Infiltration Tactics in Latin America Fernando Diez
Large-scale planning, centralized command, and dissolution of the distinction between architectural planning and urban planning—these were once considered powerful ideas, were ingredients of housing development in the nineteen-seventies when the notion of reforming people’s lives through architecture had grown to incredible proportions. Big budgets, centralized decisions, and unlimited power for those at the drawing boards have allowed the demolition of existing cities, erasing both history and communal bonds, erasing the botanical, archeological, and social footprints to instead create a flat and neutral surface—the tabula rasa—forming the point of departure for a “new” city, the technological and rational dream of the modern city. Following the initial years of occupation, this dream became a nightmare: the ghetto of social isolation, the island of sleeping neighborhoods with no street life and, in many cases, with no streets at all. In absence of both social life and a sense of belonging, lacking a sense of place identity, the “conjuntos habitacionales,” or “projects,” became the place from which to escape. In Buenos Aires, the optimistic 1,400 units built by Staff (Bielus – Goldemberg – Krasuk) in Villa Soldati in 1972 became known as “Fuerte Apache” in reference to the lawless frontier it represented, and to the fact that police could enter only after concentrating an assault unit three-hundred-men strong. A full section was completely demolished by the governor of the Province of Buenos Aires after accepting that it has drifted completely out of control. Enclosed, isolated, disinherited from the public city, the dwellers of the conjuntos habitacionales were likewise deprived of a sense of belonging and became victims of crime gangs. Confined to these distant ghettos, they were also forced to travel more hours, either to their workplaces or to the public services in the real city. Ironically, if this concentration of investment and alienation from the preexisting city characterized urban growth for subsidized housing during the nineteen-seventies and early eighties, similar conditions characterized urban growth for the wealthy and middle classes in the nineties. Although of a quite different character, these projects also revealed the preference of avoiding the existing city and denying the possibilities presented by its public space: typically two or more towers in the middle of a block, separated from the streets. High-rise residential enclaves surrounded by a wall became a new model, with their own recreational amenities (and big garages) that would allow its dwellers to avoid the public parks and streets. In fact, this trend heightened the very problem to which it was reacting. Since these high-rise developments were so hostile to public space, their appearance contributed to a stifling of life on the streets no longer being walked by neighbors. Tabula rasa was the necessary precondition for a way of thinking in which a closed and imperfectible result was being viewed as a permanent and irrefutable solution. This is what a “strategy” looks for: a distant and previously defined goal, inviting the sacrifice of anything in its way. A “tactic,” rather, is a more modest and provisional way of acting, implying only the devising of provisional goals instead of sacrificing the means to the ends, accepting an open future, changing circumstances, or taking advantage of them.1