NB: because entrance to campus currently requires a Columbia ID, please reach out to Zachary Torres ([email protected]) by Monday, Feb. 23 if you require guest access to this event. Due to campus restrictions we are unable to honor last-minute requests.
The mid-twentieth century signaled an experimental shift in urban solidarity projects across Latin America. Responding to what scholars and the United Nations termed “the great urban explosion,” national governments and international actors such as the Organization of American States (OAS) addressed drastic housing shortages by sponsoring new agencies to foster Pan-American cooperation through housing. Agencies such as the Inter-American Housing and Planning Center (CINVA) in Bogotá connected foreign experts, transnational aid programs, and municipalities with local teams and self-organized communities in projects aimed at reversing the discriminatory effects of urban marginality. This talk explores how these housing and planning laboratories negotiated Northern models of aid and expertise with local material and intersubjective practices in the pursuit of more inclusive cities.
Since the 1950s, several aided housing projects broke ground in the region following CINVA’s newly published housing manuals. In preparing these manuals, the center’s experts outlined detailed guidelines for candidate selection, housing schemes, and financial plans, guidelines that participating communities and national housing agencies soon challenged. This talk examines the histories of these housing manuals and early projects in Chile and Costa Rica to engage with questions of coloniality and epistemologies of the South. Planning and urban histories have highlighted transnational planning programs as tools of American imperialism in the region and beyond. Latin American social studies emphasize instead the collective power of local communities in reshaping the forms and laws of their living environments. The history of planning and housing in Latin America requires a more nuanced examination of the complex mediation between institutional planning and alternative forms of collective organization and production—a distinctly Latin American process that revises the power balance between agents and hemispheres in histories of modern housing and planning.
Marta Caldeira is an Assistant Professor in Architectural History and Theory at the New York Institute of Technology. Her research investigates transnational discourses of modern architecture and urbanism, with a particular focus on their intersection with politics and society in the areas of housing, urban planning, preservation, and urban pedagogy. Her writings have appeared in several international journals, including Perspecta, Log, EAHN Newsletter, Festival dell’Architettura, Jornal Arquitectos, Il Progetto, and Metamorfosi, as well as recent anthologies on modern and contemporary architecture. She is currently co-editing a thematic issue of the journal Project: Research on Álvaro Siza: Housing in the Contested City.
