The Shadow-Line Neighbourhoods of Lima

Abstract

The paper studies the issue of social and spatial exclusion as within the city or, to put it another way, why
it is that large low income sectors of the population find they must invade, occupy and shanty-settle on the
city’s shadowy side lines and beyond its pale. The case of the capital, Lima, which takes in the provinces of
Lima and Callao, is here used as an example as is the 40 year period running from 1961 to 2001, 1961 being
taken as a starting point given that year the Law of Unfavoured Neighbourhoods/ Ley de Barrios Marginales
(LBM) that made legal the squatter invasions of private and public property prior to 1960 and publicly
established a will not only to hand over deeds of property for such actions but to consolidate the housing already
thus built consequent upon it. From then on in, the commonest way to access building ground has been by
shanty town building. The paper thus questions this public policy and examines its workings during the
period above mentioned in which social exclusion in the city has flourished in the shade of a law which,
although it did not make legal any future squatting rights, did indeed give rise to the popular belief that all
such actions would be condoned by future indulgences and amnesties, a belief furthermore which has be borne
out in fact. The ‘barriada’ or shanty town is here defined as a mose of habitat, a settlement that has come
upon its building ground by non-mercantile and illegal means, the ground itself never having been publicly
declared fit for housing. Illegal is here understood in the light of two considerations, first because what is
being studied here is people taking social action that goes against the law and second because the state, despite
its own laws, does nothing to assure adequate living conditions for its citizens.