Communes under risk of urbanization.

Quito, Ecuador

By Mateo Fernández-Muro
urbanization, communes, quito, ecuador, real-estate

This map analyzes the urbanization and real-estate pressures that the communes and parroquias in Quito are suffering.

In the Metropolitan District of Quito (DMQ, its acronym in Spanish) there are located a number of annexes, neighborhoods and villages which, despite being incorporated to the urban dynamics, conserve different forms of identity with native traditions. They are politically autonomous settlements with indigenous roots, called comunas. According to the official data that I obtained from the municipality, there are 49 comunas in the DMQ, as it is shown in the map. However, this number is not totally clear. It can even vary from less than 40 to almost 60 units. Either way, just a single point in the map of Quito delimitates their positions: they are just nodes, points, undefined areas with no clear legal limits for their territory. It is difficult to talk about comunas within the DMQ due to the heterogeneity and diversity between each other. One of the tasks I expect to pursue with this project, then, won’t be that of defining the territorial limits for each comuna, which for decades has been a struggle involving litigious processes and interminable bureaucratic and historical research, but rather that of merely providing some tools to categorize and define such heterogeneity. The debate around comunas gained importance during the 1980s and 1990s due to the significance of human groups involved and due to social, economic and legal order problems derived by their immersion in the relentless growing of the city. Urban expansion have been increasingly enclosing the comunas and peasant settlements under its area of influence, heavily altering both life conditions and occupational strategies within those populations, as well as specific land uses and particular forms of using resources. Land trading, on its part, weakened community bonds and distorted the meaning of communal institutions. Up until the first decade of the twenty-first century, State politics have been permanently ignoring the existence of these areas, and when they have provided some sort of attention it has been from a unilateral perspective: street paving, sewage systems… but disregarding land use wider issues, not to mention the respect to their cultural diversity. Such are the problems I’m attempting to address through my research, not only by showing the information I mentioned above for each comuna, but also by extracting conclusions from crossing such data.

Today, the city of Quito keeps expanding, having experienced a strong expansion in the last decades according to a dynamic of expanded metropolization through which the city increasingly occupies rural areas in its path. These new places of urbanization are combined with state planned infrastructures, key factors when it comes to increase the value of the land. It is from this perspective that we should analyze the territorial influence caused by the construction of new infrastructures such as, for instance, the New International Airport in Tababela, one of the most important development nodes for state territorial planning, and the highway network connecting it to the urban center. In parallel, the real-estate sector expects such infrastructures to be spaces for a broad housing development, which is provoking a strong speculation on property, making really difficult for the land to become agricultural again. Mapping the land according to the difference in between its cadastral values and market values will give us some clues on which territories are suffering the most from real-estate pressure.