Barriadas and Housing Policy in the Aftermath of the 1950 Cusco Earthquake

Abstract

This article examines the efforts to address the housing crisis in the aftermath of the 1950 earthquake in Cusco, Peru. Mid-twentieth-century Cusco served as an early incubator for ideas about affordable housing and development in Peru. Peruvian and foreign experts sought to rebuild Cusco as a beacon of modernity in the Andes. Still, for the most part, these global designs failed to come to fruition, leaving poor, working-class, mostly Indigenous cusqueños to improvise their own solutions. The article argues that this experience in Cusco helped shape housing policy in Peru more broadly.