Towards Social and Urban Integration of Slums and Precarious Settlements: Implementing the Law for Fair Access to Habitat and New Urban Agenda in the Province of Buenos Aires.

The Province of Buenos Aires has launched an ambitious and unprecedented plan to promote the effective social and urban integration of its 1585 slums and precarious settlements, inhabited by 420 thousand families, based on the principles of the Law of Fair Access to Habitat and of the New Urban Agenda.

The Socio-Urban Integration Plan (PISU in Spanish) aims to address the problem of the habitat from a comprehensive and articulated vision. The first is understood as the result of the conjunction of the following dimensions: Physical-environmental; Socio-economic; Normative-instrumental, and the Administrative-institutional; and the second, as the logic of articulation of joint actions between the different levels of the government, social organizations and civil society as a whole.

Furthermore, it also allows the government to be thought as a key actor and committed to a view that incorporates strategic planning as an important tool for decision making. Distancing itself from the traditional working model where actions are fragmented, disjointed, unidirectional and bureaucratic.

In accordance with the guiding principles of the Law and the New Urban Agenda, the PISU intends to work towards the right to the city and adequate housing; the integrated city; social economy; community participation, and interinstitutional and interjurisdictional coordination, through three articulated guidelines:

I. Urban Integration and Environmental Quality: The first guideline contains the specific integral and progressive physical-spatial intervention programs, both in terms of neighborhood and housing improvement and regarding parcel dimensioning and domain regularization with the application of urban planning instruments proposed by the law.

II. Socio-economic Networks for Neighborhood Development: concerns a series of actions aimed to strengthen the endogenous capacities of the community based on multi-stakeholder participation oriented towards social inclusion and the sustainable public policies.

III. Government Modernization and Public Participation: Finally, the third guideline proposes the synergy between the different actors and a Government with an active role in the planning of its actions regarding the habitat, through open and transparent actions.

The PISU proposes the elaboration of comprehensive and individualized neighborhood development projects, that address the socio-spatial and environmental specificities of each of the spaces to be intervened. In this way, the democratic management of the city becomes important, understood as a decision-making process that enables the active, deliberative and self-managed participation of the community in general, and of the affected citizens in particular.

The PISU, as a dynamic process, allows to observe the state of the interventions in order to diagnose the advances, and to project and redirect the planned actions to reach the proposed objectives.

In this event we will make the detailed presentation of the PISU, and the tools that have been developed so far for its implementation, with concrete examples of application.