Improvised Cities Architecture, Urbanization, and Innovation in Peru

Improvised Cities Architecture, Urbanization, and Innovation in Peru

Helen Gyger • University of Pittsburgh Press

ISBN-10: 0822945363 · ISBN-13: 978‑0822945369 · 2019

Live offer for this book: 6 live copies of this book from $73.36 (as of 2026-09-08).

Dimensions: 10.3 × 7.3 × 1 in

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Completeness 45

Cover quality: good

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Beginning in the 1950s, an explosion in rural-urban migration dramatically increased the population of cities throughout Peru, leading to an acute housing shortage and the proliferation of self-built shelters clustered in barriadas , or squatter settlements. Improvised Cities examines the history of aided self-help housing, or technical assistance to self-builders, which took on a variety of forms in Peru from 1954 to 1986. While the postwar period saw a number of trial projects in aided self-help housing throughout the developing world, Peru was the site of significant experiments in this field and pioneering in its efforts to enact a large-scale policy of land tenure regularization in improvised, unauthorized cities. Gyger focuses on three interrelated themes: the circumstances that made Peru a fertile site for innovation in low-cost housing under a succession of very different political regimes; the influences on, and movements within, architectural culture that prompted architects to consider self-help housing as an alternative mode of practice; and the context in which international development agencies came to embrace these projects as part of their larger goals during the Cold War and beyond.

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6 live copies of this book from $73.36 (as of 2026-09-08).

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