HELEN GYGER: A major way the formation of squatter settlements in Peru takes place is through these sort of organized land invasions, where people pay a sort of subscription fee to an organizer who then selects a site—usually it’s on an unused plot of public land—and then they’ll select a date and a time for everybody to assemble, and then go occupy that land. 1954 is significant within Peru, because there was a very large land invasion, on Christmas Eve, which really was a trigger for broad changes in housing policy towards self-built settlements. And it really began the push for aided self-help housing.

My name’s Helen Gyger. I’m an architecture historian, or perhaps it will be better to say I’m a historian of the built environment. And the book is Improvised Cities: Architecture, Urbanization, and Innovation in Peru.

The term aided self-help housing first is coined by U.S. housing expert Jacob Crane. The idea is that you’re using the labor of the residents who would be building their houses on their own, but there’s a kind of expert guidance at some level that’s being brought in with the idea that that will achieve a better outcome in terms of the material qualities of the housing, in terms of the spatial design. So, for example, making sure that there are enough windows and there’s cross ventilation. And in some cases that might mean that there’s more kind of engineering expertise being brought to bear in the design. So in the case of Peru, having some sort of anti-seismic considerations being brought into the engineering of the house.

That’s the core of the concept. But at various moments it has different kinds of political or kinds of ideological overlays that are put onto it. One of the first promoters of the idea in Peru was an economist called Pedro Beltrán, who was a classic, sort of old school liberal economist who thought that aided self-help housing would promote entrepreneurship; it would promote self sufficiency, and at some level it could be part of a broader program for national development within Peru by sort of fostering these entrepreneurial skills. And it’s the idea that you don’t want to give someone an apartment in a public housing complex, because that just makes them dependent on the government. You want to use housing to promote individual sort of self-empowerment. And at the same time it’s a mechanism for individual home ownership through a much more affordable means than a house that had been built by a contractor, for example.

Then, at the other end of the spectrum, you have someone like John Turner, who’s an English aided self-help housing theorist who trained as an architect in the 1940s. You know, he had a strong background in anarchist thinking in the sort of classic idea of mutual aid, of self-directed action, of sort of communities working together to sort of improve their lot. So he saw aided self-help housing as a collaborative endeavor. So it’s not about an individual sort of achieving self-empowerment through building their own house. It’s about groups of people coming together to build houses in a sort of collaborative way and collectively improving the community.

The other sort of interesting thing in the particular case of Peru is that there are a couple of words in Quichean used to evoke the idea of mutual aid and collaborative work. So there’s this idea that the practices that appear in traditional Andean villages, that they can be translated into the urban setting.

The two major modes of aided self-help housing, the kind of individual versus the collective, come into the ascendancy at different moments in Peru. So, under the period of the revolutionary government, it’s very much about the collective mode of self-help housing. And then in the ’80s there’s a kind of neoliberal model of aided self-help, which, again, is about the individual. And then there are other times in Peru where both forms are promoted as equally acceptable options. So it’s quite malleable in that sense.

One of the first aided self-help housing projects that was constructed in Peru was in the city of Arequipa, which had suffered an earthquake in early 1958, and as part of the rebuilding effort for that city there was a certain amount of money that came in from the national government and from international sources. And John Turner, the English architect, was working in our Arequipa at the time, and with some of his colleagues proposed that they put together a kind of trial project that would use aided self-help. So in that case it was a very hands-on kind of project. The architect found a site, they allocated the lots, they came up with a basic design for the house, and then there was hands-on day-to-day supervision. The architect is on site regularly checking the progress of the work. There would be expert construction overseers. But the people who are actually, you know, helping to clear the site or move the bricks around or do the mortaring together of the bricks aren’t necessarily people who have any experience in construction. They’re sort of trained on the job. In this case I believe that the houses are only allocated at the end of the construction process, so when you’re building, you don’t know whose house you’re building. You’re just building a house for the community, you’re required to put in a certain amount of labor.

So that’s one sort of very hands-on model. At the other end of the spectrum, a lot of the Peruvian government projects that were executed in Lima, the first stage of construction would be carried out through conventional mass-building techniques. So there would be a very simple sort of core dwelling that might only be one room, for example, or two rooms. And then that would be sort of allocated to people who participate in the project. And the theory would be that each family would be given a set of plans that would show them how to extend the house over time, on their own schedule, depending on how much money they had coming in or how much time they had free, or how quickly the family was growing. And in theory, there would be sort of technical assistance available over an extended period of time to help people follow those plans.

The relationship between architects and residents in these processes often varies. It’s confrontational. It can be difficult. It’s not always an easy collaboration. There’s often differences of opinion of how something should go ahead. And it’s not as simple as the expert gets their own way. I quote an architect at one point who makes this sort of observation that, yes, architects have the power of education, and they have the power of a certain kind of elite status, but the residents have the power to withdraw their labor, to not build what they’re asked to build, to build something else. Instead, there is this sort of constant pushback between architects and participants that gets missed when people just sort of talk about participatory planning or participatory processes. Just because it’s participatory doesn’t mean it’s easy and always collaborative and harmonious.

When the model was first proposed in Peru—say in the mid fifties, in the early sixties—there was a very strong belief that it would be a cheaper mode of constructing housing. Or at least it would be cheaper for the government, because the residents themselves are providing so much of the labor. But in practice, because of those kinds of layers of oversight, it was never really as low cost an option as people had hoped. So that was one of the . . . I don’t know, “failure” is a difficult word. I think “challenges” might be a better way of thinking about it, because although each of the projects that I look at faced a lot of challenges in implementation, I’m not advocating that architects and planners have no involvement in trying to improve housing in squatter settlements, in emerging settlements. Because I think the outcome of that is often really very poor quality housing. So I think there is still room to find some space for architects and planners to be involved, but it may not be on the very intensive model of this direct oversight.

You can see architects within Peru trying different strategies. When they see one thing that doesn’t work, they are continually trying to reinvent this practice. And even though they continue to face challenges, I think that’s really the only option is to keep trying to refine the techniques. There’s a lot of space in between a complete success and a complete failure.