Sustainable Management for Informal Settlements

Many of Latin America’s largest cities, including Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Lima and Rio de Janeiro, have among the world’s highest “Gini coef?cients,” which measure disparity in wealth distribution. This region also has some of the world’s highest rates of urbanization - of the 600 million people in the southern part of the Americas, 80 percent now live in cities. However, according to UN-Habitat, slum growth today in many parts of this continent is slowing down. Settlements are consolidating and many countries are beginning to provide residents with access to land tenure and services. All in all, Latin America represents a laboratory for slum upgrading that might provide a model for other parts of the world - some of the world’s most interesting current efforts to improve the conditions of non-formal cities are already occurring there. This creates a huge demand for architects and urban planners, but also politicians and managers, who can deal with complex challenges of sustainable social housing, energy management and the development of inclusive urban communities. For the implementation of the architects’ and urban planners’ concepts, sustainable management approaches are essentiell, for anchoring innovative solutions in a complex environment with different stakeholder. Sustainable management has to consider cultural aspects, including a corresponding unterstanding of business ethics, and therefore has to be adapted to the region/country under investigation. SUMA helps South American cities in Argentina and Peru to solve problems related to housing poor urban communities by supporting these communities by trainings in sustainable management, energy management, housing policy, and urban planning, rather than evicting them from their informal settlements. An investigation of the housing policy in the project countries in Latin America is a precondition for the implementation of innovative planning concepts. On the basis of housing policy in the countries of the project partners of the European Union as well as of their experience in two other Erasmus+ projects (BInUCOM, SES) in India and Ethiopia, policy recommendations will be developed for the project countries in Latin America.