Creating the conditions for communal life: Comunidad 12 de Octubre, Punto Fijo.

Oil refineries in Punto Fijo. Much of the government’s reform agenda, which has enabled the work of the CTUs, has been funded by oil

In Punto Fijo, a coastal city in the North-West of Venezuela and home to its largest oil refineries, I visited a CTU which has now almost completed the construction of their new houses. The community, Comunidad 12 de Octubre, is now home to a group who have spent the last 15 years fighting for their rights to land and housing. In 1992 they enlisted the help of the local technical university to help them make plans for a new community on a vacant piece of land on the periphery of town. The results of that collaboration are just now being constructed on the land.

Members of Comunidad 12 de Octubre work during the weekend on finishing their new homes.

When the new government signed the decree which officially sanctioned the creation of the CTUs in 2002, Yuraima ‘Tiki’ Fingal and her association of Los Sin Techo ‘those without roofs’ were quick to become registered as the 35th CTU in Venezuela. The administration took special interest in the association and assisted them to get communal title over the land they had been occupying. The communal title grants all the members of the CTU permanent and secure land tenure, which cannot be bought or sold and remains the property of all members in perpetuity. The funding for the construction of the dwellings has been provided by the Ministry of Housing. The community manages the entire process and each family contributes a minimum

Reinaldo and his daughter take a break from painting and tiling. Reinaldo works in the refinery and joined the CTU ‘for the energy of the people’

On first seeing the buildings I was stuck by their unusual ‘space-age’ form, lack of sun shading and the fact that every house was identical, with no apparent consideration of family size or solar orientation. I questioned the residents about why they had opted for this design. Their justifications were interesting. They saw themselves as doing something very new and exciting, the pioneers of a new form of socialism. As such they did not want traditional workers’ homes, rather they wanted something which would symbolise their attitude to community and equality. This also went some way to explaining the homogeneity of design, as the residents were adamant that everyone in the community was equal and thus should get the same house, if the family got too large they could simply get a second house. In this way the design which at first glance had seemed highly inappropriate was now beginning to make sense. For the community of 12 de octubre the symbolism of their houses was at least as important as their basic functionality.

Sketch of ‘Tiki’ Fingal’s new home. She lives upstairs with her husband and 3 children while her elderly mother lives in the ground floor.

The houses are arranged in small clusters, referred to as manzanas (apples). Each manzana consists of four ‘mico-manzanas’. Within each micro-manzana the neighbours share a central garden and playground

Auto-diagnosis and collective action: The Permanent Workshop for Participatory Design.

Los Comités de Tierra Urbana:

The Comités de Tierra Urbana (Urban Land Councils, CTUs) are self-organising federations of families living in the barrios. The CTUs, officially enabled by a presidential decree in 2002, are a direct continuation of the struggle by groups which began to form in the late 1980s around the campaign for rights to water and land.

These CTUs, enabled by government land reforms, gain collective ownership of the land they occupy for housing. By granting security of tenure and removing the threat of eviction a fertile situation is created where incremental improvements of the barrios can occur under the guidance of the communities themselves and with the assistance of a wide range of urban professionals, including architects. The CTUs also form around the creation of new settlements (Campamentos de Pioneros). These settlements offer the chance to create new, customised living environments driven by the ideas and desires of people themselves.

Crucial to the development of the new settlements is the fundamental participation of the community members at every level of the development of the place. The Taller permanente de Diseño Participativo (Permanent Workshop for Participatory Design) are a group of architects and planners drawn from universities and the public sector who are committed to providing communities with the resources they need to collectively develop their new homes.

A group of pioneros visit the site of their future community at Hoyo de La Puerta. Image courtesy of Taller Permanente de Diseño Participativo

At Hoyo de la Puerta, a new settlement being developed on the southern outskirts of Caracas, the process of designing new houses for 200 families has expanded to encompass a survey of all aspects of community life. The Taller describes this process as Auto-diagnosis, where the community members themselves research their own problems and situation and generate solutions from that understanding.

At Hoyo de la Puerta the auto-diagnosis began with a thorough analysis of the site, its connections to other parts of the city, as well as its local connections and characteristics (water, slope, orientation, access etc). The participants then began to ask many questions of themselves: How will we move around the new community? what areas do we need? what services? what kinds of production? how will we look after children? What emerged was a complex and richly layered vision for the community, a dense programmatic brief detailing all the requirements for the new community including housing, gas-lines, hostels for visitors, community childcare, workshops, clinics, orchards, chicken-houses, hairdressers, pathways, places for playing dominos and many other things. From this brief they then discussed how much of the site should be used for each purpose, how programs could be combined and spaces shared.

The group then returned to the site to begin to plan how these various functions could be applied to the specific piece of land. During multiple site visits and through the process of constructing a contour model of the land they identified the best locations for building (with low slope and without environmental protection constraints). With the use of the model they then began to arrange the various programs on the site, considering which programs needed to be physically linked, centrally located, public or private and in proximity to transport and services.

Participants plan where the specific parts of their new community will be located. Image courtesy of Taller Permanente de Diseño Participativo

With the large scale vision for the entire community now sketched out the workshop shifted focus to the micro-scale, that of the individual house. Continuing with the process of auto-diagnosis the participants began with an analysis of their current living situation. They compiled the demographics of who was in each house, studied what activities those people did, recorded the sizes and characteristics of spaces in which those activities took place and commented on the quality and practicality of those spaces. After this they discussed ways in which things could be done better and what they would change in their houses and surrounding areas. From these exercises the group was able to produce some model house designs drawn from the needs identified by the people themselves.

Participants use an analysis of their existing houses to create plans for some new house types. Images courtesy of Taller Permanente de Diseño Participativo

The project is still in its early stages, waiting for approvals and funding to come through complicated bureaucratic channels, but the community now has a concrete plan for the development of their land. It is a plan which they own and understand inside-out because they created it, making it a powerful tool for argument. One participant mentioned to me that through the process she had learned to question everything about her situation. Not just the physical conditions but also social and political ones: “Why are we living in tiny shacks on the edge of a crumbly mountain when others have more than they could possibly use?

Urban Acupuncture: Chacao’s Vertical Gymnasium.

One of Villanueva’s former students and long-time collaborators is Mateo Pinto. Together with his brother Matias and Austrian architect Hubert Klumpner, Mateo designed the Vertical Gymnasium, built on the edge of the small inner-city Barrio Santa Cruz by the municipality of Chacao.

The Vertical Gymnasium draws on the barrio practice of maximising the available resources by taking a single open air basketball court and raising it to the roof thereby creating 3 levels for multiple overlapping programs below. These include: a judo area, an indoor basketball court, an indoor running track, a weights gym, a medical centre, meeting rooms and a rooftop basketball court.

The intention of the Vertical Gymnasium is to provide a dense bundle of services and recreational opportunities to the residents of Barrio Santa Cruz. The centre is used by local schools and sporting teams and even those not actively engaging with the centre are accommodated by the undercroft seating where motorcycle couriers congregate and local men gather to read newspapers shaded from the heat of the midday sun.

The Vertical Gymnasium could be seen in a number of ways. On one hand it is the generous gesture of the formal city stepping into the barrio to provide it with services. On the other hand, given that Barrio Santa Cruz is a relatively small barrio completely surrounded by formal development and that the Vertical Gymnasium presents a hard wall and opaque screens to the barrio, opening to and connecting more strongly with the formal street, it could equally be seen as the formal city encroaching on the barrio as providing services for it.

This raises questions more generally about the often non-participatory projects of ‘urban acupuncture’, which aim to connect the informal city more strongly with the formal city by inserting formal elements into it. But is it a connection or an invasion? Is it acupuncture or just a jab with a pin?