History, genesis period 1940-1970 in Europe

In the Dutch case,[2]​ at the beginning of the 1930s the urban system would give way to a new type of expansion: the functional city (CIAM). In the 1950s, neighborhood structuring in the form of a “seal” was imposed, through groupings of apartment blocks and low-rise homes around community spaces or gardens. Neighborhoods, and even cities, also emerged on the outskirts of Amsterdam, built around the thought of Le Corbusier with large blocks of homes located in a park; or Almere, which was born as a polynuclear city at the beginning of the '70s. In the mid-60s, the so-called woonerf emerged, in which human relationships would form the central element, with the street being the meeting place and automobile circulation becoming secondary. The development of the “bloemkoolwijk” in the 1970s had the human dimension as its starting point: the urban plan was designed based on the housing, developing the neighborhood and the city around it. “The city like the house, the house like the city” would say Aldo van Eyck.

The '90s gave rise to other concepts of making a city and “non-city” or VINEX zones, suburbs on the outskirts of the city implemented centrally by the state. The aim was to respond to the needs of the consumer within a wide variety of housing, but the reality was different: monotony, lack of services, long caravans to leave and enter them.

In the case of Spain, a notable demographic growth began in the 1940s that would continue to increase until the 1960s and early 1970s, leading in some cases to tripling the population of some Andalusian cities. This created a critical situation for the State and other public institutions that had to face the task of trying to solve the serious housing problem in large cities, becoming the main agents of urban growth in this period. The periphery of all the large Andalusian cities will begin to be dotted with a group of residential complexes, most of them simply supported by road axes and disconnected from the rest of the urban fabric. This stage between 1940-1950 entailed growth based on blocks of a certain height that were arranged in traditional closed blocks where the access to the home was directly related to the street, reserving the interior for the service areas. The set of blocks of a certain height formalize neighborhoods of blocks with streets defined by the alignments of facades, with a certain resemblance to the traditional city.

However, in the period between 1950-1960, they will require a freer arrangement of the housing blocks, it will be preferable to maintain the optimal orientation or regularity of the plan than to maintain continuous road alignments. That is, the building begins to follow only its compositional rules without access to homes, parking areas, etc. have to condition them. This new way of building the city of the new residential neighborhoods of public initiative is characterized by the replacement of the street-building concept with free space-building. This growth model, proposed by the Administration and called “polygon”, had a unitary character and a certain dimension, being conceived as monofunctional areas intended to cover housing demands.

Private initiative was gradually added to this strategy, in the period between 1960-1970. There is an increase in speculative actions: high-density block neighborhoods in which the less profitable double-bay typologies are quickly abandoned and replaced by four-bay blocks (H-shaped blocks), causing greater urban clogging and a loss of habitable conditions.

The result of all these transformations were cities, in principle, larger in size, in a peripheral location and poorly connected to urban centers, with great morphological variety and strong functional and social segregation. Its most alarming shortcomings: poor reception due to very different ways of life, inability to dictate primary social communication to its inhabitants, incomplete or deficient social equipment, rigidity of its zoning.[3]​.

In Andalusia, these polygons emerge, which substantially change the image of the periphery. Examples such as Almanjáyar in Granada, Three thousand homes in Seville, Palma Palmilla in Málaga, El Puche in Almería, La Paz in Cádiz, San Martín de Porres in Córdoba,[4]​etc., are some examples that mark its geography at that time.

History, genesis period 1940-1970 in Latin America

In the case of Buenos Aires, starting in the 1940s, intense immigration from the countryside to the city, due to the incipient industrialization of the country, overwhelmed the shelter capacity of the cities, generating the first informal settlements, then baptized as “Villas Miseria”. Buenos Aires will receive the largest number of immigrants, facilitated by a centralized railway network. With the arrival of the populist Juan Domingo Perón to the presidency of the country in 1945, the problem of working-class housing would become the center of the government program. The state construction of housing was not important but it marked the popular rhythm through the symbolism of its achievements. After the '50s, despite the measures taken by the Peronist government, housing problems continued to grow and worsen. The decade of the '60s was a period of construction of large housing complexes, most of them within policies developed by military dictatorship governments, which aimed more at getting rid of informal settlements at any price than at offering real solutions to a problem that seemed to have no end. Massive, high-rise housing complexes were built on the outskirts of cities that replicated the typical models of late modernity, especially in Europe. Around 1970, 70% of the Argentine population will live in Buenos Aires or its surrounding area. Argentina thus presents one of the earliest urbanization processes among Latin American countries. We could say that the modern history of informal settlements in Argentina begins there, as does one of the most emblematic cases of Buenos Aires and the entire country, Villa 31 located steps from Retiro, the city's central train station and the opulent neighborhood of the same name, where more than 25 thousand people live today.

The symptoms are known: non-existent maintenance, progressive construction deterioration, ghettoization, social stigmatization, with the consequent loss of value of the housing units. This, plus irresponsible legal management by the state of the issue of permits and construction plans, of the domains of the units or of the zoning of the land, only aggravated the problem. As summarized by a study carried out, "In general, this behavior of the administration of dealing only with the situation and not resolving what was carried out, consolidated the irregularity and opened the doors to the informal market, as the only possible outlet for the inhabitant of those homes."

However, and after years of abandonment and apathy by the state, especially during the time of military dictatorship (1976-1983), the government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, together with the Central Society of Architecture, has undertaken a study to survey the reality of some 700 of these complexes distributed throughout the country, which contain some 250 thousand homes, with the aim of notifying their possible rehabilitation.

Definition and objectives

Until now, in some European countries, urban regeneration had been understood fundamentally as a building practice that is developed outside the housing policies applied to the city as a whole and that is aimed at recovering traditional housing to offer it as an exclusive real estate product of the highest quality in central urban areas. However, in certain countries, urban regeneration has acquired a less elitist character and has been oriented towards intervention in degraded areas and disadvantaged, sensitive, vulnerable urban areas, etc. But, in any case, in Europe, there seems to be a majority understanding of urban regeneration as a somewhat exceptional, non-substantial practice, complementary to other practices that lead urban development and that guide, in general, the real estate sector.

The two axes of recommendations of the Leipzig Charter - making greater use of integrated urban development policies and paying special attention to less favored neighborhoods within the global context of the city - can come together in the area of ​​“integrated urban regeneration”. In this sense, it may be interesting to investigate the possible construction of this concept in the context of the EU's reflection on sustainable urban development but, to do so, it is necessary to start from the knowledge of urban regeneration as it is conceived by all Member States. This is the fundamental purpose of this questionnaire.

To stop this degenerative process that occurs in certain neighborhoods and produce urban and social revitalization, ensuring its sustainable development, the strategic integration of different actions from various fields is necessary: ​​physical, social, labor, educational, economic... and the active collaboration of the population and neighborhood associations.

The rehabilitation policy is born from the commitment to promote a new way of intervening from the administrations in the neighborhoods, based on active citizen participation, and through more agile management mechanisms that favor the coordination of resources and efforts at the local level to guarantee cities where there is a place for everyone. In each selected area, a Management Office is opened, dependent on the corresponding Administration and specialized in urban and social management, responding to the problems of residents.

The strategies and actions carried out during the rehabilitation work are designed jointly and prior to any action, and entails, among other things, a change in attitude in relation to housing and its environment, but also to convert residents into real citizens of the city where they live with their rights but also with their duties, overcoming the physical and social isolation suffered by this population, so that the policies and interventions developed are sustainable over time.

These aspects, generally quite complex in nature, are closely linked to the comprehensive perspective that the actions must have. This same complexity requires a temporary development of the actions, and the necessary involvement of all administrations and organizations such as: universities, foundations, NGOs... in short, the entire city, in order to recover the city for all citizens.

To carry out any action in the neighborhood, actions to recover the home are combined with work on the needs of the family that is going to live there (its resources, the environment that hosts it...), together with educational, training, employment and health policies. All of this aims to respond to the demands of the resident population, as a vehicle capable of guaranteeing the conservation and identity of the neighborhood.

Inclusive Urban Regeneration Approach

In Latin America, one of the most recent and systematized approaches for intervention in informal urban settlements is Inclusive Urban Regeneration, proposed by the Venezuelan consultant Cristofer Correia. This approach is based on the premise that urban poverty cannot be addressed solely through the provision of housing, but requires multidimensional action that combines infrastructure, services, participation and citizen recognition.[5]​.

Inspired by regional experiences such as Medellín and UN-Habitat recommendations, the RUI model proposes four fundamental lines of action:

Furthermore, the RUI incorporates a transversal axis of citizen participation, understood as an essential component to achieve sustainable and democratic processes of habitat transformation.

The proposal has been systematized in the book Inclusive Urban Regeneration, published by the Andrés Bello Catholic University (UCAB).[6]​ The RUI approach has been disseminated and analyzed by specialized organizations such as the Architecture and City Foundation, which highlights it as a methodology focused on reducing poverty from the territory through progressive interventions in neighborhoods. According to this entity, RUI is characterized by articulating social policy, urban planning and citizen empowerment, proposing that “the neighborhood is also a node of democratic innovation and resilience.”[7]​.

From the Venezuelan academic field, the Inclusive Urban Regeneration approach has been described as a critical alternative to centralized housing policies. In an interview with the university media El Ucabista, it is highlighted that the proposal is based on the recognition that “housing cannot be an island” and that the sustainable transformation of neighborhoods requires integrated policies that combine public services, participatory planning and legal recognition of the land.[8]​.

History, genesis period 1940-1970 in Europe

In the Dutch case,[2]​ at the beginning of the 1930s the urban system would give way to a new type of expansion: the functional city (CIAM). In the 1950s, neighborhood structuring in the form of a “seal” was imposed, through groupings of apartment blocks and low-rise homes around community spaces or gardens. Neighborhoods, and even cities, also emerged on the outskirts of Amsterdam, built around the thought of Le Corbusier with large blocks of homes located in a park; or Almere, which was born as a polynuclear city at the beginning of the '70s. In the mid-60s, the so-called woonerf emerged, in which human relationships would form the central element, with the street being the meeting place and automobile circulation becoming secondary. The development of the “bloemkoolwijk” in the 1970s had the human dimension as its starting point: the urban plan was designed based on the housing, developing the neighborhood and the city around it. “The city like the house, the house like the city” would say Aldo van Eyck.

The '90s gave rise to other concepts of making a city and “non-city” or VINEX zones, suburbs on the outskirts of the city implemented centrally by the state. The aim was to respond to the needs of the consumer within a wide variety of housing, but the reality was different: monotony, lack of services, long caravans to leave and enter them.

In the case of Spain, a notable demographic growth began in the 1940s that would continue to increase until the 1960s and early 1970s, leading in some cases to tripling the population of some Andalusian cities. This created a critical situation for the State and other public institutions that had to face the task of trying to solve the serious housing problem in large cities, becoming the main agents of urban growth in this period. The periphery of all the large Andalusian cities will begin to be dotted with a group of residential complexes, most of them simply supported by road axes and disconnected from the rest of the urban fabric. This stage between 1940-1950 entailed growth based on blocks of a certain height that were arranged in traditional closed blocks where the access to the home was directly related to the street, reserving the interior for the service areas. The set of blocks of a certain height formalize neighborhoods of blocks with streets defined by the alignments of facades, with a certain resemblance to the traditional city.

However, in the period between 1950-1960, they will require a freer arrangement of the housing blocks, it will be preferable to maintain the optimal orientation or regularity of the plan than to maintain continuous road alignments. That is, the building begins to follow only its compositional rules without access to homes, parking areas, etc. have to condition them. This new way of building the city of the new residential neighborhoods of public initiative is characterized by the replacement of the street-building concept with free space-building. This growth model, proposed by the Administration and called “polygon”, had a unitary character and a certain dimension, being conceived as monofunctional areas intended to cover housing demands.

Private initiative was gradually added to this strategy, in the period between 1960-1970. There is an increase in speculative actions: high-density block neighborhoods in which the less profitable double-bay typologies are quickly abandoned and replaced by four-bay blocks (H-shaped blocks), causing greater urban clogging and a loss of habitable conditions.

The result of all these transformations were cities, in principle, larger in size, in a peripheral location and poorly connected to urban centers, with great morphological variety and strong functional and social segregation. Its most alarming shortcomings: poor reception due to very different ways of life, inability to dictate primary social communication to its inhabitants, incomplete or deficient social equipment, rigidity of its zoning.[3]​.

In Andalusia, these polygons emerge, which substantially change the image of the periphery. Examples such as Almanjáyar in Granada, Three thousand homes in Seville, Palma Palmilla in Málaga, El Puche in Almería, La Paz in Cádiz, San Martín de Porres in Córdoba,[4]​etc., are some examples that mark its geography at that time.

History, genesis period 1940-1970 in Latin America

In the case of Buenos Aires, starting in the 1940s, intense immigration from the countryside to the city, due to the incipient industrialization of the country, overwhelmed the shelter capacity of the cities, generating the first informal settlements, then baptized as “Villas Miseria”. Buenos Aires will receive the largest number of immigrants, facilitated by a centralized railway network. With the arrival of the populist Juan Domingo Perón to the presidency of the country in 1945, the problem of working-class housing would become the center of the government program. The state construction of housing was not important but it marked the popular rhythm through the symbolism of its achievements. After the '50s, despite the measures taken by the Peronist government, housing problems continued to grow and worsen. The decade of the '60s was a period of construction of large housing complexes, most of them within policies developed by military dictatorship governments, which aimed more at getting rid of informal settlements at any price than at offering real solutions to a problem that seemed to have no end. Massive, high-rise housing complexes were built on the outskirts of cities that replicated the typical models of late modernity, especially in Europe. Around 1970, 70% of the Argentine population will live in Buenos Aires or its surrounding area. Argentina thus presents one of the earliest urbanization processes among Latin American countries. We could say that the modern history of informal settlements in Argentina begins there, as does one of the most emblematic cases of Buenos Aires and the entire country, Villa 31 located steps from Retiro, the city's central train station and the opulent neighborhood of the same name, where more than 25 thousand people live today.

The symptoms are known: non-existent maintenance, progressive construction deterioration, ghettoization, social stigmatization, with the consequent loss of value of the housing units. This, plus irresponsible legal management by the state of the issue of permits and construction plans, of the domains of the units or of the zoning of the land, only aggravated the problem. As summarized by a study carried out, "In general, this behavior of the administration of dealing only with the situation and not resolving what was carried out, consolidated the irregularity and opened the doors to the informal market, as the only possible outlet for the inhabitant of those homes."

However, and after years of abandonment and apathy by the state, especially during the time of military dictatorship (1976-1983), the government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, together with the Central Society of Architecture, has undertaken a study to survey the reality of some 700 of these complexes distributed throughout the country, which contain some 250 thousand homes, with the aim of notifying their possible rehabilitation.

Definition and objectives

Until now, in some European countries, urban regeneration had been understood fundamentally as a building practice that is developed outside the housing policies applied to the city as a whole and that is aimed at recovering traditional housing to offer it as an exclusive real estate product of the highest quality in central urban areas. However, in certain countries, urban regeneration has acquired a less elitist character and has been oriented towards intervention in degraded areas and disadvantaged, sensitive, vulnerable urban areas, etc. But, in any case, in Europe, there seems to be a majority understanding of urban regeneration as a somewhat exceptional, non-substantial practice, complementary to other practices that lead urban development and that guide, in general, the real estate sector.

The two axes of recommendations of the Leipzig Charter - making greater use of integrated urban development policies and paying special attention to less favored neighborhoods within the global context of the city - can come together in the area of ​​“integrated urban regeneration”. In this sense, it may be interesting to investigate the possible construction of this concept in the context of the EU's reflection on sustainable urban development but, to do so, it is necessary to start from the knowledge of urban regeneration as it is conceived by all Member States. This is the fundamental purpose of this questionnaire.

To stop this degenerative process that occurs in certain neighborhoods and produce urban and social revitalization, ensuring its sustainable development, the strategic integration of different actions from various fields is necessary: ​​physical, social, labor, educational, economic... and the active collaboration of the population and neighborhood associations.

The rehabilitation policy is born from the commitment to promote a new way of intervening from the administrations in the neighborhoods, based on active citizen participation, and through more agile management mechanisms that favor the coordination of resources and efforts at the local level to guarantee cities where there is a place for everyone. In each selected area, a Management Office is opened, dependent on the corresponding Administration and specialized in urban and social management, responding to the problems of residents.

The strategies and actions carried out during the rehabilitation work are designed jointly and prior to any action, and entails, among other things, a change in attitude in relation to housing and its environment, but also to convert residents into real citizens of the city where they live with their rights but also with their duties, overcoming the physical and social isolation suffered by this population, so that the policies and interventions developed are sustainable over time.

These aspects, generally quite complex in nature, are closely linked to the comprehensive perspective that the actions must have. This same complexity requires a temporary development of the actions, and the necessary involvement of all administrations and organizations such as: universities, foundations, NGOs... in short, the entire city, in order to recover the city for all citizens.

To carry out any action in the neighborhood, actions to recover the home are combined with work on the needs of the family that is going to live there (its resources, the environment that hosts it...), together with educational, training, employment and health policies. All of this aims to respond to the demands of the resident population, as a vehicle capable of guaranteeing the conservation and identity of the neighborhood.

Inclusive Urban Regeneration Approach

In Latin America, one of the most recent and systematized approaches for intervention in informal urban settlements is Inclusive Urban Regeneration, proposed by the Venezuelan consultant Cristofer Correia. This approach is based on the premise that urban poverty cannot be addressed solely through the provision of housing, but requires multidimensional action that combines infrastructure, services, participation and citizen recognition.[5]​.

Inspired by regional experiences such as Medellín and UN-Habitat recommendations, the RUI model proposes four fundamental lines of action:

Furthermore, the RUI incorporates a transversal axis of citizen participation, understood as an essential component to achieve sustainable and democratic processes of habitat transformation.

The proposal has been systematized in the book Inclusive Urban Regeneration, published by the Andrés Bello Catholic University (UCAB).[6]​ The RUI approach has been disseminated and analyzed by specialized organizations such as the Architecture and City Foundation, which highlights it as a methodology focused on reducing poverty from the territory through progressive interventions in neighborhoods. According to this entity, RUI is characterized by articulating social policy, urban planning and citizen empowerment, proposing that “the neighborhood is also a node of democratic innovation and resilience.”[7]​.

From the Venezuelan academic field, the Inclusive Urban Regeneration approach has been described as a critical alternative to centralized housing policies. In an interview with the university media El Ucabista, it is highlighted that the proposal is based on the recognition that “housing cannot be an island” and that the sustainable transformation of neighborhoods requires integrated policies that combine public services, participatory planning and legal recognition of the land.[8]​.