Chimbote, Projected: Urbanity from Up Above and from Down Below

Abstract

In the late 1940s, the U.S. architectural firm Town Planning Associates produced a master plan for Chimbote in Peru as part of a regional development scheme centered on a new steel mill. The plan included designs for housing for the city’s workforce of rural–urban migrants, with proposals ranging from patio houses to provisional dwellings based on the vernacular self-built housing prevalent in Chimbote’s barriadas (squatter settlements). However, the influx of migrants vastly exceeded estimates, resulting in extensive unregulated urban growth. In an effort to remediate this problem, the Peruvian government selected the city as a key site for aided self-help housing projects beginning in the late 1950s. In Chimbote, Projected: Urbanity from Up Above and from Down Below, Helen Gyger explores the intertwined nature of authorized and unauthorized urbanisms in postwar Chimbote and employs a close reading of visual and textual sources to advance a comparative analysis of contrasting proposals that architectural history has previously separated into distinct categories.