ABSTRACT
I first met Judith in one of the barrios of Venezuela in December 2009. She is a single mother with four boys and a girl ranging in age from late teens to under ten. Her home could not be more different to a single mother in London. The shack she had built of tin, timber pieces and cardboard was falling down the hill. She had put up a Christmas tree and nativity scene at the place where the shack threatened to fall over so that the children would not step near the sloping floor. The ‘bedroom’ had three beds that were shared by the family and she had hung teddy bears from the ceiling to stop the rain from coming in. Near the elaborate altar, there was a telephone and in the narrow passage that led to the bedroom, a fridge had somehow been squashed in. When I visited the year later, parts of the house stood at various angles and the Christmas tree had finally fallen into a crevice. Judith told me that she needed BsF30,000 (Bolivares Fuerte; about $3,600) to buy a better home. Judith’s dream home will be of a concrete frame house with hollow brick walls. Like her counterparts all over the world, she aspires to the kind of building that the middle classes live in. As I left her house that afternoon, a violent storm descended on the hill. I was soaked to the skin and wondered how Judith’s house was doing. As far as I know, she is still waiting for that BsF30,000. Since I last saw Judith, the rate of inflation in Venezuela has reached 30 per cent,2 who knows for how long Judith will wait? Judith’s story is typical of the poor who live by the skin of their teeth in the barrios. According to the way the homeless are classified by the UN, she does not even feature in the billion people supposed to be homeless around the world. Thankfully for her, the children are doing well at school, looked healthy and I hope she will find a way out of her difficulties (Figure 4.1). What one aspires to in a home is a personal and cultural issue. It is one of choices and priorities too. I could say to Judith, ‘Get rid of the refrigerator
and the telephone’ and save instead to buy the house and she might not agree with me. She might not imagine filling with earth the hundreds of tyres that I have seen in the barrios to create the kind of homes that Mike Reynolds likes to design for the rich in New Mexico. I have seen people living in the most decrepit homes in slums and squatter settlements, yet they have air conditioners, cable TVs, computers, etc. In a series of photographs taken after the 2010 landslides in Caracas, a man is shown carrying his refrigerator on his back while escaping from his collapsed home. The choices many make are based not just on individual preferences but to conform to their particular society, especially in a collectivist nation. Preferences for building materials and technology also take this view. This has been termed ‘sociosemitics’ by Paul Oliver, who notes that similar to spoken language, there operates an architectural language consisting of form and materials of what is acceptable to a certain society.3
