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Responding to decades of poverty, poor housing, inadequate health care, rampant crime, deficient schools, poorly planned infrastructure, and inequitable access to services, citizens in about half of Brazil’s 60 major cities voted in October 2000 for mayors from left-wing parties noted for advocacy, honesty and transparency. These reform administrations are introducing new hopes and expectations, but they inherit long-standing mistrust of municipal bureaucrats and politicians, who traditionally have been lax and often corrupt. These new governments also confront the dismal fiscal prospects of low tax receipts, weak federal transfers, and urban land markets that produce segregated neighborhoods and profound inequalities.
The strongest left-wing party, the Workers’ Party (in Portuguese, the Partido dos Trabalhadores or PT), held on to the five large cities it had won in the 1996 election and added 12 more. These PT governments hope to universalize services, thus bypassing traditional top-down methods and giving residents an active role in their local governments. In the process these governments are reinventing local democracy, invigorating politics, and significantly altering the distribution of political and symbolic resources. The most remarkable case may be Porto Alegre, the capital of Brazil’s southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul, where the PT won its fourth consecutive four-year term with 66 percent of the vote, an example that may have encouraged Brazilians in other cities to vote for democratic reforms as well.
Porto Alegre, like cities everywhere, reflects its national culture in its land use patterns, economic structure and distribution of political power. Brazil’s larger social system employs sophisticated mechanisms to assure that its cities continue to follow the same rules, norms and logic that organize the dominant society. Because Brazilian society is in many respects unjust and unequal, the city must constantly administer to the effects of these broader economic and political constraints.
At the same time, no city is a pure reflection, localized and reduced, of its national social structure. Any city can bring about and reproduce inequality and injustice itself, just as it can stimulate dynamic social structures and economic relations. To the extent that the city, and especially its government, determines events, then the effects can be positive as well as negative. It is not written in any segment of the Brazilian social code, for example, that only the streets of upper- and middle-class neighborhoods will be paved, or that water supply will reach only the more privileged corners of the city.
Participatory Budgeting
In Porto Alegre, a popular front headed by the PT has introduced “participatory budgeting,” a process by which thousands of residents can participate each year in public meetings to allocate about half the municipal budget, thus taking major responsibility for governing their own community. This reform symbolizes a broad range of municipal changes and poses an alternative to both authoritarian centralism and neoliberal pragmatism. Neighbors decide on practical local matters, such as the location of street improvements or a park, as well as difficult citywide issues. Through the process, the PT claims, people become conscious of other opportunities to challenge the poverty and inequality that make their lives so difficult.
Participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre begins with the government’s formal accounting for the previous year and its investment and expenditure plan for the current year. Elected delegates in each of 16 district assemblies meet throughout the year to determine the fiscal responsibilities of city departments. They produce two sets of rankings: one for twelve major in-district or neighborhood “themes,” such as street paving, school construction, parks, or water and sewer lines, and the other for “cross-cutting” efforts that affect the entire city, such as transit-line location, spending for beach clean-up, or programs for assisting the homeless. To encourage participation, rules set the number of delegates roughly proportional to the number of neighbors attending the election meeting.
Allocation of the investment budget among districts follows “weights” determined by popular debate: in 1999, weights were assigned to population, poverty, shortages (e.g., lack of pavement), and citywide priorities. Tension between city hall and citizens has led to expanded popular involvement, with participatory budgeting each year taking a larger share of the city’s total budget. Priorities have shifted in ways unanticipated by the mayors or their staffs.
Participants include members of the governing party, some professionals, technocrats and middle-class citizens, and disproportionate numbers of the working poor (but fewer of the very poor). This process brings into political action many who do not support the governing party, in contrast to the traditional patronage approach that uses city budgets as a way to pay off supporters. As one index of success, the number of participants in Porto Alegre grew rapidly, from about 1,000 in 1990 to 16,000 in 1998 and 40,000 in 1999.
The participatory process has been self-reinforcing. For example, when annoyed neighbors discovered that others got their streets paved or a new bus stop, they wondered why. The simple answer was that only the beneficiary had gone to the budget meetings. In subsequent years, attendance increased, votes included more interests, and more residents were happy with the results. City officials were relieved, too, as residents themselves confronted the zero-sum choices on some issues: a fixed budget, with tough choices among such important things as asphalt over dusty streets, more classrooms, or care for the homeless.
Participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre is succeeding in the midst of considerable hostility from a conservative city council and constant assault from right-wing local newspapers and television programs, all of them challenging participation and extolling unregulated markets. The municipal government depends for its support on the participants and their neighbors, on radio broadcasting, and on many who resisted two decades of military dictatorship, from 1964 to 1985. In electing four consecutive reform administrations, a majority of the population has managed to pressure a hostile city council to vote in favor of the mayor’s budget proposals, keeping the progressive agenda intact.
Changes in Material Conditions
In 1989, despite comparatively high life expectancy and literacy rates, conditions in Porto Alegre mirrored the inequality and income segregation of other Brazilian cities. A third of the population lived in poorly serviced slums on the urban periphery, isolated and distant from the wealthy city center. Against this background, PT innovations have improved conditions, though only moderately, for some of the poorest citizens. For example, between 1988 and 1997, water connections in Porto Alegre went from 75 percent to 98 percent of all residences. The number of schools has quadrupled since 1986. New public housing units, which sheltered only 1,700 new residents in 1986, housed an additional 27,000 in 1989. Municipal intervention also facilitated a compromise with private bus companies to provide better service to poor peripheral neighborhoods. The use of bus-only lanes has improved commuting times and newly painted buses are highly visible symbols of local power and the public interest.
Porto Alegre has used its participatory solidarity to allow the residents to make some unusual economic development decisions that formerly would have been dominated by centralized business and political interests. The city turned down a five-star hotel investment on the site of an abandoned power plant, preferring to use the well-situated promontory as a public park and convention hall that now serves as the new symbol of the city. And, faced with a proposal to clear slums to make room for a large supermarket, the city imposed stiff and costly household relocation requirements, which the supermarket is meeting. In another example, in spite of promises of new employment and the usual kinds of ideological pressures from the Ford Motor Company, the nearby municipality of Guíaba turned down a proposed new auto plant, arguing along political lines established in Porto Alegre that the required subsidies would be better applied against other city needs. (A state investigation in August 2000 found the former mayor, not “at fault” for losing the Ford investment.)
Nevertheless, daunting constraints in the broader Brazilian economic and political environment continue to limit gains in economic growth, demands for labor and quality jobs. Comparing Porto Alegre and Rio Grande do Sul with nearby capital cities and their states during the years 1985-1986 and 1995-2000, one finds few sharp contrasts. Generally, GDP stagnated, and per capita GDP declined. Unemployment rose and labor-force participation and formal employment both fell.
Given this limited extent of economic improvement, how can we account for the sense of optimism and achievement that pervades Porto Alegre? The city is clearly developing a successful experience with local government that reinforces participatory democracy. We believe the PT’s success lies in the way the participants are redefining local power, with increasing numbers of citizens becoming simultaneously subject and object, initiator and recipient, so they can both govern and benefit directly from their decisions. This reconfiguration is immediately discernible in the procedures, methods and behavior of local government.
After 12 years, Porto Alegre has changed not just the way of doing things, but the things themselves; not just the way of governing the city, but the city itself. Such a claim is clearly significant. Porto Alegre offers an authentic, alternative approach to city management-one that rejects not only the centralist, technocratic, authoritarian planning model of the military dictatorship, but also the competitive, pragmatic, neoliberal model of the Washington Consensus, to which the national government still adheres. This model imposes International Monetary Fund (IMF) orthodoxy and requires such “structural adjustment” imperatives as free trade, privatization, strict limits to public expenditures, and high rates of interest, thus worsening the conditions of the poor.
While most Brazilian cities continue to distribute facilities and allocate services with obvious bias and neglect of poor neighborhoods, the reconfiguration of power in Porto Alegre is beginning to reduce spatial inequalities through changes in service provision and land use patterns. We can hope that the effect will be felt in the formal structures of the city and eventually in other cities and in Brazilian society in general.
New Forms of Local Power
Political and symbolic resources normally are monopolized by those who control economic power, but radically democratic municipal administrations, as in Porto Alegre, can reverse power to block the favoring and reinforcing of privilege. They can interfere with the strict solidarity of economic and political power, reduce private appropriation of resources, and promote the city as a collective and socially dynamic body. In other words, a city’s administration could cease to honor the actions of dominant urban groups-real estate interests and others who use various forms of private appropriation of public resources for their private benefit. These actions may include allocation of infrastructure to favor elite neighborhoods, privatization of scenic and environmental resources, and the capture of land value increments resulting from public investments and regulatory interventions. Thus, a reconfigured, publicly oriented city administration permits access to local power for traditionally excluded groups. Such a change constitutes a quasi-revolution, with consequences that cannot yet be measured or evaluated adequately by activists or hopeful governments.
Are Porto Alegre’s experiences with municipal reform, participatory budgeting and democratic land use planning idiosyncratic, or do these innovations promise broader improvements in Brazilian politics as other citizens build expectations and improve the structure of their governments? The Interamerican Development Bank (IDB) is urging localities throughout Latin America to engage in participatory budgeting, following Porto Alegre’s example. Can reform-minded city administrations override the constraints of international markets and national policy? In recommending the formal and procedural aspects of the participatory budgeting technique, does the IDB overestimate the practical economic achievements and underestimate the symbolic and political dimensions of radical democracy?
The lesson of urban reform in Porto Alegre emerges not so directly in the economic market as in new experiences with power, new political actors, and new values and meanings for the conditions of its citizens. Even as citizens weigh their expectations against stagnating macroeconomic conditions, they can find hope in new visions of overcoming spatial and social inequalities in the access to services. These new forms of exercising political power and speaking out about land use and governance issues give the city’s residents a new capacity to make a difference in their own lives.
References
Rebecca N. Abers. 2000. Inventing Local Democracy. Grassroots Politics in Brazil. Boulder: Lynne Rienner.
Gianpaolo Baiocchi. 1999. “Transforming the City,” unpublished manuscript. University of Wisconsin (September).
Boaventura de Sousa Santos. 1998. “Participatory Budgeting in Porto Alegre.” Politics and Society 26, 4 (December): 461-510.
William W. Goldsmith is a professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University. Carlos Vainer is a professor in the Institute for Urban and Regional Planning and Research at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. They participated in a December 1999 seminar hosted by the City of Porto Alegre and cosponsored by the Lincoln Institute and the Planners Network, a North American association of urban planners, activists and scholars working for equality and social change.
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For the past six years, the Lincoln Institute has been collaborating with the Loeb Fellowship Program at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Established in 1970 through the generosity of alumnus John L. Loeb, the Loeb Fellowship invites about 10 mid-career professionals each year to study independently and develop insights and connections that can advance their work revitalizing the built and natural environments. The 2002–2003 fellows took their class study trip to Cape Town, South Africa, in May, focusing their inquiry on urban renewal efforts in the township of Khayelitsha.
Cape Town is as glistening a first world city as one could ever expect to see. It’s also among the most deceptive. The come-on begins with one’s first view of Table Mountain, rising behind the city’s modernist skyline. It literally peaks when you ride the sleek, blue funicular to the top and behold, along with the wondrous natural landscape, abundant evidence of apparent prosperity and cosmopolitanism. The seaport of this early outpost of globalization continues to bustle with levels of trade befitting an intercontinental crossroads. The gleaming Victoria and Alfred Waterfront is an upscale tourist vortex, and the massive new convention center with its adjoining international hotel help make Cape Town a glorious modern city.
One feels a twinge of betrayal, however, with the first visit to Khayelitsha, 26 kilometers (16 miles) out the N2 highway amid the sandy Cape Flats, a black African township of over a million residents and the sort of place where the majority of Cape Town residents live. Miles before any apparent settlement, one sees dozens of men and women walking along the shoulder of the freeway, making an hours-long commute to work, or in search of it. Closer to Khayelitsha, hordes of children are playing soccer in the road reserve, occasionally streaming across the multilane highway. Soon the shacks come into view, emerging from a smoky-dusty haze. There are thousands of them, amazingly resourceful assemblages of corrugated tin, recovered shipping palettes, found scraps of anything. Some are drab but most are swathed in vibrant hues.
In the township itself there are more shacks, then row after row of cinder block huts. Apart from a gas station there are almost no formal stores or other nonresidential buildings. But informal traders abound at most intersections: hair stylists operating in overturned shipping containers; meat purveyors with raw animal parts lying on dusty tables or sizzling on oil-drum grills fired by salvaged wood; fruit stands; a house store selling cigarettes, drinks and not much else. Even at noon on a workday the streets are teeming with pedestrians.
If it is an overstatement to call this the “real” Cape Town, it is also true that this condition is far more prevalent than the patina of affluence in the white, Euro-centric center. Certainly it is no exaggeration to call townships like this, with their high unemployment and AIDS rates, the greatest challenge to the still young post-apartheid government of South Africa. Recognizing this, the administration of President Thabo Mbeki is pouring resources into a program, dubbed “urban renewal” in an eerie echo of the earlier American episode, aimed at remaking these troubling legacies of apartheid into more livable places. It is this effort that the 2003 class of Loeb fellows has come to study.
Staggering Quality-of-Life Challenges
The urban renewal program was begun in 2001 to combat unemployment and crime and improve quality of life for township residents. Each of the nine provinces has identified several nodes of focus, with more than 30 nodes nationwide. The Western Cape province selected Khayelitsha and the neighboring “colored” township of Mitchell’s Plain because of the huge challenges they present. Both are large—Khayelitsha is second only to Soweto in size—and distant from the urban core and economic opportunities; together they account for one-third of the Cape Town region’s population.
The magnitude of the project is stunning. Not yet 20 years old, Khayelitsha is believed to have over one million residents and an annual growth rate of 5 percent. The township, whose name means “our new home” in the Xhosa language of its dominant population, began life in the early 1980s as a planned dormitory settlement for rural African men who migrated to Cape Town for industrial jobs. Initially, wives and children were not allowed to join the men. When the dying apartheid regime lifted its pass law restrictions in the late 1980s, families came flooding into the township.
Today, unemployment officially stands at around 46 percent, but that apparently counts only those who still are actively looking. The HIV infection rate is thought to be around 25 percent. As much as one-third of township residents are living in informal housing, either in squatter shacks built illegally on city-owned land, in officially sanctioned shacks on plotted and serviced lots, or in backyard shacks behind the cinderblock huts that comprise the lion’s share of formal housing.
Khayelitsha has almost no jobs of its own apart from informal trade, such as unlicensed taverns known as shebeens, hair stylists and house shops, and scant tourism jobs. The commute to Cape Town is a grueling journey by overcrowded trains, and the trip is made longer by the fact that the Khayelitsha line is not direct, but a branch from the line to Mitchell’s Plain. And increasingly the jobs are not in central Cape Town but in the booming edge city of Bellville, which is unreachable for carless commuters except by jitney taxi. As it happens, access to and from Khayelitsha is intentionally poor. Emerging at the height of the anti-apartheid struggle, the township was designed so that its two entrance points could be closed in the event of any disturbance.
Given the paucity of jobs in the township and the difficult commute to existing employment centers, the most appropriate urban renewal strategy might be to relocate residents to new housing near jobs and adequate transportation networks. But that task is so monumental and fraught with thorny considerations that the government has settled for now on trying to make the existing township as livable as possible.
“The question of relocation versus redevelopment of Khayelitsha is a political hot potato,” says Pieter Terblanche, principal planner in Cape Town’s Planning and Environmental Directorate. White residents in Cape Town and its close-in suburbs aren’t eager for new neighbors, and the township residents themselves want to cling to whatever patch of ground they’ve been able to secure for themselves in the (probably legitimate) fear that they’ll never get as much anywhere else.
Addressing the housing needs within Khayelitsha itself then becomes a top priority. About 20,000 households now live in areas with only communal toilets and water taps, though most have electricity. Most of these families need to be relocated to so-called serviced sites, with water, sewer and access to a bona fide street. Several thousand others are doubled up on serviced sites intended for only one house; these too will be relocated. To reduce the risk of the devastating fires that sometimes sweep through the shack lands, the city wants to de-densify informal areas, adding to the relocation challenge.
The rehousing program is complicated by other factors. For the vast majority of residents, the only acceptable housing is a detached hut on a privately owned lot. Multifamily rental housing is seen as a despised relic of apartheid, and mid- or high-rise apartments are anathema to these recently rural denizens. Government rental housing is being phased out as it is converted to private ownership. Most residents are waiting their turn to secure an individual lot where they can use their 17,900 rand (US$2,400) housing subsidy toward building the standard-issue, 36-square meter, cinder block hut. With enough hands, a hut can be erected in a weekend.
Naturally, this land-intensive approach leads to what we in the U.S. would call sprawl, exacerbating transportation problems and dramatically increasing the cost of extending water, sewer and other infrastructure. The effect, taken together with the wide arterial roads that are the primary street network, is a kind of American-style, automobile-oriented design, but without the automobiles.
Other issues are emerging, as well. “Ownership brings financial responsibilities and requirements that people aren’t necessarily prepared for,” said Terblanche. Many residents also were unprepared for the reality of being forced to pay rising water and electricity rates. Most had become accustomed to paying little or nothing during the late apartheid era, when the government could do little to counter the mass civil disobedience. In an echo of that era, angry poor residents today regularly participate in street protests against utility rates and collections.
Remaking the Township into a Town
With residents largely staying put in Khayelitsha, the question for the urban renewal program becomes how to make the township into something more closely resembling a real town. Step one has been to lay the groundwork for a central business district (CBD) that will allow residents to do their shopping and government business closer to home; now they must take a costly cab ride to Mitchell’s Plain to buy anything beyond convenience items.
The CBD is being developed as a joint venture between the city of Cape Town, private interests and the Khayelitsha community. It spans 73 hectares (182.5 acres) adjacent to the commuter rail station. While retailers and developers know Khayelitsha is a huge, untapped market, it is also seen as an enormous risk by financial institutions, who redline African townships. In Khayelitsha, 60 percent equity has been required of any developer or institution seeking financing. In late July, however, a tentative agreement was reached, and the Cape Town council gave approval to what will be one of the largest private-public investments yet undertaken in a South African township. A grocery chain and discount department store have signed on, but planners want to get a mix of tenants that also includes local merchants. That has required an elaborate financing scheme that allows for keeping rents affordable. Some informal traders also will be allowed in an enclosed square that planners consider the focal point of the district.
Several other planned projects aim to formalize and dignify the public realm. While the city’s transport officials are resistant, one of the most urgent needs is to provide safer, cleaner and more attractive pedestrian ways, says Barbara Southworth, manager of urban design in the city’s division of development services.
In addition to building walkways and plazas at key intersections and at taxi-bus nodes, Southworth’s office is working to provide some order to the informal trade areas by introducing rows of concrete, post-and-beam arches that can serve as storefronts for the trading stalls. Most of these are improvised from sideways shipping containers, and tend to lie in haphazard clusters. By leasing the favored storefront positions the city hopes to introduce a modest level of control over an otherwise unregulated environment.
The government’s attention to Khayelitsha has delivered other amenities as well, though not necessarily under the rubric of urban renewal. The magistrate court building that opened in early May is the most expensive government building ever built in a black township, which is taken as an important sign of progress. The national and provincial governments also contributed to the first national tourist site in a township, a cultural center at Lookout Hill. Built at the highest point in the Cape Flats, next to a fragile dune that offers a panoramic view of Khayelitsha and Mitchell’s Plain, the center is expected to be the entry point for the increasingly popular township tours, estimated at 30,000 mostly foreign tourists annually. The center will feature exhibits on the origins of Khayelitsha and on the Sangoma healers of Xhosa culture and a marketplace selling the wares of local cottage industries.
Vexing Consequences
It is unsettling to think that, at the moment, the most promising economic path for Khayelitsha is to offer tourists a glimpse of the provisional landscape necessitated by crushing poverty, mass relocation and government-enforced segregation. It is equally disquieting to realize that urban renewal efforts at normalizing the township’s environment could reduce some of the appeal to those tourists.
While American urban renewal often meant displacing many African-American and immigrant populations by eliminating central city ghettoes, the South African variant aims to improve conditions for millions of residents who will be allowed to remain in far larger ghettoes many miles from the urban core. This immediately raises some vexing questions: Should the government work to preserve these intensely segregated artifacts of an oppressive regime? There are powerful arguments for doing so, not least the extreme difficulty and unpopularity of relocating a population that has had its fill of such government-driven exercises. But by investing in making townships more permanent, are current residents and future generations consigned to economic isolation? These questions linger even as the government proceeds with the program.
David Goldberg was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard in 2002–2003. He is communications director at Smart Growth America, a nationwide coalition based in Washington, DC.
Loeb Fellows, 2002–2003
Gabriel Abraham, Senior Consultant, Research Triangle Institute, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina
Arnd Bruninghaus, Architect, A/haus Group, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Kathleen A. Bullard, Chief of Watershed Planning Division, Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority, Los Angeles, California
Deborah J. Goddard, Director of Community Development Planning, Urban Edge, Boston, Massachusetts
David A. Goldberg, Communications Director, Smart Growth America, Decatur, Georgia
Linda Haar, Director, Boston Planning Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Susan L. Hamilton, Assistant Director of Industrial Development, Metro Development Authority, Louisville, Kentucky
Robert L. Liberty, Smart Growth Consultant, Portland, Oregon
Josephine Ramirez, Program Officer, Getty Grant Program, J. Paul Getty Trust, Los Angeles, California
Jennifer Siegal, Principal, Office of Mobile Design, Venice, California
Jennifer Yoos, Architect and Partner, Vincent James Associates, Minneapolis, Minnesota
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Una versión más actualizada de este artículo está disponible como parte del capítulo 7 del CD-ROM Perspectivas urbanas: Temas críticos en políticas de suelo de América Latina.
En las ciudades de América Latina, y especialmente en las más grandes, la ubicación de las viviendas es crítica para los grupos más vulnerables. En Buenos Aires, la población de las villas miseria en el área del centro se duplicó en el último período intercenso (1991-2001), si bien la población total declinó aproximadamente el 8 por ciento. En Rio de Janeiro, durante la misma década, los asentamientos informales de mayor crecimiento fueron los que se percibían como mejor ubicados, generalmente cerca de la costa en los barrios de clase media y alta, si bien éstos eran ya los barrios más hacinados y congestionados.
También se observa esta tendencia en Chile, no obstante el problema de los asentamientos informales es mucho menor que en el resto de América Latina. Sólo alrededor de 28.600 familias (el 1 por ciento de la población total de Chile) viven en 533 asentamientos precarios identificados (los cuales son denominados campamentos). Los catastros sucesivos demuestran que al mismo tiempo que los campamentos más antiguos se van reordenando, se continúan creando campamentos nuevos. Más de la mitad de los campamentos existentes fueron establecidos entre 1991 y 2007 (Fundación un Techo para Chile, 2007).
Hay varias explicaciones para esta persistencia de campamentos, aun en Chile, donde la política de vivienda se considera más desarrollada que en otros países, y donde ya queda poca tierra urbana disponible para ser invadida. Algunas familias que viven en campamentos pueden representar un grupo residual en transición entre su llegada a la ciudad y su reubicación en viviendas de interés social u otro tipo de vivienda formal. Otros pueden tener preferencia por tener su propia casa en un campamento en vez de tener que compartir cuartos con otra familia o parientes en una vivienda más formal.
Vivir en un campamento también puede ser comparable a anotarse en una lista de espera para poder acceder a un programa de vivienda de interés social, ya que el programa del gobierno que se concentra en este tipo de familias (Chile Barrio) tiene por finalidad atender a sus necesidades y facilitar su acceso a la vivienda de interés social. Como algunas de las familias que viven en campamentos aún no cumplen con las condiciones necesarias para participar en el programa de viviendas de interés social, siguen allí hasta poder encontrar otras opciones.
Por otro lado, la continua existencia de campamentos no se puede atribuir a altos niveles de pobreza o a una política débil de regularización de asentamientos. Por el contrario, en los últimos 20 años la pobreza en Chile se redujo a la mitad, y ahora se estima que alcanza al 13,7 por ciento de la población (CASEN, 2006). Al mismo tiempo, el gobierno implementó una política de vivienda que entrega bonos a las familias para comprar una casa. Este programa ha sido respaldado por sucesivas administraciones de gobierno y ha beneficiado hasta ahora a dos millones de familias, a un promedio de 100.000 familias por año, o casi el 3 por ciento de los 3,6 millones de hogares urbanos de Chile en 2002.
Independientemente de su éxito en términos de cobertura, los programas de vivienda han generado una concentración de viviendas de interés social en la periferia de Santiago y otras ciudades principales. Históricamente, los proyectos de viviendas de interés social han creado grandes zonas socialmente homogéneas que han producido la segregación de familias de bajos ingresos, con consecuencias negativas. Algunas de estas zonas ahora sufren de serios problemas sociales, como un alto nivel de desempleo y deserción escolar, como también sentimientos generalizados de falta de esperanza y inversión de los valores sociales entre sus residentes (Sabatini, Cáceres y Cerda, 2004).
También hay mayor inestabilidad e inseguridad laboral en la economía chilena en la actualidad que en el pasado, y una transformación radical del sistema político ha desestabilizado las relaciones cotidianas entre las clases populares y los líderes de los partidos políticos. A medida que estas formas tradicionales de cohesión social se van debilitando, ciertos factores, como la ubicación de una casa en la ciudad, se hacen más relevantes, ya que una buena ubicación puede brindar acceso a una mejor “geografía de oportunidades”, o sea a lugares que se perciben como de mayor y mejor acceso a servicios públicos y privados, como escuelas, mercados, parques y redes de transporte, como también acceso a mejores trabajos y proximidad a redes sociales y familiares.
En este contexto, examinaremos algunos de los factores que influyen en el continuo desarrollo y persistencia de los campamentos, a pesar de la disponibilidad de programas gubernamentales masivos de vivienda, como también un sistema legal que protege los derechos de propiedad.
Una encuesta de preferencias de localización de vivienda
Usando datos de la Región Metropolitana de Santiago, diseñamos tres conjuntos de muestras con un total de 1.588 unidades familiares: familias que viven en campamentos (812); familias que viven en viviendas de interés social y que se mudaron de campamentos que fueron erradicados (510); y familias que viven en viviendas de interés social pero que no se mudaron de un campamento (266). Las tres muestras fueron tomadas, respectivamente, de un inventario de moradores de campamentos preparado en 2007; y el registro del programa Chile Barrio, que identifica a familias que vivían en campamentos y que adquirieron viviendas de interés social entre 1999 y 2005; y familias del mismo proyecto de viviendas de interés social que no provenían de un campamento. Las encuestas en los campamentos fueron efectuadas de puerta en puerta en agosto de 2008, y en los barrios de proyectos de vivienda de interés social en diciembre de 2008.
Los resultados de la encuesta muestran que al vivir en campamentos, las familias logran optimizar las preferencias de localización de su vivienda con una mayor probabilidad de éxito, entendiendo dichas preferencias fundamentalmente como la proximidad a una buena geografía de oportunidades. Casi el 70 por ciento de las familias que antes vivían en campamentos y ahora viven en viviendas de interés social se quedaron en el mismo distrito, comparado con el 51,7 por ciento de las familias que viven en viviendas de interés social y que no vinieron de campamentos (ver Cuadro 1). Por lo tanto, sin alterar radicalmente la ubicación de su vivienda, las familias que antes vivían en campamentos pudieron acceder a subsidios de vivienda que les permitieron mejorar su estándar de vida y obtener un título legal.
Ver Cuadro 1 en anexo: Origen de las muestras de hogares en la Región Metropolitana (RM) de Santiago (porcentajes)
Las familias que viven en campamentos también perciben que tienen mayor prioridad que otras familias similares para acceder a viviendas de interés social, y una mayor probabilidad de acceder a viviendas de interés social en su localización preferida. Alrededor del 63 por ciento de las familias que viven actualmente en campamentos reportaron tener ventaja en el acceso a viviendas de interés social en comparación con otras familias. Esta percepción coincide con la realidad, ya que entre 1996 y 2007 la cantidad de campamentos en Chile declinó de 972 (105.888 familias) a 533 (alrededor de 28.600 familias) y el déficit de viviendas asociado con campamentos se redujo en un 75 por ciento.
Para examinar el precio del suelo como factor en la selección de vivienda, utilizamos la tasación fiscal en zonas de características similares (ZCS) y, como referencia, el valor máximo obtenido por cada distrito. En este análisis, el 71,4 por ciento de las familias que se mudaron de un campamento a una vivienda de interés social se transfirieron a una localización mejor o equivalente (ver Cuadro 2).
Ver Cuadro 2 en anexo: Valor actual del suelo comparado con el valor en el distrito de origen
La encuesta también muestra que la mayoría de las familias de campamentos (60,6 por ciento) llegó entre 2000 y 2008, un período de gran expansión en la oferta de viviendas para familias de menores ingresos, indicando una preferencia por vivir en un campamento bien ubicado antes que en una vivienda de interés social en otro lado (ver Cuadro 3).
Ver Cuadro 3 en anexo: Año de llegada de la muestra de familias que viven en campamentos
Los resultados de la encuesta se deben interpretar teniendo en cuenta los siguientes factores contextuales.
Interacciones entre pobreza y los valores del suelo
La mitad de las familias que viven en campamentos (51 por ciento) no son pobres, de acuerdo a la Encuesta de Caracterización Socioeconómica (CASEN). En nuestra muestra, la mayoría de las familias que vivían en campamentos tienen un mayor porcentaje de jefes de familia masculinos, menor tamaño familiar, y un ingreso per cápita casi el doble de la mayoría de las familias de bajos ingresos de la Región Metropolitana. Este resultado contradice la creencia convencional de que las familias más pobres viven en los campamentos. Lo que parece estar ocurriendo es la expresión de una estrategia por parte de familias de menores ingresos para superar su vulnerabilidad y aprovechar al máximo las oportunidades para mejorar su situación, usando para ello la ubicación de su vivienda como un recurso en el proceso de movilidad social.
La incidencia de pobreza en los campamentos varía en función del precio promedio del suelo en el distrito donde se encuentra el barrio. Menos de la mitad de las familias que viven en campamentos ubicados en distritos de valor bajo y alto del suelo son pobres, mientras que aquéllas que viven en distritos de valor medio del suelo tienen niveles de pobreza mucho mayores (ver Cuadro 4). Las familias que viven en distritos de valores bajos y altos del suelo también tienen una mayor proporción de trabajadores en los sectores de servicios privados y domésticos, y menos empleados por cuenta propia.
Ver Cuadro 4 en anexo: Pobreza y empleo en las familias que viven en campamentos, por valor del suelo en el distrito
Los residentes perciben que la localización objetiva de los campamentos es mejor que el de las viviendas de interés social, porque es más probable que los campamentos se encuentren en los distritos de mayor valor del suelo, en comparación con las viviendas de interés social: 27 por ciento, comparado con 7,9 por ciento (ver Cuadro 5). Al mismo tiempo, las familias que viven en campamentos tienen una percepción mucho mejor de su proximidad a los servicios y puestos de empleo, y encuentran que su distrito es socialmente más diverso que el de las familias que viven en viviendas de interés social (ver Cuadro 6).
Ver Cuadro 5 en anexo: Distribución de familias por valor del suelo en sus distritos respectivos (porcentajes)
Ver Cuadro 6 en anexo: Percepciones de localización de la vivienda
Si se usan los valores del suelo como indicador de acceso a servicios, queda claro cuán significativa es la localización para las familias. Los campamentos ubicados en distritos donde los valores del suelo son altos exhiben ventajas significativas sobre aquellos en distritos de precio del suelo bajo, sobre todo con respecto a la ubicación del trabajo del jefe de familia y su cónyuge (ver Cuadro 7).
Ver Cuadro 7 en anexo: Percepciones de localización por valor del suelo en el distrito entre las familias que viven en campamentos (porcentaje)
Preferencias declaradas de localización
Las familias que viven en campamentos valoran su localización. Al preguntar: “Si tuviera la oportunidad de mudarse a otra casa, ¿qué elegiría?”, el 28,8 por ciento declaró que preferiría quedarse en el mismo lugar y el 57,6 por ciento se mudaría a otra ubicación dentro del mismo distrito. La tercera opción, mudarse a otro distrito, fue seleccionada sólo por el 13,6 por ciento de las familias.
Con respecto a sus expectativas para el futuro, la mayoría de las familias que viven en campamentos declaran que esperan vivir en una vivienda de interés social dentro de cinco años. El sesenta y siete por ciento cree que vivirá en una vivienda de interés social dentro del mismo distrito y el 25 por ciento de ese grupo cree que vivirá en una vivienda de interés social construida en el mismo lugar donde se encuentra el campamento donde vive ahora.
El resultado más interesante es que el 51,8 por ciento de las familias que viven en campamentos dicen que prefieren quedarse en el barrio (bajo las mismas condiciones) que mudarse a una vivienda de interés social lejos de su distrito actual, Esta preferencia también es expresada por el 58.7 por ciento de las unidades familiares que declararon estar dispuestas a ahorrar más de los aproximadamente 400 dólares estadounidenses que el estado exige actualmente como pago para participar en el programa; un pago más alto aumentaría aún más la probabilidad de quedarse en la misma localización.
Conclusión
Este estudio ofrece una nueva perspectiva sobre los patrones y preferencias de localización de las familias que viven en asentamientos precarios. Subyacente en la decisión familiar de vivir en un campamento está el interés de aumentar la probabilidad de obtener una vivienda de interés social en un período más corto y en el distrito de su preferencia. No parece haber ningún conflicto entre obtener una mejor localización y obtener un subsidio residencial de una vivienda formal. Por el contrario, el vivir en un campamento constituye una estrategia racional para alcanzar ambos objetivos.
Las familias que han seguido esta estrategia tienen un perfil un tanto distinto a la típica familia pobre de Santiago. La mayoría tiene un jefe de familia masculino y un nivel de ingresos que, si bien es bajo, se encuentra significativamente por encima de la línea de pobreza tal como se define en Chile. La localización del campamento parece cumplir un rol importante en favorecer la proximidad al trabajo tanto para el jefe de familia como para su cónyuge.
Los programas de vivienda de interés social en Chile se han guiado fuertemente por la noción del déficit de viviendas, donde las familias pasan a ser un número de una lista para obtener un subsidio de manera independiente, sin considerar aspectos tales como el mantenimiento de las redes sociales o las preferencias de localización. Esta política, basada en subsidiar la demanda y dar por sentado el valor del suelo, llevó a una segregación a gran escala en la periferia, donde los precios del suelo tienden a ser menores.
Este estudio demuestra que las familias optarán por una mejor localización, frecuentemente en la ciudad central, aunque ello signifique vivir en un campamentos o un lote más pequeño, demostrando los límites de la vivienda de interés social basada en los precios más bajos del suelo en la periferia. El programa Chile Barrio, creado en 1996, ha reemplazado el énfasis en el déficit de viviendas por un enfoque territorial que hace del campamento la unidad de intervención, y este nuevo enfoque parece haber mejorado las opciones de vivienda. La lección de política pública aprendida para programas de vivienda futuros es la necesidad de concentrarse en la calidad de la localización y en la inclusión social.
Referencias
CASEN. 2006. Ministerio de Planificación. www.mideplan.cl
Fundación un Techo para Chile. 2007. Informe catastro de campamentos. www.untechoparachile.cl/cis
Instituto de la Vivienda (INVI). 2001. Diagnóstico de medición de satisfacción de beneficiarios de vivienda básica. Santiago: Universidad de Chile, Facultad de Arquitectura y Urbanismo.
Sabatini, F., G. Cáceres, y J. Cerda. 2001. Segregación residencial en las principales ciudades chilenas: Tendencias de las tres últimas décadas y posibles cursos de acción”. EURE 27 (82) Diciembre.
Sobre los autores
Isabel Brain es socióloga y coordinadora del Programa de Apoyo a las Políticas Urbanas y de Suelo (ProUrbana) de la Universidad Católica de Chile Sus investigaciones se concentran en el desarrollo urbano, viviendas económicas, segregación residencial, mercados de suelos y asentamientos informales.
Pablo Celhay es economista e investigador de la Universidad Alberto Hurtado de Santiago, Chile. Recibió una maestría en políticas públicas de la Universidad de Chicago. En la actualidad está cursando la carrera de maestría en políticas públicas en la Facultad de Economía y Negocios de la Universidad de Chile.
José Joaquín Prieto es director del Observatorio Social de la Universidad Alberto Hurtado de Santiago, Chile. Sus investigaciones se concentran en políticas sociales y metodología de las investigaciones aplicadas.
Francisco Sabatini es sociólogo y profesor de planeamiento urbano en el Instituto de Estudios Urbanos y Territoriales de la Universidad Católica de Chile. Se especializa en segregación social, conflictos medioambientales y participación ciudadana.
