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Reshaping The Urban Core: The Politics of Housing in Authoritarian Uruguay

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2022

Lauren A. Benton
Lauren A. Benton*
Affiliation:
The Johns Hopkins University
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The problem of squatter settlements in Latin American cities has received far greater attention than any other theme in Latin American urban studies in the last fifteen years. The issues and debates at the heart of the field—the definition of the culture of poverty, the question of the marginality of the poor, and the concept of the urban informal sector—all have evolved out of and centered on discussing the plight of urban squatters. The sheer magnitude of the phenomenon of squatting in urban Latin America no doubt justifies this degree of attention. In addition, pursuit of the topic has provided a rich source of data for theorists interested in reinterpreting Latin American urban development from a Marxist perspective. The emphasis on squatting has also had some negative consequences, however. One result is that other important themes and other areas outside the urban periphery have received only superficial treatment; another is that the general applicability of the insights derived from the analysis of squatting has remained in doubt.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , 1986 , pp. 33 - 52
Copyright
Copyright © 1986 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

∗

I would like to thank the Inter-American Foundation for its support of field research in Uruguay. I am also grateful to the director and staff of the Centro de Informaciones y Estudios del Uruguay (CIESU) in Montevideo for their assistance and to the many people who commented on an earlier draft. Alejandro Portes, Katherine Verdery, William Rose-berry, and Eduardo García deserve special thanks for their helpful suggestions. The views presented in this article do not represent those of the Inter-American Foundation or CIESU; I am solely responsible for its contents.

References

Notes

1. Anthony Leeds points out the dearth of research on the Latin American central city as well as the similarities of center-city housing types in “Housing Settlement Types,” Latin American Urban Research, vol. 4, edited by Wayne Cornelius and Felicity Trueblood (Beverly Hills and London: Sage, 1976), 67–101. One of the best studies of conditions in a central district in the early part of this century is James Scobie, Buenos Aires (New York: Random House, 1974).

2. Oscar Lewis, Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1959); and Oscar Lewis, The Children of Sanchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family (New York: Random House, 1961). Lewis's most controversial ideas, based in part on his research in the vecindades, are summarzied in Oscar Lewis, “The Culture of Poverty,” Anthropological Essays (New York: Random House, 1970), 67–80.

3. In a comparative study of six central districts, Hardoy finds that all but one have experienced significant recent decline. See Jorge E. Hardoy, “Towards an Analysis of Central Districts in Latin America,” Comparative Urban Research 11, nos. 1–2 (1985): 32–51.

4. Edwards has done perhaps the most careful research on intra-urban mobility in a Latin American city and finds that in Bucaramanga, Colombia, the center's importance as a destination for migrants steadily decreased during the postwar decades. The majority of new migrants continue to live first in rental housing, and about 10 percent of the city's low-income population still live in the center. Michael Edwards, “Residential Mobility in a Changing Housing Market: The Case of Bucaramanga, Colombia,” Urban Studies 20, no. 2 (May 1983):131–46. It is known from numerous studies of squatter resettlement that one of the major concerns of residents being moved to public housing is its distance from the center. In Rio de Janeiro, some of the residents who were resettled to public housing from favelas adjacent to the central city even moved back in order to be closer to jobs and to social networks crucial to their economic survival. See Alejandro Portes, “Housing Policy, Urban Poverty, and the State,” LARR 14, no. 2 (1979):3–24. See also chap. 7 in Janice Perlman, The Myth of Marginality (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976).

5. For example, central-city land prices increased by 400 percent in Caracas over a ten-year period, by 800 percent in Cali, Colombia, over three years, and by 6,000 percent in residential areas of Mexico City over two decades. See Jorge E. Hardoy, Raúl O. Basaloua, and Oscar Moreno, Política de la tierra urbana y mecanismos para su regulación en América del Sur (Buenos Aires: Editorial del Instituto, 1968), cited in Alejandro Portes and John Walton, Labor, Class, and the International System (New York: Academic Press, 1981), 95.

6. Interviews were conducted in Montevideo between June and August of 1982.

7. The phrase is Scobie's, and it appears in Jaime Klaczko and Juan Rial, Uruguay, el país urbano (Montevideo: Ediciones de las Banda Oriental, 1981), 134.

8. Ibid, 108 and 128.

9. Alejandro Portes and John Walton, Urban Latin America (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1976), 40–43. The 1975 census showed only 1.2 percent of the population of Montevideo living in makeshift housing and around 4.5 percent in tenements and “collective housing.” As recently as 1982, city planners estimated that there were only fiteen hundred to two thousand ranchos (makeshift homes) in Montevideo's squatter settlements (known as cantegriles). Some recent evidence suggests that these settlements are expanding rapidly, however. Between 1973 and 1977, the government resettled a thousand families from cantegriles into public housing. According to the director of that program, most of the emptied sites have filled up again. A government spot-census showed that the number of ranchos in one sector of Montevideo's largest cantegril increased by 26 percent over a period of sixteen months from 1981 to 1982.

10. For a good discussion of the political economy of modern Uruguay and more detailed treatment of Batllista policies, see M. H. J. Finch, A Political Economy of Uruguay since 1870 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981).

11. For a recent history of public housing programs and related policies in Uruguay, see Nydia Conti de Queiruga, La vivienda de interés social en el Uruguay (Montevideo: Universidad la República, Facultad de Arquitectura, 1972).

12. For an excellent summary of rent legislation and its history, see Mauricio Kriger, La locación urbana (Montevideo: Fundación de Cultura Universitario, 1977).

13. Finch, Political Economy of Uruguay, 224.

14. D. Veiga, Elementos para el diagnóstico de la pobreza urbana en el Uruguay, CIESU publication no. 63 (Montevideo: Centro de Informaciones y Estudios del Uruguay, 1984).

15. Conti di Queiruga, La vivienda de interés social.

16. For an excellent analysis of housing decay written from a Marxist perspective, see François Lamarche, “Property Development and the Economic Foundations of the Urban Question,” Urban Sociology, edited by C. G. Pickvance (London: Methuen, 1976), 85–119.

17. Census statistics for 1963 and 1975 for seven center-city districts show a 12 percent decline in population. The drop was greater than average in the Ciudad Vieja, where the population declined by 19 percent.

18. Scobie provides a good description of conventillos in Buenos Aires in the first decades of the century in Buenos Aires. No comparable study yet exists for Montevideo, to my knowledge.

19. Further evidence of this decline is presented in Hardoy, “An Analysis of Central Districts.”

20. Because the social characteristics of Barrio Palermo and Barrio Sur are similar, residents themselves are often uncertain about where to draw the boundary between these two adjacent neighborhoods. In general, the area referred to as Barrio Sur is a compact zone bordering the Ciudad Vieja. Afro-Uruguayans already lived in the neighborhood in the early nineteenth century and probably before. An edict issued in 1839 prohibited “los bailes de candombe con tambor” within the city walls and stipulated that these celebrations should continue to take place “frente a la muralla de Sud,” or in the area that now corresponds to Barrio Sur. See Ildefonso Pereda Valdés, Negros esclavos y negros libres (Montevideo: Imprenta Gaceta Comercial, 1941), 141. Barrio Palermo is a larger neighborhood extending beyond Barrio Sur along the Río de la Plata. Afro-Uruguayans moved here somewhat later, beginning in about the middle of the nineteenth century. Their arrival coincided with the influx of blacks to Montevideo from the Uruguayan countryside and from Brazil. See Carlos Rama, Los afro-uruguayos (Montevideo: Siglo Ilustrado, 1967). To my knowledge, Rama's work is the only attempt at a comprehensive history of the Afro-Uruguayan community.

21. For a typical example of the popularized, romantic view of conventillo life, see the homage to Medio Mundo by the Uruguayan artist Carlos Páez Vilaró, “Te añoro, ‘Mediomundo’,” in Selecciones de Reader's Digest (June 1982), 21–23.

22. Incomplete, unpublished municipal documents list 244 evictions from condemned housing between 1980 and 1982. An additional one hundred cases for previous years is surely a conservative estimate, especially in view of the fact that the two-block area known as Ansina was condemned and evacuated during this period. The same unpublished documents list a total of 444 condemned properties, excluding Ansina. Montevideo's mayor recently placed the number of displaced residents in temporary shelters at 960. See “‘Peligro de vida’ corren 3.700 personas que viven en Montevideo,” El Día, 25 Nov. 1983. Public housing shelters some four hundred families, or at least an additional one thousand people.

23. These statistics were drawn from a discussion of the overall effects of the new legislation during the interview with Mauricio Kriger in “Alquileres: un tema siempre vigente,” El Correo, 4 June 1982.

24. Even completed buildings were not always successful in finding tenants. Vacant storefronts in new buildings are a common sight. The president of the Cámara de la Construcción has estimated that some four thousand units of recently constructed housing remain empty because they are not affordable for the groups in greatest need of housing. See “La gente sin plata: menos nafta y boletos,” Aquí (Oct. 1983).

25. Interview with the director of the municipal department in charge of evictions. For an example of these same views in the press, see El Día (10 December 1978), p. 19.

26. The residents considered it a special hardship that eviction notices were given during the Christmas and New Year's holiday preparations. Candombe street celebrations are particularly frequent at this time of year. Moreover, the last day for residents to move out (prior to the postponement) was El Día de los Tres Magos, an important holiday when gifts are given to children.

27. Two exemplary studies analyzing policy processes as they affect squatters on the urban periphery are David Collier, Squatters and Oligarchs (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); and Oscar Yujnovsky, “The Working Class and State Housing Policy: Argentina, 1976–1981,” Comparative Urban Research 11, nos. 1–2 (1985): 52–69.

28. See Perlman, The Myth of Marginality.

29. See note 4 above.