Photo by Desarrollo Humano y Habitat

Quarantining during the coronavirus pandemic is a new and unexpected experience in our lifes. I am writing to you at the middle of an academic year in which the world in which we operate is fundamentally different. The covid 19 epidemic has caused the loss of lives and upended economies and societies everywhere in the Latin American region.

Here, in Buenos Aires, my city has been under strict lockdown for four months now. Shops, universities and schools are closed, and people’s movements greatly restricted. My university—like most others—acted quickly as the pandemic developed to ensure that all of us — the professors and staff — could continue to educate, provide support, and fulfill our duty of care to students as physical distancing became a part of our daily lives. Those institutions also recognized that this is a change that could be with us for a long time, so our teaching moved quickly online, and students and staff have adapted and innovated to continue to deliver world-class education through new channels.

The challenges are not only in education. The pandemic is raising many challenging questions for planners and policymakers and it is expected to drive meaningful engagement around urban policies related to informality, people who live in slum-like conditions. While policy makers and governments have spent decades making the case for upgrading programs, there are worries that the threat posed by the pandemic is causing settlements to be seen as sites of risk and for densification to fall out of favor. Indeed, many efforts to control the spread of the virus have explicitly focused on strategies of “de-densification.”

Photo by Desarrollo Humano y Habitat

In early March, as the threat of the coronavirus grew into something more acute,  in addition to worrying about the same things everyone worried about at that time — the well-being of  family and friends and addressing all the new domestic and academic tasks— I started a new research project which is aimed to enhance the quality of urban policies addressing infomal land and housing development. Under this project, we are creating an informed community of experts, mostly from the public sector and academia, based on the idea that any effective guidelines enacted to mitigate informality must integrate meaningful exchange with key relevant actors. How is the pandemic going to impact  urban life in these slum type settlements in Latin American cities?

At a time when social distance and isolation are mandatory, not everyone can equally abide this level of social estrangement. These are impossible situations faced by the most vulnerable. More than two million people from Buenos Aires live in over 1,500 informal neighborhoods. The share of households in these neighborhoods with structural poverty, measured from unsatisfied basic needs, is three times higher than in formal neighborhoods. There are also gaps in the infrastructure conditions of the homes that inhibit preventive cleaning measures. Informal neighborhoods suffer huge gaps in access to the basic services that are essential to stopping a contagion — things like water, sanitation, and gas services. The differences can be as great as 50 percentage points between the formal and informal neighborhoods. In addition, overcrowding in these areas is a critical condition, with a higher percentage of households with more than six members living in minimal and precarious dwellings.

On top of all this, the incomes of most residents from these informal areas—such as “villas” or “asentamientos”—are paralyzed due to restrictions on the activity each bear by quarantine. Recall that more than 85% of workers in these neighborhoods work in the informal economy in independent jobs or eventual ones that do not support savings against even small emergencies, let alone this health crisis. The difficulty experienced by those living in structural poverty in sustaining preventive isolation also means that mobility is slightly higher in informal than formal neighborhoods, which results in more people in daily circulation exposing themselves to the contagion. Since the end of April, confirmed cases of the Covid-19 in city slums have grown rapidly, much more than in the rest of the city. Nearly 50% of the confirmed cases involve people living in informal neighborhoods. Worse, the mortality rate in these settlements is twice that seen in formal city neighborhoods.

Foto por Gobierno de Buenos Aires / Photo by Buenos Aires City Government

The pandemic has underscored powerfully the inequalities inherent in most of our Latin American cities by making it more visible. Buenos Aires city and its suburbs, which concentrates in less than 1% of Argentina’s territory more than a quarter of the country’s population, is rife with these inequalities. Almost 40% of the population is living below the poverty line in a metropolis that generates more than a third of the country’s GDP and 85% of the country’s Covid-19 cases.

The Buenos Aires situation is not unique. Almost one-fourth of the Latin American and Caribbean urban population live in informality, with their numbers increasing from 106 million in 2000 to 111 million in 2010 (UN-Habitat 2013). More recent national statistical data based on information collected from a sample of 124 cities in 17 countries in the region indicates that one out of every four people is living today in informal settlements. It’s important to note that this share of the population living in slum-type neighborhoods in some cities is over 50%, with a few nearing 70%.

For example, cities in countries such as Bolivia display average values over 40% in each city. Adding to that, informality has been increasing in the last 10 years; only for 14 cities have reported a slight decrease, and another 14 reported no changes (Goytia, 2020). These patterns of informal development clearly underscore an insufficient supply of serviced land at affordable prices in most Latin American cities.

Foto por Gobierno de Buenos Aires / Photo by Buenos Aires City Government

Although the informal land market offers a lower price alternative so poor people can actually afford their housing, the residential plots it supplies lack both services such as water, sewerage, drainage, electricity and paved roads, as well as legal tenure rights. These parcels are developed without compliance with urban regulations, land development plans, or building codes, and the developers do not have the permits or licenses required for land subdivision and construction. More often than not, informal developments are irregular occupations of public land located on sites posing severe environmental hazards.

Historically, cities have reacted to disease and disasters like this Covid-19 pandemic with innovative measures, such as the water and sewer infrastructure improvements prompted by cholera outbreaks‑everything from new public spaces to better building and zoning codes and new design practices intended to keep people healthier in congested urban areas after pandemics.

Clearly, a critical element of our post-Covid-19 recovery must be a commitment to inclusivity. This is the time to delve deeper into effective urban policy strategies to mitigate urban informality in the developing word. We must continue with greater sense of purpose to challenge social inequalities in our societies, addressing them widely through our teaching and our research. With my research team, we are doing all we can as an institution to examine urban policies and practices related to informality in Latin American cities, and we will be looking at what more communities and governments in the region can do to raise awareness of, and make progress on, building a more inclusive society.