Improvised Cities: Architecture, Urbanization, and Innovation in Peru

Abstract

The spectacular growth of Lima's informal barriadas and pueblos jóvenes has long occupied a prominent place in the scholarly and popular imagination of Peru's twentieth-century history. For many, the image of Lima as a city of unconstrained and uncontrolled informal settlements was a singular symbol of what José Matos Mar dubbed the desborde popular that had overwhelmed Peru by the 1980s. Helen Gyger's new book, Improvised Cities, acknowledges the often-chaotic nature of twentieth-century urban Peru while also drawing attention to the innovative ways in which the country became a global leader in self-help housing—that is, housing and settlements that were built by their own residents. Gyger's book documents the serious attempts by architects, political leaders, academics, and everyday Peruvians to create sustainable, effective, and often quite innovative housing policies.Gyger's book is an interdisciplinary engagement that traces historical change along with theories of architecture, design, and urbanism. Gyger and the University of Pittsburgh Press should be applauded for producing a beautiful book with 61 images and 14 color plates that clearly demonstrate these case studies. After an introductory chapter that sets up the book's themes and summarizes different perspectives on urbanism in relation to Peru's development, the book proceeds in chronological fashion. Beginning in the 1950s, Gyger shows how Peru became a leader in self-help housing experimentation. Peru's conservative leaders eschewed top-down state housing projects in favor of encouraging informal settlements and self-help housing. As these barriadas quickly grew around Lima and other cities, John F. C. Turner, a British architect, arrived in Peru in 1957 and would go on to become one of the most influential advocates of self-help housing. Perhaps the most interesting of Gyger's discoveries is the strange consensus between the anarchist Turner and the conservative leaders of Peru in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Both groups were suspicious of state-led projects and instead promoted self-help housing that they both believed would empower residents. This consensus resulted in Peru creating a legal framework for the recognition of informal settlements and their planning.As the narrative moves into the later 1960s and 1970s, Gyger pays special attention to how Peruvian architects and everyday citizens engaged with global debates on self-help housing. These included proposals from US financial institutions to encourage self-help housing as well as the United Nations–sponsored competitions that invited leading global architects to create housing plans that were both affordable and avant-garde. Despite their flashy campaigns, Gyger argues, these plans were rather detached from the realities on the ground and ultimately futile. The final chapters of the book show how these failures began to raise new questions about informal settlements in Peru, even as their organization peaked during the military government of Juan Velasco Alvarado. Turner and other reformists began to question the embrace of self-help housing as a form of sidestepping large structural problems of inequality. The book's final chapter ends back at Peru's informal settlements in the 1980s, where the efforts of grassroots leftist activists are cut short by the arrival of Shining Path. Ultimately, self-help housing, with its elusive promises and flaws, continued, but now embraced by neoliberal reformers like Hernando de Soto.Ultimately, Gyger concludes that “aided self-help has often been more powerful as an idea than as a practice” (p. 378). This conclusion, and the detailed interdisciplinary analysis of many case studies that support it, will surely be of much interest to scholars of urbanism and urban history in Latin America. However, it also may prove disappointing to other historians hoping to understand how informal urban design either reflected or affected historical change in Peru. Unfulfilled plans, like the informal housing projects analyzed by Gyger, are still important to understand, especially if the reasons for their failure reveal important elements of Peruvian and Latin American history. Yet, it's often difficult to conclude if the often-unfulfilled nature of self-help housing analyzed in Gyger's book points more to specific failures of Peru's twentieth-century politics or to more general problems with the embrace of informality as a solution to urban growth in the developing world. Ultimately, I believe Gyger's book argues in favor of both factors, which may prove disappointing to some readers looking for a smoking gun to explain if self-help housing promotion has alleviated or worsened urbanism in Peru. Still, I would highly recommend this book for any historian of architecture, urbanism, or design. Gyger's detailed interdisciplinary approach is something that will hopefully appear in and inspire more urban histories of Latin America.