Improvised Cities

Architecture, Urbanization, and Innovation in Peru

Helen Gyger

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN:
  9780822986386
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Beginning in the 1950s, an explosion in rural-urban migration dramatically increased the population of cities throughout Peru, leading to an acute housing shortage and the proliferation of self-built shelters clustered in barriadas, or squatter settlements. Improvised Cities examines the history of aided self-help housing, or technical assistance to self-builders, which took on a variety of forms in Peru from 1954 to 1986. While the postwar period saw a number of trial projects in aided self-help housing throughout the developing world, Peru was the site of significant experiments in this field and pioneering in its efforts to enact a large-scale policy of land tenure regularization in improvised, unauthorized cities.

Gyger focuses on three interrelated themes: the circumstances that made Peru a fertile site for innovation in low-cost housing under a succession of very different political regimes; the influences on, and movements within, architectural culture that prompted architects to consider self-help housing as an alternative mode of practice; and the context in which international development agencies came to embrace these projects as part of their larger goals during the Cold War and beyond.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The Challenge of the Affordable House, 1954–1958
• 2. The Barriada under the Microscope, 1955–1957
• 3. A Profession in Development, 1957–1960
• 4. Mediating Informality, 1961–1963
• Color plates
• 5. World Investments, Productive Homes, 1961–1967
• 6. Building a Better Barriada, 1968–1975
• 7. Revolutions in Self-Help, 1968–1980
• 8. Other Paths, 1980–1986
• Epilogue
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index