del área de Toronto.
John Macomber, de la Facultad de Negocios de la Universidad de Harvard, dirigió una sesión sobre la ciudad global, en la que reconoció que existen cientos de millones de personas que continúan migrando de áreas rurales a urbanas, lo que requiere una planificación a gran escala para la infraestructura. Martim Smolka, director del Programa para América Latina y el Caribe del Instituto Lincoln, lamentó los desplazamientos generalizados que están teniendo lugar a causa de los preparativos para la Copa Mundial de fútbol y los Juegos Olímpicos que se disputarán en Río de Janeiro. Bing Wang, de la Facultad de Diseño de Harvard, observó que 11 ciudades en China tienen una población de más de 10 millones de habitantes y, aún así, esta nación en rápido crecimiento sólo ha logrado la mitad de la urbanización esperada.
John Werner, director de movilización en Citizens Schools, explicó la manera en que los sistemas escolares urbanos pueden encender pasión entre los estudiantes trayendo desde fuera a distintos profesionales para que actúen como maestros y mentores. Gordon Feller, de Cisco Systems, imaginó un mundo completamente conectado y una Internet para todo. Se sumó Dan Keeting, periodista de investigación del Washington Post, quien compartió sus experiencias al extraer datos de diferentes niveles del gobierno.
El foro se vio obligado a abreviarse debido a la búsqueda de las personas que pusieron las bombas en el Maratón de Boston en el área de Cambridge-Watertown; sin embargo este evento dio pie a un diálogo acerca de la solicitud de procedimientos de “refugio en el lugar”, presentada por el gobernador de Massachusetts, Deval Patrick, la seguridad y el espacio público, y otros tipos de resiliencia en el área de Boston. Varios participantes escribieron sobre estos eventos, como Emily Badger (The Atlantic Cities), Donald Luzzatto (Virginian Pilot) e Inga Saffron (The Philadelphia Inquirer).
La reunión de periodistas cada abril es una asociación entre el Instituto Lincoln, la Facultad de Diseño de la Universidad de Harvard y la Fundación Nieman para el Periodismo de la misma universidad. La misión de esta actividad es reunir a periodistas a fin de compartir ideas y aprender acerca de las últimas tendencias relativas a la cobertura de noticias sobre ciudades, arquitectura y planificación urbana. — AF
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Almost 30 years ago, Amalia Reátegui and her husband, Eusebio, packed up their possessions, wrestled together their eight children, and moved to their new home: a dusty plot of land on the barren outskirts of the Peruvian capital, Lima. At first, life wasn’t easy there. Basic services, like running water and electricity, weren’t available. Roads were unpaved, and public transportation was nonexistent. Quality schools and health clinics were far away, in the more established and wealthier neighborhoods.
But even though conditions were tough, moving to San Juan de Lurigancho, one of Lima’s earliest informal settlements, offered the couple a rare chance to become homeowners, which would have been out of their reach in the city’s traditional districts.
Little by little, things improved. They built a sturdy house made of concrete, got electricity and, years later, running water and sewage. Buses arrived, and even a metro connecting San Juan de Lurigancho to the rest of the city. Their children went off to postsecondary education, and later landed jobs in hospitals, the municipality, and the navy.
Just as important for Amalia and Eusebio was a piece of paper from the government—the title recognizing their formal ownership of the 120-square-meter plot of land where they lived.
Today, the couple still lives in the same peach-colored house, but their family home, like their neighborhood, has been transformed over the years. The one-story house is now a four-story building with eight two-bedroom apartments, one for each of their adult children.
For Amalia, a 71-year-old soft-spoken grandmother with shoulder-length black hair, this was all part of the plan. “When we first built our home, I always thought it would be for my children,” she said. “It is my house, and it is for them.”
But for her children, who spent the equivalent of tens-of-thousands of dollars to build the upper floors, the current living situation leaves them in a legal limbo, where the ownership of their apartments is based solely on a verbal agreement with their parents rather than legal paperwork.
Reverting to Informality
The case highlights a new trend that is puzzling experts of urban development and property rights in Peru. After years of demanding legal titles for their homes, residents are allowing their properties to become deregularized by failing to use the national registry, known as Sunarp, to document property transactions such as real estate sales, change of ownership within families, or the construction of additional floors subdivided into apartments. As a result, properties revert to informality, and the government registry does not accurately reflect the actual owners.
The issue is a growing concern for policy experts, who say it could have major social, economic, and legal costs. Without legal registration, disputes can quickly arise among siblings over ownership of a family home after the parents die. Resolving the dispute can lead to high legal costs in Peru’s already overburdened and slow courts. Informal owners can’t use their property as collateral for formal bank financing, and they face lower resale value if they decide to put their home on the market. It also risks undermining the sustainability of Peru’s pioneering titling program, a popular tool aimed at promoting economic development that was later emulated around the world.
“The children are now living in the same situation that their parents were living in 40 years ago. They’ve become informal again,” said Julio Calderón, a Peruvian sociologist, Lincoln Institute researcher, and expert on property rights. “Urbanistically, this is a time bomb.”
The Rise of Informal Settlements in Peru
Like other Latin American capitals, Lima experienced a population explosion during the second half of the last century, as migrants from across Peru flooded into the arid coastal city seeking a better life.
In 1950, fewer than a million people lived in Lima. By 2000, that number had ballooned to 7.4 million, according to the United Nations Population Division. Today, the Peruvian capital is home to more than 9 million people, representing almost a third of the country’s total population. The drivers of Peru’s internal migration are varied, but it’s mainly a result of political and economic hardships in the countryside. In the 1970s, the rural economy crashed following a failed agrarian reform by General Juan Velasco, a leftwing military dictator.
The economy was battered again in the early 1980s during one of the worst El Niño weather events on record, causing damaging floods and collapse of the fisheries. At around the same time, the leftist Shining Path rebels launched a violent insurgency in the southern highlands, forcing many residents there to flee to Lima to escape a bloody conflict that would claim about 70,000 lives.
In Lima, the government wasn’t prepared for the wave of migrants. With nowhere to live, new residents began to take over vacant land on the city’s outskirts, sometimes clashing with police. One of those informal developments eventually became San Juan de Lurigancho. Hector Nicho, a community leader there, remembers the authorities as being powerless to stop the flood of people who seized land, hoping to make it their own.
“The first day of the invasion, there were 15 or 20 people. The following day, we were 500. The day after that, we were 1,500. It just kept growing. They couldn’t stop it, even though the state had sent police,” said Nicho, who was just a boy when he participated in the land invasion some four decades ago.
Land grabs occurred throughout Lima, eventually leading to the creation of districts like Villa El Salvador on the city’s southern edge and San Martin de Porres in the north. The squatters were some of the city’s most impoverished residents, living in areas noticeable for the lack of state presence and vast informal economy.
By the late 1980s, things were only getting worse. Peru’s economy had spiraled into hyperinflation. The Shining Path, once confined to the rural highlands, was fast encroaching on Lima, threatening to overthrow the government and install a Maoist-inspired regime.
De Soto’s Titling Program
Around this time, Hernando de Soto, a Peruvian economist, proposed a way out of the mess. De Soto argued that providing legal ownership to property would trigger development by allowing the poor to leverage their individual assets in the formal economy and access financing. But complex and expensive bureaucratic barriers were preventing that from happening, De Soto said.
“They realized that one of the biggest obstacles to registering property in Peru was their own public registry,” said Angel Ayala, a lawyer and expert on property registration. “The problem wasn’t the informality. The problem was that the formal sector wouldn’t allow you to enter it,” he said, referring to the government’s then-complex and costly regulations for property registration.
De Soto’s ideas were embraced by Peru, which created a new legal framework to provide property titles for people like the Reáteguis, living in informal settlements in places like San Juan de Lurigancho.
In 1996, the government created the Commission for the Official Registration of Informal Property (COFOPRI) to lead a nationwide urban titling program. It also created a parallel registry, known in Spanish as the Registro Predial Urbano. The registry, which focused only on Lima’s informal settlements, slashed the requirements for property registration, making it faster and cheaper for poor land owners to get titles.
The results were impressive. According to Regularization of Informal Settlements in Latin America, a Lincoln Institute report by Brazilian lawyer Edésio Fernandes, COFOPRI reduced the time to obtain a title from 7 years to 45 days. It cut the number of steps from 2,007 to 4. The cost of registering declined from US$2,156 to almost nothing.
Since its creation, COFOPRI has issued about two million property titles, making it one of the largest programs of its kind in the world.
“The people who worked there worked 24 hours a day,” said Jorge Ortiz, a former COFOPRI employee who later became the superintendent of Peru’s traditional public registry, known as Sunarp. “They really identified with what they were doing.”
De Soto’s titling policy became the preeminent approach for land regularization around the world. It won praise from development organizations like the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, and from politicians like former U.S. President Bill Clinton. Peru, as a pioneer of the program, became a model for other countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia that were also grappling with widespread informality and poverty.
Almost 20 years since the creation of COFOPRI, academics have identified several social and economic benefits from titling. Families with formal title, for example, invest more in their homes and their children’s education, studies show. They also have fewer children.
Critics of the program, however, argue that De Soto’s main hypothesis—that titles will increase the poor’s access to formal credit—has simply not materialized as he envisioned.
They also point to unintended consequences of large land-titling programs, such as political manipulation and incentive for squatters to continue invading land, creating new informal developments without services, in the hope of being registered one day.
The Risks of Deregularization
In Peru, one of the main concerns is the sustainability of the titling, as more and more properties are becoming deregularized. Years after they seized land, the original property owners are retiring or passing away. Their property, often given to their children, is slipping back into informality.
“What we have seen happening is that the second and third property transactions are no longer registered. For a number of reasons, people simply fail to keep their properties fully legal,” said Fernandes. “So in a few years’ time, you are back to square one in terms of the legalities of the area.”
Unless the trend changes, policy experts say, the government’s aggressive titling program could unravel, along with its benefits.
Informal property owners risk losing the most basic benefit of titling: tenure security and legal protection against eviction and fraud. They could face other costs, like legal expenditures to resolve disputes over ownership.
There are also opportunity costs. Informal homeowners can’t use their property to access formal credit. They’d also miss out on receiving fair market compensation if they decided to sell their home.
The extent of the deregularization is difficult to gauge, but a recent Lincoln Institute study by Oswaldo Molina, an Oxford-trained economist, found that just 21 percent of second property transactions in Peru’s recently titled areas were being formally registered (Molina 2014).
“When the reform started, it wasn’t just an issue of providing titles to the people, but maintaining them formal,” said Molina. “So what happened with the other 79 percent?”
“We are now going to have numerous properties with titles, but in the name of someone else,” he added.
Causes for the Failure to Register
During his time as the head of Sunarp, Ortiz said it was extremely rare to see individuals registering second property transactions. For Ortiz, this has been a disappointment.
“I believed in the model from the 1990s,” said Ortiz, who was the head of Sunarp during the start of President Ollanta Humala’s administration in 2011. “And now, some 30 years later, I’m seeing that it could go to waste.”
The causes of deregularization are obscure, but experts point to cultural issues and changes in public policy as important drivers.
In many places in Peru, there is a strong respect for the verbal decisions of parents, even concerning important legal issues like property registration. In cases where a family home is subdivided, children rely on their parents, the property owners, to sign off on the transaction in order to provide them with a formal title.
Experts say that many parents are happy to let their children pay for the subdivision, but they don’t consider providing formal title, believing that a verbal agreement is sufficient to split up the property. In other cases, parents refuse to provide title over concerns that they could lose control over their home.
“There is still a culture where you respect the decision and the word of the parents,” said Jesus Quispe, the director of Cenca, a Lima-based urban development institute, which works in San Juan de Lurigancho. “Few transactions go through the legal system. There is a culture of informality.”
Ramiro García, the head of the urban program at the Peruvian development organization Desco, says many families ignore the public registry until they confront a problem, like a legal dispute over ownership.
“It is bureaucratic, expensive, and families don’t consider it necessary,” he said from his office in Villa El Salvador.
Before Lima’s population boom, families that couldn’t afford to buy a home could move to the outskirts, grab a piece of land, and build a house. Today, most of the vacant land is gone. What remains is located on the edge of mountains, often unstable for living.
As land has become scarcer, demand for housing has remained robust. As a result, the city has started to expand upward, with apartment buildings replacing houses.
Real estate prices have also skyrocketed, driven by Peru’s strong economic growth over the past decade. For young families from lower-middle class backgrounds, escalating costs have made it increasingly difficult to acquire their first home.
To help their children, parents who settled Lima’s outskirts a few decades ago are now adding two or three floors to their homes, and subdividing them into apartments.
In San Juan de Lurigancho, Melly Rosas, a 53-year-old secretary at a church, decided to add three more floors to her house after watching her married children struggle to save up enough money to buy a property.
“At first, this wasn’t our plan,” she said. “But it was too expensive for them to buy land while paying rent.”
“We are growing upward because there isn’t any more space,” Rosas added, referring to the increasing number of buildings in her neighborhood.
Rosas and her husband, Ricardo, haven’t looked into providing titles for their children’s apartments, but they plan to. “We know we have to do so, because it will reduce a lot of problems they could have,” she said. “Right now, everything is verbal.”
A short drive away, on a quiet, residential street, Marcelo Nuñez, a 52-year-old shoemaker, lives in a spacious house with high ceilings that help to keep it cool during Lima’s hot summer days. Attached to the house is a small store, where his wife sells soft drinks and potato chips.
Like their neighbors, Nuñez and his family slowly built their home over the last 30 years, one wall at a time. Now his 28-year-old daughter is building a second floor, where she plans to live with her baby boy. Nuñez’s son, 25, will likely live on the third floor.
Nuñez said he hadn’t planned to register the upper floors, even though they will be owned by his children. “For my part, I hadn’t thought about doing it legally, because we are family,” he said. “It’s pretty strange to do a subdivision legally. Normally it is just by word.”
But, like Rosas, Nuñez agrees that leaving his children without formal titles could create future problems. “If they’re in agreement, I wouldn’t have a problem with doing it legally,” he said.
But cultural factors aren’t the only impediment to property registration. Policy experts say that people like Rosas and Nuñez will run into several costly regulatory requirements if they eventually decide to formalize their properties.
The obstacles arose, experts say, due to the government’s decision to eliminate the Registro Predial Urbano, the parallel registry created to speed up formal registration in Lima’s informal settlements.
In 2004, Peru merged the Registro Predial Urbano into Sunarp, the traditional public registry that was seen as too costly and bureaucratic. The Registro’s simpler procedures for second and third property transactions were replaced by Sunarp’s more complicated and costly requirements.
Critics of the decision say the government made the change due to lobbying from powerful groups representing public notaries, who were concerned about losing lucrative business due to the Registro Predial Urbano. Unlike the traditional registry, the Registro allowed property owners to hire any lawyer, not just notaries, to legalize their transactions.
“By returning to the previous system, the costs multiplied by five. People said, ‘No, I’m not going to do that,’” said Ayala, the lawyer and expert on titling. “The issue isn’t cultural. It is about how to maintain the titling process in the formal system.”
Deregularization in Peru has far-reaching consequences for other countries that established their own titling programs based on the Peruvian model.
Argentine economists and Lincoln Institute researchers Sebastian Galiani, of the University of Maryland, and Ernesto Schargrodsky, of the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, found that in a recently titled suburb of Buenos Aires a significant portion of households were falling back into informality. In a 2013 study, the authors concluded that deregularization was likely due to the unaffordable cost of keeping the properties formal (Galiani and Schargrodsky 2013).
“This isn’t just a Peruvian issue, but something that is much larger in the region,” said Molina, the economist who studied deregularization in Peru. “It is a problem with the short-term view of the reform.”
Potential Solutions
To stem the tide of deregularization, policy experts say authorities will need to intervene now to prevent the need for costly retitling programs in the future.
Some small steps have been taken. In 2007, the government issued legislation to provide lower-income title holders with funds to formalize subdivisions, a process that first requires them to register construction of the house. (Peru’s registration program gave residents titles to the land, but not the house built on top.) However, registration experts say the 2007 program was never fully implemented.
More importantly, experts say the government should reinstate simpler procedures, like those that were discarded when the Registro Predial Urbano was integrated into Sunarp. “The concrete thing to do would be to reconsider mechanisms that were used before,” said Molina. “The Registro was created so that the poor could correctly receive titles.”
Regulatory changes may not be enough on their own. Many experts insist that the problem requires authorities to tackle Peru’s broader culture of informality as well. To do so, they say, the government should launch a campaign to educate residents about the importance of maintaining their properties formal.
“This is a problem that the government has to address,” said Gustavo Riofrio, a sociologist and Lincoln Institute researcher who has spent his career studying property rights. “You have an entire city that was made by these people who are facing the same problem. It is now a social problem, not an individual one.”
Officials at Sunarp say they are working to simplify procedures for property transactions, without jeopardizing the legal security that the current system provides. Sunarp says it is also working to educate people about the importance of using the registry, but acknowledges that the government “hasn’t been able to instill in the population the importance of formalization.”
Until there is a greater acceptance of the regulatory system, some lawyers say Peru should make registration compulsory. Unlike many other countries, Peru does not require registration of property transactions; it’s voluntary.
“We have to educate people so they understand that registration doesn’t just provide security. It’s important to create value as well,” said Ortiz. “But until we have a new culture, we need to require people to register by modifying the civil code.”
At the home of Amalia and Eusebio, in San Juan de Lurigancho, their 40-year-old daughter Emma is eager to discuss property titles.
Emma, who lives in a third-floor apartment with her son, says the subdivision of her childhood home is working out nicely so far. The family members respect each other’s space, but they still get together for a lunch on Sunday. The children also help their aging parents with expenses such as food.
But Emma says she knows it’s important to define ownership legally, especially after seeing cases where other families get mired in legal conflicts over their home. She thinks her parents will eventually start the process to provide their children with titles.
“My mom and dad still feel physically well. When that changes, I think they’ll let it go,” she said. “But for the moment, they are still keeping it tied up. For me, that’s OK.”
Ryan Dubé is a Canadian journalist based in Lima, Peru. His articles have been published in The Wall Street Journal, The Globe & Mail, and Latin Trade. He has also worked on projects for the Economist Intelligence Unit.
References
Fernandes, Edesio. 2011. Regularization of Informal Settlements in Latin America. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. www.lincolninst.edu/pubs/dl/1906_1225_Regularization%20PFR%20Rev%202012.pdf
Galiani, Sebastian and Ernesto Schargrodsky. 2013. “Land De-Regularization.” Working paper. www.utdt.edu/ver_contenido.php?id_contenido=2674&id_item_menu=4526
Molina, Oswaldo. 2014. “Loss of Plot Formality through Unregistered Transactions: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Peru.” Working paper. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. www.lincolninst.edu/pubs/2447_Loss-of-plot-formality-through-unregistered-transactions
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The introduction of land titling programs to the informal land market seemed to offer a magic solution to the problem of poverty in third world countries. Various governments breathed a sigh of relief, as the struggle to reduce poverty would no longer require the complex and stressful income redistribution measures that always cause conflicts between social groups and classes. According to this magic formula, all that was required was for informal urban dwellers (about 50 percent of the population in the major cities) to formally register their properties and thus gain access to title deeds, so they could obtain mortgage loans from private banks. Their titles and newfound access to loans would enable them to increase their real estate capital, improve their homes and develop small businesses (de Soto 1986; 2001).
To put this hypothesis to the test, and at the request of Perú’s National Institute of Statistics and Data Processing (Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas e Informática–INEI), I conducted a study of the official real estate registration policy under which more than one million title deeds were conferred in Perú between 1996 and 2000. This policy was implemented by the Commission for the Official Registration of Informal Property (COFOPRI) and the Real Estate Registry of Urban Settlements (RPU). As stated in Perú’s Law Decree 803 of March 1996, the purpose of this policy was to establish a formal relationship between the distribution of land titles, access to formal credit mechanisms and better standards of living. Based on information provided by National Household Surveys (ENAHO) for 1998 and 1999, conducted by INEI, my study analyzed data on housing that either was acquired through invasions or other illegal means and did not have property titles or had obtained titles from COFOPRI through the regularization process. The data base consisted of 913,335 units in 1998 and 1,033,480 in 1999, out of a total of 3,572,091 urban housing units for both years. The financing obtained for housing expansion and other domestic expenses was used as an indicator to determine the access to credit, whereas the structure of the dwelling and the supply of basic services were used to determine standards of living.
Those who advocate the regularization of property in Perú argue that property titles should be granted on a large scale by recognizing informal occupation (that is, legalizing land ownership), awarding registered land title deeds, and thus establishing the links needed to gain access to formal credit mechanisms. Official registration is the legal procedure whereby actual rights to a property result in legal ownership. A particular characteristic of this procedure is the firm resolve to establish connections between the legalization of land and property and the access to mortgages through the private banks. As described by the Path to Property Association, an organization dedicated to promoting these policies worldwide, the basic philosophy behind the formal registration process is that prosperity in countries with market economies is largely achieved because those societies have adequate property systems that enable their markets to operate through exchangeable ownership rights in a wide-ranging market.
To grant landowners indisputable proof of ownership and protect them from fraud and uncertainty ownership rights must be standardized, and universally accessible exchange instruments must be registered in a central government system by legal norms and regulation. Consequently, through the official registration of property, the “energy” of the informal sector can be channeled toward organized and prosperous market economies. From this perspective, informality is merely the inability of governments to make their laws coincide with the real circumstances under which people work and live. Nevertheless, this viewpoint fails to reduce a complex phenomenon to its legal dimension and neglects its economic aspects.
Land Titling Policy and Outcomes
To speed up the distribution of land titles and to avoid troublesome formalities, COFOPRI took over this responsibility from the municipalities. The World Bank supported this policy, granting COFOPRI a US$38 million loan in December 1998. Between 1996 and 2000, 1,134,000 duly registered land title deeds were awarded: 645,165 of them in Lima, 112,631 in Arequipa and 74,180 in Trujillo (the first, second and third largest cities in Perú, respectively). In terms of the distribution and registration of land titles, the success of the formal registration policy is undeniable. However, the fact that municipalities were removed from the process is questionable, since their legal role in the urban system was undermined.
A close connection between the official registration of property and the standard of living was observed in Lima after the policy was implemented. Between 1998 and 1999, regularized (formerly illegal or informal) housing in the capital city showed improved construction of walls, floors and roofing; however, the nonregularized housing units also had improved construction of walls and floors. In the rest of the country, informal housing in urban areas predominates over regularized housing.
While regularized housing units outside Lima increased from 17,929 to 48,869 between 1998 and 1999, the number of units still without property titles increased from 371,005 to 392,436, indicating the persistence of invasion mechanisms. The gaps between different types of improvements on regularized and informal houses outside Lima increased between 1998 and 1999 for most categories (see Table 1).
Looking at the relationship between official land titles and access to credit, the study found that of the 70,725 houses in Lima awarded land title deeds by COFOPRI in 1998, about 23,965 (34 percent) of those homeowners gained access to varied types of financing, such as loans from banks, lending agencies or family members, to improve or renovate their homes. In 1999, the owners of about 23,804 (18.3 percent) out of a total of 129,588 titled houses obtained such financing. Although there is no official information on how many homeowners applied for credit and were denied, this result proves that officially registered households that gain access to loans are a minority and, in fact, the number has decreased. This situation is explained by complex factors including the economic recession, the default rate of 10 percent on private bank loans, fear of giving loans to lower-income sectors, and fear among these residents of mortgaging their houses and land.
Similarly, the number of bank loans to already titled landowners in Lima decreased from 12,750 in 1998 to 8,993 in 1999. In contrast, the use of own resources to finance housing improvements rose from 12,282 in 1998 to 14,811 in 1999. Not only is a larger majority spending their own funds on housing, but they are facing more difficulties in gaining access to credit institutions, despite the formal registration of their properties. A study by COFOPRI-DESCO (Riofrío 2001) identified several characteristics of those who are willing to take mortgages:
Of the 12,750 households officially registered and regularized in Lima in 1998 that also received bank loans for renovations and improvements, 52.6 percent obtained their loans from the Banco de Materiales and 47.4 percent from the National Construction Company (ENACE). In 1999, 8,993 officially registered and regularized households received loans for renovations and improvements, 7,593, or 84.43 percent from the Banco de Materiales and 15.57 percent from the ENACE. Since these are both public entities that grant subsidized loans (at the same annual interest rate of 7 percent), there is no connection between the official registration of property through regularization programs and access to loans from private banks.
With respect to seeking financing for other kinds of household expenses, only 11,323 (8.7 percent) out of a total of 129,588 households registered in Lima in 1999 resorted to any kind of financial assistance. Since no public entity provides loans for these expenses, most households receive money from friends and relatives (47 percent) or other sources such as lending agencies (25 percent). Only 28 percent of these 11,323 registered households gained access to loans from private banks for household needs.
In other urban areas, the situation of officially registered households is different from Lima’s experience. In 1998, the use of the households’ own funds for housing improvements predominated over bank loans (78.7 percent compared with 21.2 percent), whereas in 1999 bank loans predominated over own funds (51.3 percent compared with 42.9 percent). In 1998, all of the loans were public loans granted by Banco de Materiales, and 93 percent were from that source in 1999. With respect to loans for other household expenses, 6,163 (13 percent) of the total of 47,302 households officially registered during 1999 received some financing. Of this small group, 45 percent received financial assistance from lending agencies and other sources, 34 percent from friends and relatives, and 21 percent from their employers or work centers. None of them obtained funds from private banks.
Conclusions
The study yielded the following conclusions with regard to the relationship between official registration of titles and access to credit:
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Thus, there is no direct relationship between the number of title deeds handed over to informal dwellers and their subsequent access to loans from private banks. This conclusion was confirmed when the transition government that succeeded former President Fujimori (1990-2000) revealed in 2001 that only 12,388 mortgages had been recorded in the RPU throughout the country, which is equivalent to only 5 percent of potential beneficiaries. Although registration facilities may be useful, they are certainly not sufficient to increase access to credit. Effective policies require an in-depth study of a number of different factors, including:
Julio Calderón Cockburn is a sociologist and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of San Marcos in Lima, Perú. He has written many books and articles published in the Americas and Europe, and he currently works as an independent consultant and university professor. He is a faculty associate of the Lincoln Institute, which supported the study reported here and other research and teaching projects in the past. Several of his written works are available on the Lincoln Institute website in the Latin America section under LAC Papers (www.lincolninst.edu).
References
Calderón Cockburn, Julio A. 2001. Comparative analysis of the benefited and non-benefited population by the national formalization plan. In Has the well-being of the population improved?: A balance of the main social policies and programs. Lima: National Institute of Statistics and Data Processing (INEI): 65-92. de Soto, Hernando. 1986. The Other Path. London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd.
_____. 2002. The Mystery of Capital. London: Bantam Press.
Fernandes, Edesio. 2002. The influence of de Soto’s The Mystery of Capital. Land Lines 14 (1): 5–8.
Riofrío, G., J. Calderón y M. Zolezzi. 2001. Estudio sobre cultura registral. Lima: COFOPRI-DESCO. Agosto.
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Una versión más actualizada de este artículo está disponible como parte del capítulo 2 del libro Perspectivas urbanas; Temas críticos en políticas de suelo de América Latina.
Mi experiencia al asistir a la conferencia “Who Owns America? II” [¿A quién pertenecen los Estados Unidos?] celebrada en Madison, Wisconsin en junio pasado fue como contemplar un panorama formado por ideas acerca de la tierra y la gente. Desde mi punto de vista, este panorama tenía cuatro características dominantes:
La característica más sobresaliente del pensamiento jurídico estadounidense con respecto a la tierra es la gran importancia de los derechos de propiedad. La tradición jurídica de América Latina, según la doctrina de la función social de la propiedad planteada por el jurista francés Leon Duguit, tiende a considerar los derechos de propiedad como una materia a ser limitada por el gobierno y las leyes a fin de satisfacer las necesidades sociales. Por lo tanto, para mí fue un choque cultural descubrir la popularidad de la teoría de Charles Reich sobre la propiedad, en la que se promueven las ideas igualitarias mediante la defensa de los derechos de propiedad individuales.
En la conferencia se plantearon numerosas maneras distintas de ampliar la noción de propiedad para dar cabida a nuevas demandas sociales. Un ejemplo de ello fue el planteamiento de Eric Freyfogle de que la propiedad debiera tener un lugar privilegiado en la sociedad. Por supuesto, no hace falta que una idea sea aceptada por unanimidad en el razonamiento jurídico estadounidense para que pase a ser un aspecto importante del panorama actual de ideas sobre la propiedad.
La segunda característica se refiere a la distinción entre lo público y lo privado –una distinción que resulta esencial para las sociedades modernas y que suele darse por descontada–. Estamos acostumbrados a reconocer la coexistencia de dos formas separadas de control social sobre la misma extensión de tierra: el del propietario privado y el de las entidades gubernamentales públicas. Sin embargo, debemos recordar que esta separación no es eterna ni universal; es producto de la historia.
Los estudios urbanos han demostrado repetidas veces que las regulaciones de la tierra afectan constantemente las relaciones entre el control privado y el público. Los poderes de planificación y los derechos de propiedad han venido reduciéndose y ampliándose desde los inicios de la gestión urbana moderna, y ese proceso ahora se presenta como normal. Un desafío más marcado para la separación de las categorías pública y privada fue planteado en la conferencia por los reclamos que hacen las poblaciones indígenas sobre sus territorios en los Estados Unidos.
Tales reclamos se refieren a una tercera forma, aún sin codificar del todo, de control sobre la tierra. En general, los pueblos indígenas no buscan controlar los gobiernos locales, es decir, gobernar un territorio por medios convencionales. Igualmente rechazan ser tratados meramente como corporaciones que poseen tierras. Hablan de derechos de índole distinta, con elementos antiguos y nuevos, y lo hacen cuestionando una serie de tratados entre el pueblo y el estado. Un tratado es la forma usual que toma la relación jurídica entre una nación-estado y una fuerza externa. Al parecer los tratados pasados debían ‘resolver’ el problema territorial. Hoy en día esos tratados están siendo cuestionados tanto en términos de la dicotomía de lo público/lo privado como por la formación de una nación-estado que no se concretó.
Asimismo debemos reconocer que el razonamiento jurídico clásico no cuenta con los mecanismos para darle sentido a estos desarrollos, puesto que son los fundamentos mismos de ese razonamiento lo que está en tela de juicio. Es obvio que estas inquietudes también se presentan en Canadá y México, aunque con formas y resultados diferentes. Los estudiosos y profesionales de la teoría jurídica, y especialmente de la teoría constitucional, de estos tres países norteamericanos pueden aprender mucho unos de otros en este proceso.
No debería sorprendernos que surjan nuevas formas de control territorial cuando ha habido tantos cambios en la tierra misma. Se han escrito miles de libros acerca de la transformación de la tierra, sobre todo desde el punto de vista que ahora llamamos perspectiva ambiental. La tierra como ‘objeto’ de las relaciones de la propiedad se ha convertido en un asunto bastante complejo y esa complejidad es la tercera característica que encuentro en este panorama de ideas. Los territorios han pasado a ser un concepto difícil de entender y tal vez el fenómeno más significativo es la disolución de la distinción entre lo urbano y lo rural. No tenemos ciudades en el sentido tradicional de la palabra, sino un conjunto de procesos urbanísticos.
Los mensajeros del ciberespacio nos dicen que las distancias se acortan gracias a las nuevas tecnologías; el espacio y la distancia han perdido relevancia. La verdad es que el cambio tecnológico, aunado al cambio demográfico y social, solamente ha hecho la tierra más compleja. Esto queda claro cuando vemos, como lo demostraron las ponencias presentadas en la conferencia, las numerosísimas disciplinas que describen, analizan y hasta alaban con cantos la tierra. No existe disciplina alguna que pueda englobar la tierra en una única forma de discurso.
Tal vez la más interesante de las nuevas maneras de ver la tierra sea el enfoque narrativo, la cuarta característica en nuestro panorama. El relato de historias acerca de la tierra aclara las relaciones de la propiedad mucho mejor de lo que lo hacen tantos otros métodos empíricos porque nos permite reconocer los aspectos subjetivos sin alejarnos demasiado de las ciencias sociales empíricas. En comparación con la rigidez de los enfoques jurídicos y económicos, los relatos personales nos transmiten la fluidez de la propiedad como una relación social, los cambios que suceden en esa relación como resultado de muchas interacciones y los diferentes significados que puede adquirir una parcela de tierra o un vecindario para sus moradores, habitantes nuevos, visitantes y demás.
Reconocer la riqueza e intensidad de las historias de la gente y contrastar esta riqueza con la rigidez de las categorías jurídicas no implica abandonar estas últimas. Tan es así que este enfoque más subjetivo puede constituir una nueva forma de tomar la ley con seriedad. Apenas si existe un discurso social sobre la tierra, ni siquiera en la modalidad más vernácula, que no tenga una connotación normativa. Cuando alguien dice ‘esta tierra me pertenece (me pertenecía o debiera pertenecerme)’, está haciendo un reclamo legal. Las categorías jurídicas son importantes fuera de los círculos profesionales de los abogados, jueces y agentes inmobiliarios porque son parte de las historias personales; más aún, su función es darle significado a las experiencias de la gente.
Cuando las categorías jurídicas no logran abarcar las representaciones normativas que hace un pueblo de la tierra, la ley pierde su significado. Si el razonamiento jurídico tradicional define la propiedad como un cúmulo de derechos, el enfoque narrativo puede enseñarnos a ver la propiedad como cúmulos de representaciones que permitirían ayudar a la gente a darle significado a su relación con la tierra. Quizás es esta la mayor lección que he aprendido de la conferencia “Who owns America?”: usar muchos lentes para observar el panorama y explorar las ideas comparativas acerca del carácter individual y comunitario de la propiedad, de los asentamientos informales y de los marcos jurídicos en todos los Estados Unidos.
Antonio Azuela es el Procurador Federal de Protección al Ambiente del gobierno de México. Es egresado de la Universidad Iberoamericana (Ciudad de México) y la Escuela de Leyes de la Universidad de Warwick (Inglaterra) y se ha desempeñado como asesor jurídico de varios gobiernos estatales y dependencias del gobierno federal en materia de legislación de la planificación urbana. El Dr. Azuela es autor del libro La ciudad, la propiedad y el derecho (El Colegio de México, 1989) y muchas otras publicaciones sobre legislación urbana y ambiental desde una perspectiva sociológica.
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If cynics know the price of everything but the value of nothing, then they may have something in common with contemporary American planners. Constrained by the courts, the planning fraternity sometimes appears to have spent the last decade rationalizing nexuses and quantifying costs without really addressing the social and environmental values that should underpin the planning process. Under assault from those criticizing government, as well as from the property rights movement, the profession seems to have retreated into the land of that dismal science, economics. This allegation has been made in a number of ways over the past few years by critics as diverse as New Urbanist architects and, in England, the Royal Family. Is it really justified?
This article is written from an English perspective and is based on research into the types of planning tools used in the United States to minimize the adverse effects and costs of development or to maximize public benefits. The intention is to adapt the best American practices for future use in the United Kingdom.
A broad analysis of the types of policy processes presently being used highlights an amazing breadth and depth of local policy innovation. The accompanying table outlines the range of policies found, broken down either by the way they have been justified or the process that has been used. This “family” grouping may help in suggesting other types of policies that can be used to achieve similar goals. It may also provide a useful reminder that the policies are always supposed to achieve aims, and that those aims should always be in a constant state of review.
The policies span a wide range. Some are not traditionally thought of as land use or planning policies. Indeed, in many cases the policies are not promoted with any explicit intention of achieving specific land use goals. They are, however, all capable of directly affecting land use patterns and, properly used, can all realize benefits to the community.
Purpose Policies
Harm, quality of life and control policies are all well-accepted planning tools. They work to prevent development in inappropriate areas–on wetlands or in congested districts, for example–or to require development in certain places. For the most part these policies do not offer any new lessons to UK planners. However, their scope is widening. New harms are being defined, such as air quality, lack of public transit accessibility and effects on the water table.
In addition, new, more limited types of land interests, such as easements and deed restrictions, are being used as controls, and new actors are becoming involved. For example, in South Florida the Water Management District is now a major purchaser of land and development rights, working in loose alliance with planning authorities. School boards, forest preserve districts and private utility companies have also become more interventionist.
Nevertheless, the main areas of experimentation are in other family groups. Cost policies are being used more proactively and are being expanded in scope. Fees are being used to either encourage or discourage development in particular locations. In San Diego impact fees in outlying zones have been set at economically prohibitive levels to deter development. In Dade County, Florida, road impact fees are banded and fees increase towards the urban fringe. In Montgomery County, Maryland, certain fees are waived when affordable housing is provided.
Cost policies can also be used to raise revenue to meet off-site costs for nontraditional “infrastructure.” In Boston and San Francisco linkages have been identified between the construction of new offices and the need for housing, justifying the extraction of money sums. In principle the range of these fees could be expanded. The City of San Diego already charges developers for new libraries, fire stations and other community facilities, and includes some future maintenance costs. In rapidly growing areas, the public costs of new health infrastructure, hospitals and clinics might also be considered.
Some municipalities have considered the possibility of charging “disassociation fees” that recognize the cost to the community of development away from central cities. “Historic investment” or “recoupment” fees could account for the cost of past provision of infrastructure. In the case of schools or hospitals, a charge could also be made to reflect the cost of wasted desk and bed capacity in the area from which migration has occurred. Alternatively, fees could be charged for the “softer” social costs of increasing the distance that citizens need to travel to reach open space or to reflect the additional stress that occurs from lengthy journeys through strip development.
Process Policies
Market policies have been described as creating “a currency in the public domain that [can] then be traded.” Unsurprisingly, new markets have developed swiftly, responding to local conditions. These policies generally require zoning that sets limits on development at lower levels than the market would otherwise build. A release from that limitation can then be “sold” or transferred for use either on or off site. Seattle, New York state, Maryland and New Jersey lead the way with policies of this type, creating the necessary currency in the form of bonus floor areas and transferable rights. They also provide “market” infrastructure such as credit banks in some cases. In Florida the private sector has set up profitable “mitigation banks” that reclaim damaged land to create mitigation credits for future use by developers whose projects would threaten wetlands. Private sector sales of “utility credits” also occur.
Fiscal policies are all too often seen as intended simply to raise revenue. Yet they can also guide land uses and capture public benefits from increases in the development value of private land. In some Business Improvement Districts, such as those in Miami Beach and Chicago, increased tax assessment streams have been bonded and the proceeds spent on capital works achieving planning aims. In San Diego’s special assessment areas the cost of new social infrastructure, such as parks and libraries, is borne in this way.
In some areas it is possible to secure contributions towards public works that lead to private benefits, for example when major new transport links or services are provided. In downtown Miami, businesses that benefit from a transit system pay a property assessment that meets the county’s share of the original infrastructure cost.
The final two categories of policies are important for different reasons. Adequate transitionary policies are essential. Politically and legally it is difficult to introduce new policies unless careful attention is paid to minimizing or mitigating the immediate costs. Providing for a lengthy period of introduction, or providing compensating credits, as in Montgomery County, may offer some comfort. In some areas “reversionary” permits have been proposed, where development rights revert back to an earlier or less valuable use if they remain unimplemented for a period of time. The miscellaneous policies provide clear means for enforcement. All too often well-intentioned policies are not rigorously applied. Agreements may allow easier control and greater certainty.
Conclusion
It is clear that a large number of policy tools are available to and used by American planners. The opening criticism questioned their fixation with economics. While economic issues are and always should be part of the planning process, the scope of planning policies itself shows that planning is about more than economics. However, it has also become apparent that planners tend to use only a limited range of instruments, even when alternative approaches might better achieve their policy goals.
For a variety of legal and institutional reasons, municipalities understandably concentrate on those policies that they have already used and that have worked. Notwithstanding that, to an English planner the American system as a whole offers a mouthwatering array of policy feasts. It is a shame that so many planners operating within the system only nibble at the corners of a table that is groaning with the weight of possible delights.
Stephen Ashworth is a visiting fellow at the Lincoln Institute and a Harkness Fellow in a program sponsored by the Commonwealth Fund of New York. In the United Kingdom he is a partner in the firm of Denton Hall, Lawyers. This article is drawn from his research on “Harnessing Land and Development Values for Public Benefit.”
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Urban land management policies and land market operations have taken on greater status in the debate on urban public policy in Latin America, and they are given increased attention in academic research and the development agendas of many countries in the region. Over the past 10 years the Lincoln Institute’s Program on Latin America and the Caribbean has supported a network of Latin American scholars and practitioners who have developed seminars, promoted research, organized public debates, consulted with decision makers and published their findings on these timely issues. Members of this network met at a conference in Buenos Aires in April 2004 to assess their activities and prepare this summary declaration of core land policy issues crucial to the search for more sustainable urban development programs in the future.
Urban land policy in Latin America and the ways that land markets operate tend to produce cities that are economically unequal, politically and socially exclusionary, spatially segregated and environmentally unsustainable. The consequences of these policies can be seen in the high and often irrational prices for land, due in part to the absence of effective urban land management practices.
The Current Situation
Land markets are structurally imperfect. However, the functioning of urban land markets depends on social relations, just as the outcomes of land market operations affect those relations, making it both possible and necessary to influence the markets. Instead of removing the imperfections, many instruments and policies have in fact helped to distort urban land market operations even further. Moreover, many established policies have kept the “rules of the game” in urban real estate unchanged, and apparently untouchable.
A more comprehensive reading of the problem reveals that, rather than being the result of inconsistent rationalization, the current dysfunctional land market is the result of missed opportunities for socially sustainable development in Latin American cities. Yet there are promising and innovative alternatives that can overcome the existing bottlenecks evident in inadequate and destructive national government policies, the enduring difficulties in financing urban development, and poor management practices.
One of the most glaring negative outcomes of the current situation is the relative persistence, weight and importance of informal urban land markets dominated by many exclusionary practices, illegal titling, lack of urban services, and other problems. Deregulation in places that should be regulated (poor outlying areas on the urban fringe), overregulation of wealthy regulated areas, and privatization policies that disregard social criteria are factors that help to drive these negative processes, particularly the spatial concentration of the urban poor. Although the majority of regularization programs are well-intended, they instead cause perverse effects, including increased land costs for the poorest sectors.
Traditional urban planning processes and urban standards have lost importance and effectiveness as instruments for guiding urban development, especially the existing mechanisms for land management. Yet this situation offers opportunities to think about innovative ways to deal with land management and urban planning strategies. This opportunity has already been seized in some places, where new experiments and proposals are causing intense debates by questioning the predominant traditional approaches.
Creating new practices within this framework requires making one unavoidable step: rethinking urban land taxation by incorporating new methods and keeping an open mind regarding alternative fiscal instruments that must be intended as tools to redirect current urban development and discipline the operation of the urban land market. These new tools should not only collect funds in order to build infrastructure and provide urban services, but also contribute to a more equitable distribution of benefits and costs, especially those associated with the urbanization process and the return of recovered land value increments to the community.
Proposals for Action
Recognize the indispensable role of the government. It is critical that the government (from local to national levels) maintains an active role in promoting urban development. The local level should be more committed to structural changes in land management, while the national level should actively foster such local initiatives. Government must not ignore its responsibility to adopt urban land market policies that recognize the strategic value of land and the specific characteristics of how land markets operate, in order to promote the sustainable use of the land by incorporating both social and environmental objectives and benefiting the most vulnerable segments of the urban population.
Break the compartmentalization of fiscal, regulatory and legal authorities. Lack of cooperation among local authorities is responsible for major inefficiencies, ineffective policies, waste of scarce resources and inadequate public accountability. Furthermore, incongruent actions by different public authorities send misleading signals to private agents and create uncertainties if not opportunities for special interests to subvert government plans. The complexity and scale of the challenges posed by the urban social reality of Latin American cities require multilateral actions by numerous stakeholders to influence the operation of urban land markets (both formal and informal), thus insuring the achievement of joint objectives: promoting sustainable and fair use of land resources; reducing land prices; producing serviced land; recognizing the rights to land by the urban poor; and sharing the costs and benefits of urban investment more evenly.
These authorities must also coordinate urban development policies with land taxation policies. They should promote a new urban vision with legislation that recognizes the separation of building rights from land ownership rights, with the understanding that land value increments generated from building rights do not belong exclusively to landowners. Urban managers must also devise creative mechanisms whereby these land value increments may be mobilized or used to produce serviced land for low-income social sectors, thereby offsetting urban inequalities.
Recognize the limits of what is possible. Transforming the current regulatory framework that governs the use of urban land requires new legal and urbanistic thinking that recognizes that inequalities and socio-spatial exclusion are intrinsic to the predominant urban development model. Even within the current model there is substantial room for more socially responsible policies and government accountability. Urban regulations should consider the complexity of land appreciation processes and enforce effective traditional principles such as those that restrain the capacity of government agencies to dispose of public resources or proscribe the “unjustified enrichment” of private landowners.
Break vicious cycles. Alternatives to existing regularization programs are needed to break the vicious cycle of poverty that current programs help to perpetuate. It is important to recognize that these programs are only a stopgap measure and that urbanization, housing and land taxation policies must also be integrated into the process. Reliance on housing subsidy policies, although inevitable, can be nullified if there are no mechanisms to prevent these subsidies from being translated into an increase in land prices. City officials should give priority to the creation of more serviced land rather than new regularization programs, since the right to a home is a social right to occupy a viable “habitat” with dignity. It is also important to understand that the low production of serviced land per se contributes to withholding the supply and, therefore, to higher prices affecting all aspects of urban development.
Furthermore, individual solutions (such as plot-by-plot titling processes or case-by-case direct subsidies to individual families) ultimately result in more costs for society as a whole than broader, collective solutions that incorporate other aggregate values such as public spaces, infrastructure investment and other mechanisms to strengthen social integration. Many Latin American countries have witnessed subsidized housing programs, often supported by multilateral agencies, where the land component is overlooked or dismissed. Such programs seek readily available public land or simply occupy land in intersticial areas of the city. This disregard of a broader land policy compromises the replicability, expansion and sustainability of these housing programs on a larger scale.
Rethink the roles of public and private institutions. Land management within a wide range of urban actions, from large-scale production of serviced land for the poor to urban redevelopment through large projects, including facelift-type actions or environmental recovery projects, requires new thinking about how public institutions responsible for urban development can intervene through different types of public-private associations. Redeveloping vacant land and introducing more flexibility in the uses and levels of occupancy can play a crucial role here, provided such projects fall under the strategic guidelines of public institutions, are subject to monitoring by citizens, and incorporate a broadly shared and participatory vision of urban development.
Showcase projects such as El Urbanizador Social (The Social Urbanizer) in Porto Alegre, Brazil, the Nuevo Usme housing project in Bogotá, Colombia, and that country’s value capture legislation are examples of sensible and creative efforts that recognize the importance of adequate urban land management and new thinking on the role of land, particularly the potential of land value as an instrument for promoting more sustainable and equitable development for the poor in our cities. Creative and balanced new thinking is also exemplified by the joint ventures of public land and private capital in Havana, Cuba, with value increments captured for upgrading densely populated historic areas.
Empower the role of land taxation in public finance to promote urban development. National, state or provincial and local governments must share responsibility for promoting property taxation as an adequate and socially meaningful method of financing and fostering urban development. The property tax should be sensitive and responsive to Latin American cities that have a strong legacy of marked economic and socio-spatial differences. There may be good reasons to tax land at a higher rate than buildings, in a rational and differentiated manner, especially in outlying areas subject to urban speculation and lands offered ex ante to low-income sectors of society (making certain that paying the tax also helps to build citizenship in these sectors). As already noted, it is also critical to create innovative fiscal instruments appropriate to special situations and other methods for capturing the value generated.
Educate stakeholders in the promotion of new policies. All actors involved in these processes, from judges to journalists, from academics to public officials and their international mentors, need in-depth training and education in the operation of land markets and urban land management in order to achieve the above objectives. We must identify the “fields of mental resistance,” particularly in urban and economic thinking and in the legal doctrines that represent the obstacles to be overcome. We must recognize, for example, that an “informal right” exists and operates in many areas to legitimize land transactions socially, if not legally, and to create networks and spaces of solidarity and integration. It is urgent that we take steps to introduce these themes and proposals into political agendas at the various government levels, in political parties, social organizations, academia and the mass media.
Latin American Network
Pedro Abramo, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
Oscar Borrero, Bogotá, Colombia
Gonzalo Cáceres, Santiago, Chile
Julio Calderón, Lima, Perú
Nora Clichevsky, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Claudia De Cesare, Porto Alegre, Brasil
Matilde de los Santos, Montevideo, Uruguay
Diego Erba, São Leopoldo, Brasil
Edésio Fernandes, London, England
Ana Raquel Flores, Asunción, Paraguay
Fernanda Furtado, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
Alfredo Garay, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Silvia García Vettorazzi, Guatemala City, Guatemala
Ana Maria González del Valle, Lima, Perú
Samuel Jaramillo, Bogotá, ColombiaCarmen Ledo, Cochabamba, Bolivia
Mario Lungo, San Salvador, El Salvador
María Mercedes Maldonado, Bogotá, Colombia
Carlos Morales Schechinger, Mexico City, Mexico
Laura Mullahy, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USARicardo Núñez, Havana, Cuba
Sonia Rabello de Castro, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
Eduardo Reese, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Francisco Sabatini, Santiago, Chile
Martim Smolka, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Alvaro Uribe, Panama City, Panama
Ricardo Vanella, Córdoba, Argentina
Maria Clara Vejarano, Bogotá, Colombia
Isabel Viana, Montevideo, Uruguay
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One of every three urban citizens lives in slum conditions across the world today. According to the United Nations Human Settlement Programme, in 2006 there were nearly 1 billion people who could find housing only in slum settlements in most cities of Latin America, Asia, and Africa, and a smaller number in the cities of Europe and North America (UN Habitat 2006).
The rapid and intense urbanization in Latin America over the last 50 years is often contrasted in the literature with an inadequate urban planning system as a way to explain many resulting social problems: high land prices and property speculation, rampant informality, extreme sociospatial segregation, inadequate urban infrastructure and services, environmental degradation, and the like. The literature is largely silent, however, on the role played by national legal systems, which have both contributed to this situation and reacted against it. The pivotal role of the legal order cannot be underestimated.
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As coastal cities continue to face the potentially expensive threat of increasingly volatile weather, storm surge, and sea level rise associated with climate change, building resilience has become a top planning priority. But resilience has multiple dimensions. It means not only building things, like flood gates and hardened infrastructure, but also keeping natural systems such as wetlands free of development—and, in many cases, deciding not to rebuild in the most vulnerable places. Therein lies an evolving and complex issue affecting private property rights.
From at least the turn of the 20th century, the Supreme Court has wrestled with a basic question: When does land use regulation constitute a taking, requiring compensation for property owners under the 5th amendment of the U.S. Constitution (“ . . . nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.”)? Since Pennsylvania Coal v. Mahon, 260 U.S. 393 (1922) and Euclid v. Amber Realty, 272 U.S. 365 (1926), the essence of the rulings has been that government has considerable leeway in its power to regulate land use. In Kelo v. City of New London, 545 U.S. 469 (2005), the high court affirmed the state’s power to use eminent domain for economic development in the 21st century.
In June 2013, however, a decision on a Florida development project seemed to indicate a subtle shift in another direction. In Koontz v. St. Johns River Water Management District, the justices ruled 5 to 4 that government was overzealous in imposing mitigation requirements on developers as conditions for building permits. Coy Koontz, Sr., who had wanted to build a small shopping center on his property, objected to a Florida water management district’s demands that he pay for off-site wetlands restoration to offset environmental damage caused by the construction. Citing two cases, Nollan v. California Coastal Commission, 483 U.S. 825 (1987) and Dolan v. City of Tigard, 512 U.S. 374 (1994), Koontz claimed that the requirements constituted a taking for exceeding a “rough proportionality” between the requirements and the scope of damages caused by the development. In 2011, the Florida Supreme Court rejected Koontz’s argument, but in June the high court ruled that the mitigation requirements on the builder went too far.
The ruling alarmed some environmentalists and groups such as the American Planning Association, who feared new limits on the government’s ability to control development and impose requirements to restore and conserve natural areas. The concern extended to coastal metropolitan regions preparing for the impacts of climate change, such as New York City, which in May proposed a model $20 billion plan that is a mix of strategies for living with water and keeping it out. Property rights experts speculated that developers could cite the Koontz case as justification to refuse to pay into a fund for such initiatives.
At a broader level, the question remains: After an event like Hurricane Sandy, is government within its rights to forbid rebuilding or to modify regulations in order to prevent new building? The legal answer is essentially yes, according to Jerold Kayden, an attorney and professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, who was part of the Lincoln Institute’s Journalists Forum on Land and the Built Environment, held in April.
Particularly as more data become available on sea level rise and storm surge, government has the legal right to restrict owners from building on a vacant lot that is subject to flooding and sea level rise, or from rebuilding a home that has been destroyed. But, Kayden said, “politically, it’s another story.”
New York and New Jersey represented two different approaches to post-Sandy reconstruction. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg called for a mix of rebuilding and “strategic retreat,” while New Jersey Governor Chris Christie focused on allocating money to residents so they could rebuild on parcels battered by the storm—even when the property remained in harm’s way.
The City of Boston, meanwhile, has begun to require waterfront developers to prepare for rising seas and storm surge by relocating mechanicals from basements to higher floors, among other measures. As the Koontz case opens the door for heightened scrutiny of various measures imposed by local government as a condition for building, developers might sue over these expensive, climate-related requirements, arguing that they are too burdensome and may constitute a regulatory taking.
While property rights lawsuits over reconstruction and restrictions on new building in coastal areas will no doubt continue to proliferate, Pratap Talwar, principal at the Thompson Design Group, presented an alternative in long-range planning that could help prevent such conflicts from arising. He detailed for the journalists the case study of Long Branch, New Jersey, which overhauled its planning process several years ago to include tougher standards but also a fast-track process for development that satisfied the guidelines. Long Branch was the one mile of New Jersey shore that weathered Sandy relatively intact, Talwar said.
Journalists Forum on Land and the Built Environment: The Resilient City
Thirty-five leading writers and editors who cover urban issues attended the 6th Journalists Forum on Land and the Built Environment on April 20, 2013, at Lincoln House. The theme was The Resilient City, from coastal municipalities preparing for sea level rise and storm surge to legacy cities trying to evolve despite diminished populations and business activity.
Kai-Uwe Bergmann, principal at Bjarke Ingels Group, opened the forum with a look at urban design innovations that maximize efficiency in land, housing, and major infrastructure projects. Johanna Greenbaum from Kushner Companies, who helped run New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s microhousing initiative, detailed that project as well as other similar efforts around the country to accom-modate singles and couples who can live in just 300 square feet.
Alan Mallach, co-author of the Lincoln Institute’s policy focus report Regenerating America’s Legacy Cities, noted signs of resurgence in places such as the Central West End in St. Louis or Over-the-Rhine neighborhood in Cincinnati, while acknowledging the challenges facing Camden, New Jersey; Flint and Detroit, Michigan; and Youngstown, Ohio. Antoine Belaieff, Innovation Director at MetroLinx, detailed the use of social media to gain citizen input on a $16 billion investment in resilient transportation infrastructure in the Toronto area.
John Macomber, from Harvard Business School, led a session on the global city by recognizing the hundreds of millions of people who continue to migrate from rural to urban areas, requiring large-scale planning for infrastructure. Martim Smolka, director of the Lincoln Institute’s Program on Latin America and the Caribbean, lamented widespread dislocations caused by preparations for the World Cup and the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Bing Wang, from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, noted that 11 cities in China have populations over 10 million—and yet the rapidly growing nation is only halfway to its expected urbanization.
John Werner, chief mobilizing officer at Citizens Schools, spelled out how urban school systems can ignite passion in students by bringing in outside professionals as teachers and mentors. Gordon Feller of Cisco Systems envisioned a completely connected world and an Internet of everything, joined by Washington Post investigative reporter Dan Keating, who shared his experiences extracting data from various levels of government.
The forum had to be shortened because of the manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombers in the Cambridge-Watertown area—but that event prompted dialogue about the “shelter in place” request by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, security and public space, and another kind of resilience in the Boston area. Several participants wrote about the events, including Emily Badger at The Atlantic Cities, Donald Luzzatto at the Virginian Pilot, and Inga Saffron at The Philadelphia Inquirer.
The springtime gathering is a partnership of the Lincoln Institute, Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. The mission is to bring journalists together to share ideas and learn about cutting-edge trends in the coverage of cities, architecture, and urban planning. — AF
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El crecimiento de la Red Internacional de Conservación de Suelo
Laura Johnson es abogada y conservacionista de toda la vida, con más de 30 años de experiencia en gerencia de organizaciones sin fines de lucro. En la actualidad es directora de la Red Internacional de Conservación de Suelo (International Land Conservation Network o ILCN), visiting fellow del Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo y presidente de la junta directiva de la Alianza de Fideicomisos de Suelo (Land Trust Alliance).
Laura fue presidente de Mass Audubon de 1999 a 2012. Anteriormente, trabajó durante 16 años como abogada en The Nature Conservancy desempeñando los cargos de directora de la delegación de Massachusetts y vicepresidente de la región noreste.
Laura obtuvo una licenciatura en Historia por la Universidad de Harvard y un doctorado en Jurisprudencia por la Facultad de Derecho de la Universidad de Nueva York. Entre 2013 y 2014 fue fellow Bullard de Harvard Forest, Universidad de Harvard, donde completó un estudio sobre las iniciativas de conservación de suelo privado alrededor del mundo.
LAND LINES: Su programa, la Red Internacional de Conservación de Suelo (ILCN), se ha creado este año, pero tiene antecedentes en el Instituto Lincoln. ¿Nos puede hablar sobre esta trayectoria?
LAURA JOHNSON: Hay algunas conexiones maravillosas entre esta red nueva y el apoyo brindado por el Instituto Lincoln en el pasado a los esfuerzos innovadores de construcción de capacidad dedicados a la conservación, que en última instancia dieron lugar a la Alianza de Fideicomisos de Suelo.
A comienzos de la década de 1980, Kingsbury Browne, un ilustre abogado de Boston, decidió tomarse un tiempo de licencia de su estudio de abogados y usó su año sabático en el Instituto Lincoln para explorar las necesidades y oportunidades de fideicomisos de suelo privado en los Estados Unidos. Hasta ese momento, no había existido una iniciativa nacional para descubrir los mejores ejemplos de actividades de protección de suelo, para poder compartir estas ideas y buenas prácticas, o incluso para mantenerse al tanto de lo que estaba ocurriendo en el ámbito de la conservación de suelo por todo el país. El estudio realizado por Kingsbury Browne lo llevó a fundar, junto con algunos otros líderes de fideicomisos de suelo de aquella época, una nueva organización llamada Bolsa de Fideicomisos de Suelo (Land Trust Exchange) para conectar a la comunidad de conservación del país, pequeña pero creciente, por medio de un boletín y algunas actividades básicas de investigación y capacitación. El Instituto Lincoln cumplió un papel crucial para ayudar a lanzar la Bolsa, que creció a lo largo del tiempo y cambió de nombre, para pasar a ser la Alianza de Fideicomisos de Suelo, con sede en Washington, D.C. En 1982, cuando se fundó la Bolsa, había menos de 400 fideicomisos de suelo en los Estados Unidos; ahora, la Alianza de Fideicomisos de Suelo comprende 1.200 fideicomisos en todo el país. La Bolsa comenzó como un boletín modesto en la década de 1980; ahora, la Alianza cuenta con un centro de aprendizaje en línea, un programa de estudios completo sobre conservación y gestión de riesgo; y más de 100 webinarios y 300 talleres en los que participaron cerca de 2.000 personas en 2014.
LL: A lo largo de casi toda su carrera profesional, se ha dedicado de lleno al trabajo de conservación de suelo en los EE.UU. ¿Qué la llevó a ampliar su trabajo a nivel internacional?
LJ: Cuando dejé la presidencia de Mass Audubon hace dos años, comencé a hablar con Jim Levitt, un fellow del Instituto Lincoln, director del Programa de Innovación en Conservación de Harvard Forest y exmiembro de la junta de Mass Audubon. Él tuvo la idea inicial de explorar cómo los conservacionistas fuera de los Estados Unidos estaban usando y adaptando las herramientas de conservación que se fueron desarrollando aquí a lo largo de los años. Jim se había involucrado de lleno en las iniciativas de conservación privada en Chile, y existía la oportunidad de fortalecer el movimiento incipiente en ese país compartiendo las medidas adoptadas en los EE.UU., como las servidumbres de conservación. Aproximadamente al mismo tiempo, Peter Stein recibió la beca Kingsbury Browne y una subvención de la Alianza de Fideicomisos de Suelo y el Instituto Lincoln, que le permitieron explorar también la envergadura de las organizaciones de conservación a nivel mundial. A través de estos proyectos distintos, Jim, Peter y yo llegamos a una conclusión similar: que había muchas personas en el resto del mundo que compartían un gran interés por conectarse entre sí y con otros conservacionistas en los EE.UU. Este deseo de una comunidad de practicantes parecía ser una oportunidad extraordinaria de ayudar a construir capacidad para proteger el suelo en forma privada.
LL: ¿Por qué es este rol el desafío más importante para usted en este momento?
LJ: He tenido la increíble buena fortuna de haber trabajado con algunas de las mejores organizaciones y con gente increíblemente talentosa. Como joven abogada que se iniciaba en The Nature Conservancy en la década de 1980, pude crecer profesionalmente en un momento crucial para el movimiento de conservación en los Estados Unidos. Si observamos las tendencias históricas, el movimiento de conservación de suelo en los EE.UU. comenzó a remontar vuelo en esa época, y era muy emocionante poder formar parte de este crecimiento. Después pasé a Mass Audubon en 1999, donde tuve el privilegio de gerenciar Audubon, la mayor organización estatal independiente del país, la cual cumplió un papel de liderazgo no sólo en conservación de suelo, sino también en educación medioambiental y política pública. Ahora tengo el honor de prestar servicio en la junta de la Alianza de Fideicomisos de Suelo, que realiza un trabajo extraordinario aquí, en los Estados Unidos, para generar una protección efectiva del suelo y los recursos. Mi capacitación como abogada fue sin duda útil en esta trayectoria, pero también he aprendido mucho sobre las características de organizaciones que son exitosas y que tienen un impacto positivo. Me siento muy afortunada de tener estos antecedentes y experiencias, y quiero contribuir con ellos a los desafíos que confronta la comunidad internacional para la conservación de suelo.
LL: Usted mencionó un par de veces la construcción de capacidad y creación de organizaciones exitosas. ¿Puede comentar qué significa esto en el contexto de la conservación de suelo?
LJ: Las organizaciones de conservación de suelo necesitan contar con todos los elementos de cualquier organización sin fines de lucro sólida: misión clara, visión y estrategias convincentes, planificación disciplinada y objetivos claros, recursos económicos suficientes y personas excelentes. Pero el trabajo de protección de suelo requiere una perspectiva de muy largo plazo. Para empezar, un fideicomiso de suelo necesita el conocimiento y los recursos necesarios para determinar qué tierras se deben proteger –ya sea su misión la de conservar recursos naturales o escénicos, o valores culturales o históricos– y qué herramientas legales y económicas son las mejores para lograr un buen resultado. Después, quizá haya que trabajar años con un propietario hasta llegar al punto en que todos están preparados para llegar a un acuerdo. Los fideicomisos de suelo necesitan contar con gente que tenga la capacitación, el conocimiento y la experiencia para realizar transacciones legal, económica y éticamente sólidas. Una vez que el suelo está protegido por un fideicomiso, esa organización se está comprometiendo a gestionar el suelo que posee o que está sujeto a restricciones permanentes. Los museos son una buena analogía, pero en vez de Rembrandts y Picassos, las organizaciones para la conservación de suelo custodian recursos vivos invaluables, y el suelo y el agua de los que todos dependemos para sobrevivir.
LL: ¿Por qué es particularmente importante ahora la conservación de suelo privado? ¿Por qué necesitamos una red internacional?
LJ: Nos encontramos en una encrucijada crítica, en la que las presiones del cambio climático, la conversión de suelo y la reducción de los recursos gubernamentales están creando más desafíos que nunca para proteger el suelo y el agua para beneficio público. Por lo tanto, la misión de la nueva Red Internacional de Conservación de Suelo pone énfasis en conectar con organizaciones y gente alrededor del mundo que están acelerando la acción privada voluntaria que protege y salvaguarda el suelo y los recursos hídricos. Nuestra premisa es que la construcción de capacidad y la promoción de conservación voluntaria de suelo privado fortalecerán el movimiento global de conservación de suelo y llevará a una protección de recursos más efectiva y duradera.
El respaldo para una mejor coordinación de la conservación internacional de suelo privado está surgiendo de muchas fuentes. Por ejemplo, la Unión Internacional para la Conservación de la Naturaleza (International Union for the Conservation of Nature, o IUCN) consideró el papel de la conservación de suelo privado en el contexto de las iniciativas globales en el Congreso de Parques Mundiales que tuvo lugar en Sidney, Australia, en noviembre de 2014. El informe Futuros de áreas protegidas privadamente, comisionado por IUCN y dado a conocer en este congreso, hizo una serie de recomendaciones sobre, por ejemplo, cómo desarrollar cursos de capacitación apropiados y mejorar los mecanismos para compartir conocimientos e información, que son sin duda objetivos importantes para la nueva red. Esperamos poder colaborar con socios como IUCN y con las redes regionales y nacionales ya existentes. Y, por supuesto, contamos con el poderoso ejemplo de la Alianza de Fideicomisos de Suelo y todo lo que ha logrado a lo largo de 30 años para construir la capacidad de fideicomisos de suelo en los Estados Unidos.
LL: ¿Qué tratará de lograr en el primer año para resolver estas necesidades?
LJ: Hemos tenido que organizarnos y resolver temas básicos, como nuestro nombre, identidad visual, declaración de misión, objetivos y estructura de gobierno. Vamos a diseñar y lanzar un sitio web que funcione como repositorio esencial de estudios de casos, investigación, buenas prácticas, eventos y conferencias. En última instancia, queremos poner a disposición de nuestros usuarios un continuo de educación, por medio de herramientas, como webinarios que traten una amplia gama de temas, desde instrumentos legales a buenas prácticas organizativas. También queremos hacer un censo de las redes existentes y organizaciones activas, para crear una línea de base de conocimientos sobre la protección de suelo privado que nos permita medir el progreso a lo largo del tiempo.
LL: ¿Cuáles son los principales desafíos para iniciar esta red?
LJ: Hay muchos. Por supuesto, el dinero es uno de los más importantes. Hemos recibido una subvención generosa para ponernos en marcha de la Fundación Packard, y contamos con el gran respaldo del Instituto Lincoln. Pero nos estamos esforzando por identificar fuentes de financiamiento adicionales, para poder hacer crecer la red y su impacto. Y, por supuesto, todavía tenemos que demostrar que la red brindará información y capacitación útil, importante y práctica para satisfacer una gran variedad de necesidades en la comunidad internacional de conservación de suelo. Sabemos que no podemos hacerlo todo, así que tenemos que ser estratégicos y elegir las actividades de mayor impacto. La escala global también presenta una serie de desafíos culturales y logísticos, y exige navegar por sistemas legales, idiomas, costumbres y husos horarios distintos.
Por el lado positivo, ya contamos con un grupo muy comprometido de practicantes de conservación de suelo que participaron en nuestra reunión organizativa de septiembre de 2014 y se comprometieron con entusiasmo a aportar a la red su “capital humano”: sus conocimientos, pericia, experiencia y sabio consejo. Me queda muy claro que este es un fantástico grupo de colegas que están realizando un trabajo de gran interés e importancia en todo el mundo. Será una aventura construir juntos esta red, y sé que aprenderé mucho.
