Looking at the project beyond its local/national scale, we can question how actors from abroad are partly shaping the evolving spatial and social conditions of the project. By deconstructing the roles of institutions such as the World Bank or strong western nations such as the United States or Germany, which hold a major part of the responsibilities and overall control of the project, we discover a lot of underlying mechanisms.
At first glance, these external actors seem to be far away from the actual spatial condition of the households, but their influence, often immaterial, translates into several spatial phenomena, which allows us to understand the polarized role of those external actors at a core unit scale. The World Bank financed 100% of the costs related to the infrastructures and core unit construction, granting it a certain degree of control on those crucial part of the dwellings: the standard and ways of processing could be decided by the institution.1
The same institution championed the importance of the private actors in the project, talking about ‘a useful example to other countries facing similar shelter problems.’2 This appraisal of privatization has existed, then, since the birth of the project, but its translation over time from the financial sphere to the built environment is confirmed when you take a look at the support of a country like Germany: via different governmental institutions (KfW and GTZ), throughout the 1990s and the 2000s the western state funded different private financial actors of the area, most structured around micro-credit.3 This format of loans was in a range corresponding to the extensions of the dwellings planned by the project, or unexpected floor additions. The multiple architectural faces presented today by the originally identical units can therefore be partly attributed by the motivation of the external actors for a private market, and not governmental support to the people for housing extensions.
The way the project was drawn and imagined in the 1974 documents also reveals a lot about the spatial and constructive projection of the World Bank: the units are represented through a typical western household model of a couple and two children, a lifestyle and a demographic directly imported from the frame where the project was planned. The cultural role of these first external financial supports in the El Salvador postcolonial context can therefore be questioned.4
Sources
1. World Bank. El Salvador: Appraisal of a Sites and Services Project. 20 Sep. 1974.
2. Ibid.
3. Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. “El Salvador: An Organization called FUNDASAL (Foundation for Salvadorean Development and Affordable Housing), Its History, Organization, Goals, Political Affiliations, Funding (Particularly Funding by the German Government); Reports of Employees Being Threatened or Harassed; Allegations of Corruption or Fraud by Employees (1998-1999).” 28 February 2001. Link. Link.
4. World Bank. El Salvador. Op. cit.
Cover Image
Actors’ network scheme highlighting the role of external actors. Source: Own work, based on sources cited in text.
