Rodrigo Bueno: Climate-Resilient Housing

In Buenos Aires, the capital and most populous city of Argentina, the city’s Housing Institute tackled the challenge of providing safe, climate-resilient housing to informal settlements through a voluntary process. The Rodrigo Bueno climate-resilient housing project demonstrates that participatory, resilience-focused development can integrate housing security, economic opportunity and ecological preservation.

Buenos Aires experiences significant inequalities in access to decent housing and is pocketed by villas – informal, dense settlements that first appeared in the 1930s. Villas have grown over time into communities of vibrant, often self-organizing and self-advocating groups. However, most have almost no access to urban services and are marred by high poverty, crime and drug problems. Informal settlements are also heavily impacted by climate hazards due to their high densities, non-code compliant structures and lack of resources to recover from damages.

For more than 10 years, legal battles between residents of Rodrigo Bueno and the city raged over efforts to displace and evict residents. In 2016, a new government led to a strategy for upgrading the villa based on principles of equality, spatial justice, integration, social inclusion and non-discrimination.

In 2017, a new city law initiated the Rodrigo Bueno project, leading to intensive public consultation efforts by the Housing Institute, gradual construction of eight new blocks of multi-family dwellings and residents voluntarily moving into the new units.

The “historic neighborhood” of original self-built dwellings is still part of the community, occupied by families who have chosen to not move into new developments. Many of these homes have received structural and service upgrades (the process is ongoing) along with the entire neighborhood receiving paved streets and house numbers, further aiding in the formal integration of residents into urban life.

Through mixed-use development, 57 new retail spaces have been created, largely reserved for local businesses. There is also a plant nursery run by women residents, and a “gastronomic patio” where visitors to the adjacent Costanera Sur ecological preserve can stop for food from a variety of vendors.

The integration of Rodrigo Bueno is a part of a portfolio of slum integration projects across Buenos Aires impacting over 73,000 people across four neighborhoods. The concurrent projects share the same integration methodology.

There is no prior existing relationship between the project and WRI. For full disclosure, please visit here.