Urbanity as a project of modernization. Urban design and progressive housing strategies in Lima, 1954-1984

Abstract

Through the encounters of the formal and the informal in the city, Peruvian architecture culture has set the basis for an appropriated modernity, for new paradigm of development that is waiting for new a materialization of public architecture and urbanism in this new century.  Particularly, in the architecture of mass housing, these encounters expose the social, political, and economic conflicts and ideals of the population, as much as integrate them into the social space, territory and material culture.

This essay reviews the process of housing modernization process in Lima, in which two supposedly opposite worlds have merged into the architecture to achieve a new urbanity. The ideas presented in this research, reveal that Peruvian Modernity, deals with the encounter of a rationally systematized spatial organization with a spontaneously squatted and self-built architecture.  It reviews the emergence of the informal city, and the reassessment of the self-help and the informal city within the discipline. By doing this, the essay reassesses this unique encounter of the bottom-up and top-down processes, and exposes how architecture builds the urbanity and so, provides the physical context to empower the social development.

The text also reveals and depicts five different architecture and city-making strategies through housing projects that have shaped the image of “modern Lima”.   These ideas have created neighborhoods that promote incremental urban development with limited resources, as well as represent the most successful forms of urbanization that have been able to link the formal and the informal city, encouraging social and urban encounters.