Three moments with the neighborhood leaders of La Floresta: The University, the Parish, the Museum.
At the university: La Floresta neighborhood assembly. Architects and neighbors meet to promote dialogue and the exchange of knowledge between academia and the community.
La Floresta is a traditional neighborhood in the city of Quito, according to its residents, with a unique architectural heritage, a community character, and a heterogeneous population of upper-middle, middle, and working-class people.
In the hall of the Universidad Andina, where the event has been convened, there is a sign that reads: «Will only the name of La Floresta remain?». The neighborhood’s concern about the rapid transformation of the neighborhood’s appearance and idiosyncrasies, the result of indiscriminate urban intervention, reminds us of many similar processes that have taken place in different cities on the peninsula. In Barcelona, without going any further, there are neighborhoods experienced in the evolution and consequences of these gentrification processes.
The neighbors explain that they do not have a reactionary position of rejecting everything new, that they are willing to re-signify the patrimonial, to welcome the new inhabitants, but they do not know how to respond to the threats and harassment they are suffering.
This meeting, in which we are listening along with Carlos Hidalgo and Valeria Galarza, members of the Department of Community Mediation of the
Museums of the City Foundation
, is a first action by the community to organize with architects, urban planners, sociologists, geographers… who have thought about the city from a broad perspective and to build a framework for action against certain transformations that are taking place in Quito. One of the neighbors states: «Our neighborhood management is limited, we can denounce, follow up, but it does not allow us to question the city, we need the knowledge of the experts.”
On October 27, 2011, Ordinance 135 of the Special Plan for the La Floresta Sector was approved with a validity of 10 years and with the commitment of a review in the fifth year, in 2016. For the elaboration of that ordinance, the neighborhood of La Floresta was organized, and a contest of ideas was launched for its integral rehabilitation, to which 17 proposals were presented. There were more than 120 meetings for the elaboration of the Special Plan
As in many of these processes, the views on the territory are hardly clear and become clouded in the midst of the whirlwind of transformation; learned places, hegemonic conceptions of the urban are reproduced, which precisely benefit those dominant groups that decide how cities should be: security or street vending are two of the concerns that are added without distinction to the demolition of heritage buildings, the indiscriminate installation of cell phone antennas, or the new architecture that violates the ordinance in relation to the height of the building.
In the Parish: questions and answers
In the Parish, three neighbors from La Floresta are waiting for us. We arrive together with Carlos and Valeria, and without realizing it, we set up the stage as if it were an exam: the neighbors on one side of the room, and us on the other.
Valeria explains the role she plays in the institution within the Department of Community Mediation of the Museums of the City Foundation.
Rocío: —But what is it? Is it a program? —the question is direct and gives the impression of revealing some distrust.
Carlos: —It is a transversal plan in the five museums of the city…
Valeria continues explaining: —We are a multidisciplinary team of 14 people… and the operation of community mediation. —Rocío interrupts her—. What do you understand there as community mediation? Valeria tries again to answer the concern, sharing the origin of the project: —It arises in the
Valeria: —It’s complex, but we are not conciliators.
Rocío: —So it’s a pedagogical organization.
Valeria: —More of questions.
Rocío: —Between whom are they asking?
Valeria explains the process around the San Roque market to try to illustrate some ways of doing things based on the idea of the right to the city and the lines they share.
—Rocío: She shares with her peers, she does not share with the authority.
Valeria tries to clarify the limits with which the team encounters in their work, and what they can contribute to the processes, facilitating strategies for community articulation or tools for visibility of the problems from the collective logic.
Rocío: —But the limit with what authority? The Municipality [City Hall] wants to get the market out of there at all costs.
Carlos tries to respond with some examples of the pedagogical tools with which they work to build collective processes of analysis and understanding of the situations that different contexts and territories go through.
It seems that the atmosphere is relaxing and a space of possibility appears with the question of another of the neighbors, María de los Ángeles: —And what have you thought for La Floresta. —Valeria insists that the starting point is to share experiences and take advantage of our visit so that we can make a transfer of the tools that have been used in the process of building the historical memory of the neighborhood of Bellvitge through the project
Bellvitge live role-playing
.
The conversation drifts towards the reality of Barcelona, how these processes linked to tourism and the sale of the city by extractive economic interests have occurred and how we understand the current moment, in addition to the impact of these dynamics on the peripheries.
Rocío tries to close the meeting with the commitment of the mediation team to organize a series of training workshops for the residents of La Floresta. We agree on a date for the visit to the museum, they have closed the church and we have to wait for the priest to open the door for us.
In the museum: space for dialogue between LaFundició, residents of La Floresta, residents of La Mariscal and the mediation team of the Museums of the City Foundation.
Days later we meet again at the Center for Contemporary Art. The meeting takes place in the same room where Bellvitge live role-playing is exhibited. After a brief visit to the exhibition, we sit around a table on which we spread out a paper on which we will take notes. Rocío, María de los Ángeles and María Eugenia attend the meeting representing the neighborhood association of La Floresta; and we are accompanied by two residents of La Mariscal, a neighborhood adjacent to La Floresta that in recent years has been transformed into a gigantic center of nightlife and tourist attraction. To give you an idea, you can consult the section dedicated to this neighborhood on the tourist promotion website of the Municipality of Quito: http://www.quito.com.ec/que-visitar/la-mariscal
One of the main fears of the group of neighbors was, precisely, the growing Mariscalization of La Floresta. A fear that is by no means unfounded when we see that on the same tourist promotion website of Quito, La Floresta already appears as one of the attractions of La Mariscal itself, described as «the contemporary bohemian area of Quito», a «neighborhood of old houses» in which «filmmakers, painters, actors and musicians» (sic) live (http://www.quito.com.ec/que-visitar/la-mariscal/la-floresta).
Even with its particularities, the transformation of La Floresta (and before that of La Mariscal) can be seen as a fairly common gentrification process. As the group recounts their experiences, we are putting together the pieces of a puzzle whose drawing becomes clearer and clearer: Part of the charm of La Floresta lies in its mansions, large houses built by wealthy families in the 40s who at some point could no longer maintain them. Once the houses are abandoned, the land is devalued and new residents begin to arrive (among them young people with liberal or creative professions such as the aforementioned «filmmakers, painters, actors and musicians»). On the other hand, with the arrival of these new inhabitants, investors begin to be interested in the properties in order to open commercial, leisure or hotel establishments. Simultaneously, what the neighbors call the slumification of certain areas of the neighborhood occurs, still inhabited by the “native” population, whose abandonment they denounce: the increase in crime, the presence of brothels, street vending, unsanitary conditions… Ordinance 135 is created, precisely, to regulate some of these phenomena, as well as issues related to construction and uses.
The complaints of the neighbors cannot be underestimated at all, but it is necessary to analyze these phenomena from a broad framework that allows us to understand its operation in the social, cultural and economic fabric of the city: on the one hand, it is worth asking to what extent the slumification functions as a lever for the displacement of populations and is convenient to the interests of investor groups and real estate companies at certain times; on the other, we can ask ourselves to what extent hygienism becomes in some cases a tool of social control: Carlos Hidalgo argues that the street sale of food constitutes an idiosyncratic feature of the neighborhood, but not only that: street vending promotes the use of public spaces and it is precisely the citizen use of public space that reduces the degree of insecurity and not the increase in police presence. Certainly there is a serious public health problem due to the waste generated by street food stalls, but in that case, says Carlos, let’s see how we can solve it by managing waste properly instead of criminalizing street vending itself.
The conversation drifts along somewhat chaotic paths, it is difficult to focus it and some perceptions are reiterated. One of these is the combative character of the neighborhood, of which its neighborhood leaders are totally convinced. We try to point out some of the groups, organizations and agents that could join an organization process to address the situation of the neighborhood. Given the difficulty in reaching a clear picture of the situation in the neighborhood, the Department of Community Mediation proposes to organize a collective mapping workshop in the public space, which will also serve as a forum for debate. It is proposed to do it in a border area of the neighborhood: the Mirador de Guápulo, from which a kind of scenic walk starts that connects La Floresta with the neighborhood of Guápulo crossing the ravine. The viewpoint is one of the points in the neighborhood considered unsafe by the residents, so the workshop is proposed as a playful act that can occupy it for a few hours and serve at the same time as a call to recover, through its use, this type of space.
That’s how we left it. But we will not see it. In any case, we find it interesting to point out that the participation of the Department of Community Mediation in the context of La Floresta highlights some controversies and limits around the very idea of mediation from cultural institutions: Getting involved in any process within a social context inevitably entails taking a position in a field strained by the divergent interests of different action groups and institutions. That act of taking a position, whether consciously and voluntarily or not, is always deeply political insofar as it redefines the correlation of forces between the different actors. This may seem obvious, however, it seems to us that it clashes head-on with the illusion, sometimes encouraged in an interested way by the institutions themselves, that culture and its agents can and should act under strictly technical parameters, as if the technique were a kind of neutral protocol. But we will reflect on this with a little more depth in our “delayed Quiteña chronicle” regarding the working day we had with the Department of Community Mediation of the Museums of the City Foundation.