Like many other Latin American cities, Lima experienced explosive population growth during the last century. Its population went from 600 thousand people in 1940 to nearly 9.5 million people nowadays. Former agriculture fields between the coast and the beginning of the Andes mountains were quickly filled with urban developments. Neither the public sector nor the private housing market provided decent living conditions in the city for all these newcomers. 34% of the city’s land was developed informally (Municipality of Lima, 2013a) and 70% of the houses were to some degree self-built. The process of urban development and, specifically, the control of the space through land ownership, generated a segregated city. The urban poor usually accessed low-cost land or housing in areas exposed to high levels of risk, with accessibility problems or lack of basic infrastructure.

The current process of urban development, along with a quantitative understanding of housing in policy, continues reproducing socio-spatial segregation today. Buying a plot to land traffickers on the steep slopes of the periphery is the primary way for the low-income population to access a place to live in the city.

This graduation project has two main goals. On the one hand, it tries to understand the relations between housing, urban development and socio-spatial segregation in Lima. On the other, it explores the potential of housing (understood as a process) to develop alternative models of urban development and reduce socio-spatial segregation, in search of a more just city.