Shelter + Economy, Bogotá (Kyle)

John Kyle Paisley
Oct. 31st, 2010


The Economy of Shelter: Bogota (Kyle Paisley)

-Bogotá is the capital city of Colombia, as well as the most populous city in the country, with an estimated 7,304,384 inhabitants as of 2009 (Wikipidia)

-Bogota has Bogotá over 1400 informal settlements occupying 24% of its area and housing 22% of its population."(World Bank 2008)

- Many Colombians come to the city to escape rural violence, particularly the guerrilla violence of the FARC. Too poor to afford housing rents, they have to find alternative solutions, such as building their own houses.

Ciudad Bolivar
-The largest informal settlement of Bogota comprising 10% of the population

-the main economic activities are carried out by trade, hotels, restaurants, transportation and warehousing

-Between 1993 and 2002, the population of Ciudad Bolivar grew by 50%, more than twice as much as the city as a whole. (5 Proyecto Bogot. Como Vamos, La Pobreza en Bogota, Bogota D.C. Agosto de 2003, p. 2)
-The population grew from 35,000 residents in 1973 to a projected 713,000 in 2005. This data is probably a huge underestimation of the population of Ciudad Bolivar. By other accounts the population was somewhere between 1,2 millionand 2 million. (Ciudad Bolivar, Mas Cerca de las Estrellas, La Expresion, Bogot Colombia, http://www.laexpresion.com)



Economy of Shelter
-Most of the 400,000 houses of Ciudad Bolivar were built with very basic means, without plan or permits by the residents or by slumlords.
-A house in Ciudad Bolivar costs between $700,000 and 1 million pesos (USD $270 - $380).
- Unlike in developed countries, houses have limited potential as a financial asset in Ciudad Bolivar since the market is generally stagnant. This is due to the minimal means of Incomers, while the middle-class is not interested in living in the area.
- rather than upgrade to a larger house, lower income families generally add floors to their houses, which causes all kinds of safety issues and increases density.
(http://www.urbanology.org/Bogota/)

Unemployment / Underemployment

- The labour force is defined as the number of people employed plus the number unemployed but seeking work.

-The underemployed are those who work below their potential, either in skill level or pay/hours; Divided into subjective underemployed, those who, despite their dissatisfaction, do not for a variety of reasons make an efforts to find another job, and the objective underemployed who make an effort to find another job.

-Unemployment stopped growing, but the phenomenon of underemployment continues to rise. In July 2009, the number of underemployed came to 7.34 million in Columbia

-underemployment often supplemented by work in the informal sector, particularly in the slums

- The unemployment rate in Colombia was last reported at 12.80 percent in June of 2010, slightly higher than the year before at 12.6 percent,

-According to the National Bureau of Statistics (DANE), the subjective underemployment reached 34.2 percent in July 2010, up from 30.2 percent in the same month of 2009 (http://avilacmg.wordpress.com/2010/09/01/portafolio-one-million-people-are-underemployed-according-to-dane-unemployment-stood-at-12-6/)

Country	Interest Rate	Growth Rate	Inflation Rate	Jobless Rate	Current Account	Exchange Rate
Colombia	3.00%	1.00%	2.24%	12.80%	-1396	1811.5000

http://www.bogotalab.com/articles/bogota_edge.html

Attempts to change: Public Infrastructure

- Typically, the government legalizes established settlements in Ciudad Bolivar rather than evicting residents or resettling.

- It is very costly to provide illegal settlements with water systems, electricity and telephone lines.

-In an effort to cut the cost of retrofitting informal settlements, the City created an agency called Metrovivienda. It acquires land at the edge of the city, puts in place the necessary infrastructure and then sells the lots to developers who build for sale affordable housing units.

-The principal weakness of this program is that it leaves out families too poor to buy a house.

-Efforts have been made to connect Ciudad Bolivar to the rest of the city through public transportation networks.

(Haslam et. al. 2009) Introduction to International Development

USEFUL PAPER ON BOGOTA: http://www.unu.edu/unupress/unupbooks/uu23me/uu23me0u.htm

Shelter + Water, Bogota (Janice)

Posted  by Janice Woo
Oct. 31st, 2010

Hey guys,

Here are some excerpts from the resources I’ve found.

BOGOTA WATER FUND

Borrowing strategies from the realm of high finance, the Conservancy has created a conservation trust fund to protect rivers and watersheds in Colombia — and help provide clean drinking water to Bogotá, the country's capital.

The fund will attract voluntary contributions from Bogotá's water treatment facilities to subsidize conservation projects — from strengthening protected areas to creating incentives for ecologically sustainable cattle ranching — that will keep sedimentation and runoff out of the region's rivers.

Without such projects, the facilities have to spend millions to remove those pollutants in order to provide clean drinking water for Bogotá's 8 million residents.

The fund — based on a pilot program in Ecuador — is projected to raise $60 million for conservation projects over the next 10 years. And the Conservancy plans to implement six more such funds in South American countries in the next two years.

“The best part of this initiative is that it is voluntary and will not raise water costs for residents,” explains Samuel Moreno Rojas, mayor of Bogotá. “It will help the city save on treatment costs.”

The Conservancy led the development of the first such water fund in Quito, Ecuador, in 2000. From a modest $10,000 start-up investment, that fund has already reached $6 million in capital and will disperse $900,000 this year for conservation in watersheds that supply drinking water for Quito’s 2 million residents.

Conservancy donors in the United States provided the seed money that enabled in-country staff to launch both of these funds.

“The Nature Conservancy in Maine believed in us, and that ultimately made this project possible,” says Aurelio Ramos, director of the Conservancy's NTA program and architect of the Bogotá Water Fund.

In 2007, donors in Maine contributed $50,000 in seed money to the NTA Program, enabling Ramos to put a grand vision into action.

http://www.nature.org/wherewework/southamerica/colombia/work/art24802.html

WATER IN BOGOTA

In Colombia, nearly 91% of the domestic and commercial wastewater is discharged directly, without previous treatment, into the receiving watercourses (Camacho et al., 2006). For these reasons, integrated urban drainage modelling is needed to understand the effects of pressures exerted within a catchment, to establish reference conditions, to design monitoring programmes, to perform operational planning as an instrument for cost-effective implementation of measures, and to assess impacts to produce management plans (Solvi, 2006).

www.hydrology.org.uk/Publications/exeter/59.pdf

SLUM SHELTER IN BOGOTA

As in most cities around the world that host slums areas, the slums of Bogotá are largely the result of rapid population increase without the housing and services provision that such growth demands. During the past few decades, Bogotá has seen sustained, rapid demographic growth through waves of rural-to-urban migration in the wake of general impoverishment and violence. The Bogotá urban perimeter expanded rapidly through illegal subdivisions, occupation and the development of marginal areas by immigrants. Bogotá’s inner-city slums, on the other hand, are mostly the result of urban transformation processes, whereby certain downtown areas underwent progressive social and physical deterioration and, increasingly, accommodated lower hierarchy social strata and economic activities.

The slums of Bogotá can be classified as the outcome of:

·       Unplanned and informal urbanization through subdivisions in peripheral and marginal areas, largely characterized by an initial lack of physical and social infrastructure, but which are often – within a few years – improved by the city administration or through self-help (or combinations thereof);

·       Squatter settlements with generally more dire physical and social circumstances (although this category historically has had a relatively low importance);

·       Inner-city urban deterioration zones that came about through the progressive move of 19th-century industrial, military and other functions adjacent to the traditional urban centre to more appropriate locations, and the social, economic and physical deterioration that followed in the wake of this urban abandonment.

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dpu-projects/Global_Report/cities/bogota.htm

EFFECT OF WATER ON HOUSING IN BOGOTA

In the rapidly expanding city many new housing developments lie close to farmlands. An- other example of groundwater-engineering geology problems is a development in NW Bogotá. It has an area of 211,400 mP, with three-story homes, built in 1994. During the past eight years the constructors have been monitoring the subsidence of part of this development which lies close to another flower plantation, […]

The houses were built on gently sloping ground of the Sabana Fm 20 to 105 m thick (clay, silt, peat, sand and gravel); beneath and outcropping to the west is the Guaduas Fm, 450 m thick (claystones, sandstones, coal beds) […]

Four factors acting simultaneously cause differential settlements beneath the houses: very compressible beds with a high pore ratio; fluctuation of the water table responding to the rainfall cycles and causing contractions, fissuration and subsidence of the surface soils; the drop of the potentiometric level of the aquifers with the increase of the effective stress, accelerating the consolidation; and abundance of organic clays and peat in the western part of the lot. Micropiles have been constructed up to the thick gravels beneath the houses to solve the problem.

www.rmz-mg.com/letniki/rmz50/rmz50_0193-0196.pdf

 

Shelter, Bogota (Jen)

Jennifer Yong
October 31st, 2010 (happy halloween)
I posted links to a couple of sites that might help research for other people doing case studies on Bogota

Shelter (slums) - UN-HABITAT (United Nations Human Settlements Programme) categorizes slums according to their formation and spatial type: inner city slums (original residents move to better area, common during expansion of a city), slum estates (low-income public housing, overcrowded, bad conditions), squatter settlements (illegally occupying land without permission of owner on ground or rooftops), illegal settlements (legally subdivided land is illegal because of inadequate standards of infrastructure/service, breaches in zoning, etc)
(http://books.google.ca/books?id=q4B4YvnUS7cC&lpg=PA95&ots=onsbXsqBVF&dq=slum%20shelter%20bogota&pg=PA85#v=onepage&q=bogota&f=false)

Bogota - Colombia's capital and most populated city. Over 6.8 billion people in its capital district. Urban poverty affects 38%, 10% living in extreme poverty
(http://www.unhabitat.org/content.asp?cid=4879&catid=145&typeid=13&subMenuId=0)




Ciudad Bolivar (district of Bogota) - Good site for case study of Ciudad Bolivar, Bogota's largest informal settlement (has info on shelter, water, and economy): http://www.urbanology.org/Bogota/
http://www.bogotalab.com/articles/bogota_edge.html (same author)

Bogota has over 1400 informal settlements occupying 24% of its area and housing 22% of its population. (Israel Fainboim, World Bank Report, Colombia Urban Services Projects, Washington DC, February 2004, p.3)

The development of informal settlements directly results from the influx of rural immigrants (to escape rural violence). Too poor to afford housing rents, they have to find alternative solutions, such as building their own houses.


"despite the numerous interventions realized in the locality by international organizations, non-governmental organizations, and public institutions, Ciudad Bolivar keeps presenting a deficit of access to public services characterized by a low number of telephone lines, connection failures with of the aqueduct and sewage system, and the insufficient coverage of the cleaning services, which are due principally to the existence of illegal settlements and slums."(El Gobierno Distrital, Las Localidades, Ciudad Bolivar, Localidad 19, Bogota 2004, http://www.idct.gov.co)