Counteracting the negative effects of real-estate-driven urbanism + empowering the self-constructed city

Abstract

This article shares ideas to counteract the negative aspects of the capital-driven urbanism, addressing social inclusion and environmental soundness, with a hybrid approach, merging planning and design with the dynamism of the informal city. Attending the challenges of the self-constructed city is a task of pivotal importance in light of the demographic trends, the degree of planetary urbanization, food and water scarcity, migrations, rising social tension, political polarization, and climate change. The approach derives from the author’s knowledge of Latin-American urbanism and seeks to foster the emergence of new self-constructed habitats helping them become the dominant component of sustainable, environmentally responsible, and equitable urban scenarios. The approach avoids the Capitalist–Socialist theoretical debate, focusing on criteria and practical solutions that can significantly ameliorate living conditions for close to one-third of the planet’s population, over the next decades. Key aspects of the approach include the assemblage of public land, the deployment of public-realm armatures providing environmental services, accessibility, and public spaces, the provision of land for self-construction habitats and to incorporate productive uses and services, as well as notions of how to secure this land from unwanted occupation, and to guide the transformations of the settlements as part of larger territories.