Use, appropriation and investment in urban public spaces of working class neighborhoods

Abstract

This article presents some of the results of the investigation "Use, Ownership and Investment in Urban Public Spaces of Popular Neighborhoods. Case Study UPIS Huascar - San Juan de Lurigancho". Its main scope is to explain how the population of UPIS-Huascar has generated public spaces and managed to arrange them for its own use. Data from four public spaces was used for the construction of the empirical referent that supports the research. Moreover, events that occurred in these areas, like the appropriation and investment processes that took place there were also reviewed and analyzed. This research explains how and why it is possible that public space in these neighborhoods functions as a meeting and contact place, essential for mutual recognition, the basis of any possible form of real coexistence. Amongst other factors, the study shows that people there have an unwritten code of rules that work as means for regulating the social use of space. Also, that working class serdements can be seen as a conglomerate of economic, social, cultural, people and information flows, in whose formation a stage of gathering is needed in order to for their integration to the city. This initiative for urbanization from the State, in more than 30 years, has produced a nuclei of social and cultural convergence, of concentration of families and, at the end, of a new way of city life.