Invasion: A contested form of transitional shelter

The landslides that destroyed the coastal cities in Vargas, Venezuela, woke up a nation, unprepared for the impact of natural disaster. Although disaster is recurrent in the area, the amount of affected persons drastically amplified, due to the increase of urbanization in high-areas of last decades. When disaster struck, quick solutions were improvised to cope with the situation. Besides many official solutions to provide shelter to the victims, there was one other more unorthodox way of providing temporary shelter, which ten years later still provides highly contested urban condition, namely invasion.

La Tragedia, coincided with the national election to revise the Venezuelan constitution, which - if won - would pave the way, to what Hugo Chavez calls: “a social-democracy of the 21st century”. This attempt to reorganize Venezuelan society, based on an ideological background of equality, social values and a community/state-structured organization, was incipient at the time and many ministries, the national currency, laws, etcetera were being reorganized to fit this project, which ten years later is still in full progress.

When the landslides indiscriminately destroyed poor as well as rich upper middle-class neighborhoods of the cities during the night of 15 December 1999, many people fled and sought refuge with their family, friends or in camps organized by the government called “refugios”. Those who didn’t leave, or had no other place to go, pragmatically, started “invading” the houses of people who had fled. Given many of the houses were second homes of the richer middle-class of Caracas; these invasions were justified within the national agenda of equality, and a newly created decree ambigously handing out contested tenure documents. Also the lack of any other solution, and the limited capacity of camps, contributed to the invasions getting a “temporarily” tolerated status until new plans were made.

While landowners complained, the invasion continued, and it soon became apparent that people from all over the country, and even abroad, had gotten word of this opportunity. Thus many areas saw a complete shift of their population.

Now, ten years later, when driving through Caraballeda - the worst damaged city on El Litoral - you see an interesting image of derelict villas, abandoned hotels and apartment buildings retrofitted with phenomena usually found in the barrio’s like, make-shift red hollow brick extensions, boarded up windows, tangled wires of tapped electricity circuits and political phrases graffitied everywhere. You could say the informal sector dramatically expanded, only this time growing on a preexisting formal urban and architectural form, versus the sequential growth of the “original” barrio. As you might understand the temporal character of invasions does not really apply, and still today an alternative solution to housing has not been realized.

Depending on your perspective, invasions can be described as righteous or illicit, innovative or opportunistic, symbolic of the revolution or just the result of the absence of any other solution. As you can imagine, the contemporary urban condition is highly contested. People who lost their houses say, Caraballeda is dead to them, and supposedly the only way for them to get their house back is to pay crooked cops vast amounts to forcefully evict the current invaders. On the other hand people who invaded proclaim a victory of the socialist state, and claim that Chavez supports their cause.
The question is how one interprets private property in a time when lives are at stake. Is it possible to manage the temporary use of private property to solve a national humanitarian crisis, and then slowly reinstall its previous and rightful owners? Or is this just a utopian illusion?