By 2050, an estimated 89% of Latin America's population will live in urban areas. This "need" to live in urban centers has brought about a growing inequality, manifested in a lack of access to basic services and homeownership.
In this context, Venezuelan-American David Gouverneur, a professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, uses his book Diseño de nuevos asentamientos informales (Design of New Informal Settlements) to call for greater awareness of the need to address and study informality in our cities, recognizing it as an unavoidable reality.
In his book, Gouverneur addresses the future of informal settlements currently facing cities like Caracas (Venezuela), Bogotá, and Medellín (Colombia). He also explores the issues arising in Latin American countries where government neglect affects diverse ways of life that share similar characteristics and needs.
While these self-built cities have largely lacked easy-to-implement design and management strategies to support residents of new informal settlements—addressing challenges such as accessibility or the proper use of public space—this is precisely the call to action that we, as citizens, must answer. In this regard, Gouverneur explains:
The urban strategies he and his students have developed in studio classes rely on conceptual designs to guide and streamline informal settlements in an orderly way. While currently viewed as a challenge, these settlements could be efficiently harnessed. To achieve this, Gouverneur proposes three categories of design components—corredores, campos y custodios (corridors, fields, and custodians)—which play a role in the spatial organization and operation of the system that hosts the new settlements.
Through thoughtful planning, design, and management, the goal is to transform the predominantly self-built city into balanced, affordable, efficient, resilient, and attractive neighborhoods and urban systems.
For Gouverneur, public space is key to the enjoyment of urban life. Corridors, fields, and custodians operate under general principles, offering solutions in harmony with the natural-cultural landscape and generating a kind of constantly transforming urban ecology rarely found in informal cities—and frequently absent in formal ones as well.
The essence of these diverse proposals highlights the inherent vitality of informality. They demonstrate that it can be channeled into sustainable urban models if action is taken before occupation occurs, proactively guiding the evolution of the settlements to foster the cultural mosaics that define daily urban life.
The hybrid formal-informal city, as Gouverneur calls it, must also account for global issues such as climate change and its implications for the unique informal armatures of these settlements.
This article was written by Yamid Rivera. The translation is powered by AI.
