El Alto's Juntas Vecinales - The Right to the City and Neighbourhood Self-Governance in Bolivia

Abstract

This thesis contextualises existing practices of communal self-governance in El Alto, Bolivia, within the framework of the right to the city and neighbourhood consolidation. El Alto, a city that emerged out of indigenous migration, features distinct characteristics of self-help housing regarding its residential composition, and self-organisation regarding its social-communal structure. The city of El Alto is home to a network of neighbourhood-based organisations, the juntas vecinales (“neighbourhood councils”), which carry out the task of channelling demands from residents to higher layers of the municipal polity and managing infrastructural needs of their respective neighbourhoods. They constitute a system of neighbourhood self-governance in the administration of public works, thereby fundamentally shaping urban space to the extent that they can be viewed as departing points towards the realisation of a right to the city – a right for urban inhabitants to participate in decision-making processes that determine the access to, use of and production of shared urban space. In shaping the development of neighbourhoods in accordance to inhabitant’s needs and preferences, communal self-governance as exercised by the juntas vecinales reinforces the process of neighbourhood consolidation in terms of the improvement of infrastructure and increase in basic service coverage. Moreover, the consolidation process itself shapes self-governance practices, as new demands are articulated via the structure of neighbourhood organisation as urban areas mature. These new demands grow from basic infrastructural requirements such as water supply and electricity, towards education, health and urban open space among other things. As neighbourhoods consolidate, the degree of resident’s participation in self-governance structures can be said to become more irregular due to these more particularised needs. For the assessment whether El Alto’s juntas vecinales can contribute to the realisation of the right to the city, deficiencies in self-governance relating to clientelism and institutional accessibility have to be taken into account.