Villa miseria
Encyclopedia
Shanty town
A shanty town is a slum settlement of impoverished people who live in improvised dwellings made from scrap materials: often plywood, corrugated metal and sheets of plastic...
or slum
Slum
A slum, as defined by United Nations agency UN-HABITAT, is a run-down area of a city characterized by substandard housing and squalor and lacking in tenure security. According to the United Nations, the percentage of urban dwellers living in slums decreased from 47 percent to 37 percent in the...
found in Argentina
Argentina
Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...
, mostly around the largest urban settlements. The term is a compound
Compound (linguistics)
In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme that consists of more than one stem. Compounding or composition is the word formation that creates compound lexemes...
noun made of the Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
words villa "village, small town" and miseria "misery, dejection". The name was adopted from Bernardo Verbitsky
Bernardo Verbitsky
Bernardo Verbitsky was an Argentine writer and journalist, and father of Horacio Verbitsky.Verbitsky was a screenwriter, a journalist from Noticias Gráficas, and a member of Academia Porteña del Lunfardo...
's 1957 novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
Villa Miseria también es América ("Villa Miseria is also [a part of] the Americas").
These settlements consist of small houses or shacks made of tin
Tin
Tin is a chemical element with the symbol Sn and atomic number 50. It is a main group metal in group 14 of the periodic table. Tin shows chemical similarity to both neighboring group 14 elements, germanium and lead and has two possible oxidation states, +2 and the slightly more stable +4...
, wood
Wood
Wood is a hard, fibrous tissue found in many trees. It has been used for hundreds of thousands of years for both fuel and as a construction material. It is an organic material, a natural composite of cellulose fibers embedded in a matrix of lignin which resists compression...
, and/or other materials (whatever can be found). The streets are usually not paved — narrow internal passages may communicate the different parts. The villas miseria have no sanitation
Sanitation
Sanitation is the hygienic means of promoting health through prevention of human contact with the hazards of wastes. Hazards can be either physical, microbiological, biological or chemical agents of disease. Wastes that can cause health problems are human and animal feces, solid wastes, domestic...
system, though there may be water pipes passing through the settlement. Electric power
Electric power
Electric power is the rate at which electric energy is transferred by an electric circuit. The SI unit of power is the watt.-Circuits:Electric power, like mechanical power, is represented by the letter P in electrical equations...
is sometimes taken directly from the grid using illegal connections (which are perforce tolerated by the power companies).
The villas range from small groups of precarious houses, well inside the urban grid, to larger, more organised communities with thousands of residents. In rural areas, villas miserias might be made of mud
Mud
Mud is a mixture of water and some combination of soil, silt, and clay. Ancient mud deposits harden over geological time to form sedimentary rock such as shale or mudstone . When geological deposits of mud are formed in estuaries the resultant layers are termed bay muds...
and wood. Villas miseria are found around and inside the large cities of Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires is the capital and largest city of Argentina, and the second-largest metropolitan area in South America, after São Paulo. It is located on the western shore of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, on the southeastern coast of the South American continent...
, Rosario
Rosario
Rosario is the largest city in the province of Santa Fe, Argentina. It is located northwest of Buenos Aires, on the western shore of the Paraná River and has 1,159,004 residents as of the ....
, Córdoba
Córdoba, Argentina
Córdoba is a city located near the geographical center of Argentina, in the foothills of the Sierras Chicas on the Suquía River, about northwest of Buenos Aires. It is the capital of Córdoba Province. Córdoba is the second-largest city in Argentina after the federal capital Buenos Aires, with...
and Mendoza
Mendoza, Argentina
Mendoza is the capital city of Mendoza Province, in Argentina. It is located in the northern-central part of the province, in a region of foothills and high plains, on the eastern side of the Andes. As of the , Mendoza's population was 110,993...
, among others.
These shantytowns are also euphemistically
Euphemism
A euphemism is the substitution of a mild, inoffensive, relatively uncontroversial phrase for another more frank expression that might offend or otherwise suggest something unpleasant to the audience...
called asentamientos ("settlements") or villas de emergencia ("emergency villages"). In most of Argentina, the unqualified word villa usually refers to a villa miseria.
The villas draw people from several backgrounds. Others are local citizens who have fallen from an already precarious economic position. In most cases, of course, the villa miseria is populated by the children and grandchildren of the original settlers, who have been unable to raise their economic status.
Villas miseria are considered by most citizens as havens for criminals from minor thieves to drug dealers.
Argentine painter Antonio Berni
Antonio Berni
Delesio Antonio Berni was a figurative artist, born in Rosario, province of Santa Fe, Argentina. He worked as a painter, an illustrator and an engraver. His father, Napoleón Berni, was an immigrant tailor from Italy...
dealt with the hardships of living in a villas miseria through his series Juanito Laguna, a slum child, and Ramona Montiel, a prostitute.
Statistics and programs
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Attempting to address this problem, President Alejandro Lanusse had the National Housing Fund (FONAVI) established in 1972. An amalgam of long-standing national housing programs and lending facilities previously managed by the National Mortgage Bank, FONAVI helped coordinate slum-clearance efforts and, since then, has put up over 25,000 housing units a year (both single-family and multi-family types).
Granting deeds on a lease-to-own basis, the fund mostly provides for households in Argentina's lowest income bracket and, thus, has historically tolerated a collection rate of less than 5%. The fund, one of Latin America's most significant, is underwritten largely by national fuel and other excise taxes.
See also
- FavelaFavelaA favela is the generally used term for a shanty town in Brazil. In the late 18th century, the first settlements were called bairros africanos . This was the place where former slaves with no land ownership and no options for work lived. Over the years, many freed black slaves moved in...
- Pueblos jóvenesPueblos jóvenesPueblos jóvenes is the nickname given to the vast shanty towns that surround Lima and other cities of Peru. Many of these towns have developed into significant districts in Lima such as Villa El Salvador and Comas.- Population :...
- BarrioBarrioBarrio is a Spanish word meaning district or neighborhood.-Usage:In its formal usage in English, barrios are generally considered cohesive places, sharing, for example, a church and traditions such as feast days...
s - Colonia (border settlement)
- PovertyPovertyPoverty is the lack of a certain amount of material possessions or money. Absolute poverty or destitution is inability to afford basic human needs, which commonly includes clean and fresh water, nutrition, health care, education, clothing and shelter. About 1.7 billion people are estimated to live...
- Argentine economic crisis (1999-2002)Argentine economic crisis (1999-2002)The Argentine economic crisis was a financial situation, tied to poilitical unrest, that affected Argentina's economy during the late 1990s and early 2000s...