Housing as urbanism

Abstract

This conversation between Ana Valderrama and Jorge Jáuregui attempts to provide a captious point about the project and management of social housing in Latin America. This article proposes the challenge of thinking about the physical, social, and environmental complexity that implies making city in highly conflictive contexts where housing transcends the "house" and incorporates all the necessary infrastructures to promote social cohesion. Thus, architecture could be thought as a kind of urbanism able to catalyze social and collective life, to rearticulate the territory and to enhance local identities. During this interview, Jorge Jáuregui critically reviews the legacy of modernity, introducing alternatives to tabula rasa, to segregation by functions, to the infinite repetition of the same typology and to the concept of development. In addition, a series of prioritary issues related to the design and management of public housing -which should be on the schedule of public policies of Latin American governments- are deployed. We hope this writing will interpellate the usual approaches to Latin American cities, tending to find models of environmental, social and physical justice, in relation to strategies to stimulate the popular economy related to the generation of work and income, articulated to social urbanism.