Towards the Improvement of Construction Practices in Informal Housing Production: the Case of Project Construya, by Swisscontact

Abstract

Informal housing production in Colombia has configured the urban landscape of the country’s major cities. Different authors report that between 20% and 50% of homes located in the main cities of Colombia were built informally, many of them by their owners or commissioned to master builders, without compliance of building or urban regulations, which translates, in most cases, into buildings with poor living conditions and seismically vulnerable. In this vein, ever since 2011 the Swiss Foundation for Technical Cooperation (Swisscontact), in alliance with different entities, has been developing a program in Bogota that focuses on the design and implementation of strategies to improve the quality of self built housing in sectors of informal origin. This paper summarizes the process: It focuses on identifying and analyzing the different construction practices in informal sectors in Bogota and on the description of the training strategies implemented in informal housing production sectors in order to improve their living conditions.