IN THE FIRST few days of February 2000, over 8,000 families invaded a piece of desert land in the southern part of Lima, Peru. The invasion had a political background: presidential campaigns were underway and land tenure was one of the political weapons; the land titling agency was under pressure to hand out 2 million plot titles before the elections in April. The invaders were rapidly moved to an urban expansion area which was quickly serviced thanks to the political climate. This, however, is an unusual case for Peru; normally, poor citizens have to struggle on their own to build their part of the city. This book, through in-depth analysis of a particular low-income group and their settlement, examines the contribution of households and community-based organizations to the improvement of the environmental conditions in their neighbourhoods in peripheral Lima. Three major research questions are covered:
• To what extent and under what conditions do households and community-based organizations in a peripheral district in Lima undertake activities that contribute to the improvement of environmental conditions in their neighbourhood?
• What alliances do the community-based organizations establish with external actors?
• What do their activities contribute to the transition to sustainability?
San Juan de Miraflores is representative of many other low-income peripheral districts of Lima as well as other Peruvian coastal cities. Peru’s economic growth was not evident there, yet the recession was felt through increasing difficulty in meeting daily needs. Since the beginning of this study in 1995, there has been economic and political change, and promising processes of decentralization were reversed, with ever more power being transferred to the “Ministry of the Presidency”. The research for this study was undertaken using a variety of techniques, a combination of surveys and interviews, workshops, and a pilot project on neighbourhood development. Three different levels were examined, namely, views and opinions, experience and feelings, and concrete actions. Analysis at these different levels showed that something which was not considered important in surveys (opinion), for example a green environment, was thought to be the most important factor in workshop discussions (feeling). The 11 chapters cover in great detail the problems of low-income neighbourhoods in low and middle-income countries generally and, more specifically, through detailed references to the study location. The book contributes to the general discussion on urban environmental management in a way that makes clear that community-based organizations in cities like Lima play an important role in improving the urban environment.