Biczel Viewpoint Fall2013

Viewpoint: Self-Construction, Vernacular Materials, and DemocracyBuilding: Los Bestias, Lima, 19841987Dorota Biczel

Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum,Volume 20, Number 2, Fall 2013, pp. 1-21 (Article)

Published by University of Minnesota Press

For additional information about this article

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dorota biczel

Viewpoint: Self-Construction, Vernacular Materials, and Democracy BuildingLos Bestias, Lima, 19841987

A stark, dark form intrudes upon the blank, al-most white background of the sky (Figure 1). Out of the solid blackness that occupies the entire lower quarter of the image, four upright torsos emerge, melded with their support, looking al-most like sculptural busts. The two on the right are frozen in seemingly pensive poses, as their arms appear to be tightly clasped around their chests. The two on the left become nearly indis-tinguishable from the vertical poles surrounding them. A piece of flapping, torn cloth is stretched

between the four forms that extend upward, cut-ting the picture plane. The image evokes a flat-tened silhouette of a makeshift, storm-battered sailship, captured cruising against the bright sun. One thing is certain: even if the figures look stoic, the material forms within which they are embedded manifest signs of fatigue, wear, or incompletenessripped, twisted, flawed geom-etries tied with a string. Whether these are pi-rates or survivors, their destination remains un-known. Perhaps because of the association with

Figure 1. One of the installations from Los Bestias project Des-hechos en arquitectura, December 1984. Campus of Universidad Ricardo Palma, Santiago de Surco, Lima. Courtesy of Archivo Bestiario.

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the ship and the precariousness of the construc-tion, for me this image points to the quality of a pirate urbanization, typical of the exploding metropolises of the so-called Third World.1

These pirates, imbricated with the imper-fect construction, are not urban squatters, who have constituted the major challenge to urban policies all over the planet, but a bunch of young architects who studied at the Lima-based Univer-sidad Ricardo Palma in the early 1980s.2 Between 1984 and 1987, an amorphous, fluctuating group of students at the university, calling themselves Los Bestias (The Beasts), realized a number of anarchist, informal architectural interventions on campus and in various sites of the Peruvian capital (Figure 2). Because they built them with their own hands, using industrial discards, re-cycled junk, and cheap, traditional construction materials (such as bamboo cane and reed mats),

they earned the nicknames architects-masons, architects with dirty faces, and kings of trash.3

The groups activities occurred during the bloodiest period of the Peruvian Internal Con-flict (19802000), when the very concept of de-mocracy was under assault as a result of extreme violence unleashed by all sides involved.4 The armed conflict between the Maoist rebel groups, led by Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), on the one hand, and the military forces of the state, on the other, caused irreversible changes in the ma-terial and social fabric of Lima. It profoundly af-fected the lives of ordinary people and the options of young architects alike. Taking the phrase de-mocracy building as an architectural metaphor, I trace how the interventions of Los Bestias rear-ticulated the meaning of the term democracy. Through their projects Los Bestias responded to the dwindling possibility of making even a mod-

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Figure 2. Schematic map of the central districts of Lima, showing major communication arteries. Los Bestias interventions indicated are (1) Primer esquisse del bestiario, (2) Des-hechos en arquitectura, (3) Denuncia por la vida, (4) Rockacho, (5) La semana de integracin cultural latinoamericana (SICLA), (6) El carpa teatro del puente Santa Rosa, and (7) LimaUtopa mediocre.

DOROTABICZEL, SELF-CONSTRUCTION,VERNACULARMATERIALS, ANDDEMOCRACYBUILDING | 3

est life happen amid the escalating war between the Shining Path and the government.5 Aligning their tactics with the evanescent nature of ordi-nary, everyday practice and asserting the value of self-construction, the group engaged in a pro-ductive effort to generate alternatives or antidotes to the unfolding social disintegration.

The ephemeral experiments and construc-tions of Los Bestias wedged themselves in be-tween the eclipsing modernism promoted by the state and the rising Limean critical regionalism sponsored by a handful of upper-class private in-vestors. On the one hand, the radical affirmation of the grassrootsexpressed through actions of self-construction and land invasionworked against the modernist obsession with central-ized planning by experts that drove the career of the president-architect Fernando Belande Terry and the vast majority of his public policies during his fifty-year career.6 On the other, the collective articulation of the groups proposals and their engagement with molding some kind of a com-munity sharply distinguished Los Bestias from the inward-oriented, private concerns of their teachers, who were of the generation associated with critical regionalism.

The projects Des-hechos de arquitectura (1984), El carpa teatro del puente Santa Rosa (1986), and LimaUtopa mediocre (1987) characterize dis-tinct stages in the groups trajectory.7 They range from a self-organized, anarchistic interven-tion into the university campus to collaboration with the municipal government and a theoretical urban istic proposal encompassing the dynam-ics of the Peruvian capital. Self-construction and the pragmatic employment of recycled and cheap, easily available, vernacular materials are two common threads that bring these projects together. The question of methods and materi-als is intimately intertwined with the problem of who and for whom. For Los Bestias material was never inherently endowed with meaning. It was just the stuff that was there, available at handthe mundane stuff that could acquire a symbolic or representational value only through pragmatic and functional use in the collaborative process of the elaboration of specific proposals.8 The poi-gnant title of their last project, LimaA Medio-

cre Utopia, can be seen as harkening back to the prejudices associated both with self-construction itself and with its material forms. At the same time, its very name undermines shiny visions of the top-to-bottom-implemented futures prom-ised by violent political regimes of the era. Los Bestias rejected totalizing, teleological utopias of the discourses of revolution and modernization. What was important was the creative process of carving out the independent, autonomous space for the fluid, collective body in the making. The groups attitude salvaged the critical, liberatory promise of modernity and modern vanguards in which the emancipated self did not lose sight of a collective social horizon. Yet it also modified the modern stance in a crucial way: the architects did not act as experts but rather articulated their position from the perspective of praxis of the in-habitants of the city.9

If by the early 1980s Lima was an exploding, heterogeneous metropolis that the official poli-cies could not control or contain, similarly, Los Bestias were never a formalized group or a closed collective; rather, their number fluctuated be-tween a dozen and forty and, sometimes, even more.10 As they stated: We dont consider our-selves a group, we unite people who want to liber-ate the creative ability (the creative beast) that they already possess. The Beast is any student who pro-duces artistic, cultural, [or] social work, and who wants to make it known.11 They also consciously took up an oppositional stance against their insti-tution: We demonstrate our attitude of negation with our informal language and our anarchist position. We aim to unite with the cultural move-ment that is being born in Lima. What we want is to introduce in the context of the University the reality that exists outside of the bars of its perim-eters.12 Therefore, their adversarial position was not just an expression of youthful nihilism but a call for the recognition of the radically new reality of the citya reality shaped by extreme political violence and internal migration from the prov-inces into the capital.13

The Urban Landscape of Lima in the 1980sBetween 1945 and the late 1980s, the popula-tion of Lima skyrocketed from 600,000 to over


7 million inhabitants, 50 percent of whom lived in the squatter-origin settlements (known as bar-riadas or pueblos jvenes) on the peripheries and 25 percent in the rental slums of the center of the city.14 In the 1980s the bodies of these mostly An-dean migrants turned into a battlefield on which two opposing factions of the Peruvian Internal Conflict waged a war in the name of ideological visions. The guerilla group Shining Path took up arms to implement its Marxist-Leninist-Maoist revolutionary program, and the state, while un-leashing its violence against the subversion, tar-geted the easiest-to-identify suspectsthe mar-ginalized, Quechua-speaking poor ultimately

taking the lives of almost as many victims of the conflict as the clandestine groups.15 A bloody war, which in its initial stages primarily consumed the provinces, exacerbated the rapid influx of the migrants into the capital. In search of reprieve, people flocked to the city and erected on its out-skirts makeshift shelters along the dusty moun-tains. They also appropriated the dilapidating Historic Center, which its traditional inhabitants, the upper-middle class, abandoned in favor of new suburban districts (Figure 3). Although they were not entirely free from clandestine or institutional terror, between 1979 and 1985 alone, the number of the new barriadas grew from ten to forty-five.16 This volatile period, with its acute political, eco-nomic, and social crises, brought into sharp focus the failure of the oligarchic, technocratic state, which compromised itself with its administrative ineptitude and its hard-handed turn against the populace.17

The material act of taking over spaceland invasionbrought into existence the barriadas of Lima, posing the main challenge of the sec-ond half of the twentieth century for architects, planners, and other decision makers.18 If the as-piration of the modern state was the total man-agement of population, then one of the most visible, palpable mediums of such disciplining procedures was built form. This modern uto-pia endeavored to embody and reproduce itself through architecture, whose transparency, lumi-nosity, and hygiene would organize and order the ostensibly unruly, filthy bodies and cohere them into a new and improved model social corpus. Although these lofty plans collapsed elsewhere, they had a long life in Peru: the year 1980 was marked by the return to power for the second term in office of the president-architect Fernando Belande Terry. Arguably, his entire political ca-reer was built upon an architectural rhetoric, and the solution to the problem of social housing was the constant of his platform.19 Both of his terms in office oversaw construction of new, centrally planned residential complexes in the capital and other citiesmost notably, in Lima, San Felipe and Santa Cruz in the 1960s and Torres de San Borja in the early 1980s (Figure 4).20 The projects of the latter term were championed in an official

Figure 3. Street-food vendors in the Historic Center of Lima, 1987. Photograph taken by members of Los Bestias in the process of preparing the urbanistic proposal LimaUtopa mediocre. Courtesy of Archivo Bestiario.


publication with the telling title Revolucin hab-itacional en democracia: Plan de vivienda del go-bierno peruano, 198085 (Housing revolution in democracy: Housing plan of the Peruvian gov-ernment, 198085).21 Its title adhered to the van-guardist discourse of revolution, implying both a radical break with the past (the San Borja Towers were supposed to open up a new era in the his-tory of Peru) and the dependence of the very oc-currence of that fracture on the social condition of democracy.22

Yet already by the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century, the programmatic drive toward development produced an unexpected cor-ollary ultimately responsible for reopening rifts in the spatial and ideological matrix of the na-tion-states: the migrant, the unwanted stranger. Not the benign wanderer who comes today and goes tomorrow, but the person who comes today and stays tomorrow, she polluted a neatly imag-ined fabric of the social organization of everyday life.23 In Peru a migrant from the provinces, a cholo, came to signify the aberrant, unpredictable actor who did not fit into the spatial and ideologi-cal matrix of the Peruvian nation-state.24 She, an explosive element, undermined the neat com-partmentalization of the planned whole; she in-fringed on the design of the envisaged structure, appropriated it, and resisted integration into pre-established patterns. She refused being adminis-tered and carved out her own space, constructed on the bases and priorities that contradicted pur-ist official tenets. Yet the migrants needs and demands also highlighted the phenomenon of urbanization without industrialization and the complete inadequacy of centralized housing and urban-planning policies.25

Even grand complexes like the Torres de San Borja could not come near to meeting the ac-tual housing needs in the vertiginously growing megalopolis: there were more than 400,000 can-didates for the 2,405 available units.26 Critiques of Belandes projects also pointed out formalist and stylistic shortcomings of the towers, accus-ing them of the lack of freshness and quality of the anterior housing projects and of being dull groupings of blocks lacking in spatial organi-zation.27 Finally, according to the most radical

Marxist stance, Belandes relentless promotion and reproduction of the principles of functional-ism and rationalism, firmly rooted in the logic of an urban plan, were the prime means of capital-ist production of urban space, inherently geared toward the middle and upper classes while leav-ing out those in most dire need.28

Peruvian architecture of the 1980s has been described, critiqued, and classified against the perceived failures of the modernism promoted by Belande. Award-winning shopping malls and headquarters of financial institutions that emerged during the decade are seen as exam-ples of an inevitable turn toward rootless post-modernism and the assertion of a new power: neoliberal capital.29 The better incarnations of the architectural practice are categorizedrather credulously applying Kenneth Framptons termas examples of the flourishing critical re-gionalism.30 Its iconic example is the beach house Casa Ghezzi, designed in 1984 by URP professor Juvenal Baracco (Figure 5).31 It is one of the four homes built by Baracco in a gated community in the district of Lurn, some forty kilometers south of Lima. The house is extolled for the use of in-digenous, traditional materialsits spacious in-terior patios and ample porches overlooking the Pacific Ocean are shaded by large bamboo-cane structuresand evocation of the pre-Hispanic architectural forms of the Peruvian coast.32

What is problematic about such a formalist reading of architectureand here, I echo Keith

Figure 4. Neighborhood complex Torres de San Borja, San Borja, Lima. Reprinted from Revolucin habitacional en democracia: Plan de vivienda del gobierno peruano, 19801985 (Lima: Empresa Nacional de Edificaciones, 1985).


Eggeners critique of critical regionalismis that the very presence of a particular construc-tion material is taken to mean something ab-solutely specific and the form of a building to signify with equal efficacy.33 The appearance of local materials, eucalyptus wood and bam-boo cane, in Baraccos beach houses is equated with the return to a somehow more authentic and more noble perhaps, because explicitly antimodernist tradition. However, the con-text and the subtleties of their deployment and functions are completely disregarded. This has profound repercussions in terms of the social and public roles of architecture. Baracco and his generation became disenchanted with a bu-reaucratic system that would simply not accept experimental prototypes for mass housing that used vernacular materials. Those materials were associated with poverty and backwardness and, as such, perceived as an offense to decent people.34 As a result, these architects turned to a new client base: an emergent affluent middle class.35 Simultaneously, they also rejected what they saw as an ideology and rhetoric of progress, abandoning the interest in large-scale, future-oriented public plans in favor of a psychological concern with the personal problems of the client, the designer, or the project.36 Hence, the indigenous and the local were divorced and displaced from the people who most commonly relied on them; instead, they were situated in a gated community, separatedboth physically

and legallyfrom the larger concerns of the city, and used to enhance the leisure of the privileged class. This shift toward indige nous materials in design can be seen as further reproducing and reinforcing the operative principle Incas s, indios no (Incas yes, Indians no)the politics that glo-rifies the indige nous past while ignoring (if not outright quelling) the realities of the indige nous present.37

Simultaneously, throughout the 1980s, the acute housing crisis deepened as the construc-tion industry was stalled by the progressively worsening economic crisis and state initia-tives were marred by corruption scandals. Even though neither the state nor the scant investment capital would respond to the needs of the popula-tion, voices against self-construction dominated official discussions. On the one hand, the efforts of migrants to provide any kind of roof for their heads were condemned as total chaos. On the other, many Marxist critics rebuked the official permissiveness that turned a blind eye toward and legalized informal processes. They criticized such policy as a reactionary solution that only ex-acerbated the problem while the existing super-structure, responsible for its emergence in the first place, remained unchanged and unscathed.38

Los Bestias: The Unmaking and Remaking ofArchitectureThe political and economic reality of Lima of the 1980s denied young architects professional opportunities to exercise their craft; the system and circumstances produced the architects that could not practice architecturea para-dox, given the rate of urban growth.39 Nonethe-less, Los Bestias chose to operate within the realm of their immediate possibilities. They undertook the actions necessary to constitute the kind of future thatunlike totalizing, teleo-logical utopias of either revolution or capitalist modernizationcould not be either known or designed.40 Adopting a tactic of land occupation and deploying vernacular and recycled materials that were available at hand, Los Bestias began by realizing a number of informal architectural interventions, which they called esquisses, on the grounds of the Ricardo Palma University. The

Figure 5. Juvenal Baracco, Casa Ghezzi. Malecn Jahuay, Lote 5, La Barca Beach, Lurn, Lima. Designed in 1983, constructed in 1984. Courtesy of Juvenal Baracco.


first esquisse took place in the turn-of-the-twen-tieth-century villa on the corner of Arequipa Av-enue and Dos de Mayo Street in the Miraflores district in September 1984. It was an impromptu appropriation of the patio for an event, a festi-val of art and music, presented on a stage put together with broken desks pulled out from stor-age, underneath a canopy woven from colorful yarn (Figure6).

The groups second large project, realized be-tween December 7 and 21, 1984, responded to the lack of a dedicated locale for the Department of Architecture. Called Des-hechos en arquitectura, it decisively reorganized the space of the newly constructed Universidad Ricardo Palma campus in the district of Surco, claiming the area for Los Bestias themselves. Since the Department of Ar-chitecture did not have its own building at the time, classes and workshops were divided be-tween the Department of Economy and the De-partment of Modern Languages.41 On the large, rectangular plaza between these two blocky buildings, parceled out by the grid of walkways and a parking lot, Los Bestias created a number of installations that they insisted spoke of their

reality. Each of these sculptural constructions was dedicated to a social theme that the group considered pertinent. These themes ranged from consumerism to terrorism, women, food, and ar-chitecture. Many of the individual installations were also embellished with a prolific number of hand-painted posters, banners, and signs. One of them, in an effort to compel the groups peers and assert that the whole enterprise was working to reveal their reality, pleaded, Help us. Work with us or help us with the expenses (Figure7). Some of them contained poems, while others had a much more programmatic charac-ter, speaking of the role of architects and archi-tecture in society. Perhaps somewhat ironically, given his professional endeavors at the time, Los Bestias quoted Juvenal Baracco. Addressing the necessary transformation of the role of middle-class professionals, the quotation postulated an individual ought to be capable of using his own cultural background to work with the majority to which he belonged.42

The rigid space of the plaza was altered not only by the very presence of the unruly construc-tions but also by the fact that Los Bestias altered

Figure 6. Primer esquisse del bestiario, September 1984. Department of Architecture, Universidad Ricardo Palma, currently Centro Cultural Ccori Wasi; corner of Arequipa Avenue and Dos de Mayo Street, Miraflores, Lima. Courtesy of Archivo Bestiario.


the pattern of established movement (Figure 8). They gathered stones and rocks from the con-struction site and laid out new curvilinear path-ways that traversed the space and led from one installation to another. Multiple festive gateswhose organic forms and junky embellishments contrasted sharply with the barren Brutalist de-sign of the campuspunctuated these new routes. These trails also physically connected the dispersed architects themselves. Similarly, such bringing together occurred through the incor-poration of signs that pointed to various locations that the Department of Architecture had inter-mittently occupied on Piura, Independencia, and Dos de Mayo Streets (see Figure 7).

If the moniker of the entire project, Des-hechos de arquitectura, can be understood as either the remnants or the unmaking of architecture, no other installation articulated Los Bestias po-sition more eloquently and directly than a pre-carious shack assembled under the banner of the

discipline (Figure 9). Its most crafted, crisp, and professional-looking elements were the sign and its geometric sans-serif lettering. Conversely, the huts frame was erected using bamboo canes; its sides were covered with planks of found ply-wood and cardboard; and its floor was laid out with branches. The frail construction stood in acute contradistinction to the solid brick-and-concrete buildings around it. For their installa-tions Los Bestias used materials they could find and salvage on site or acquire at very low cost. These materials happened to be poor and com-monly deployed in the so-called pueblos jvenes (young settlements or, less euphemistically, slums) of Lima. The vernacular, improvisa-tional building components aligned Los Bestias method with those used by squatters to claim the hillsides of the capital. They brought informal ar-chitecture from the periphery into the center of establishment. Yet, if the majority of installations performed a symbolic function, a small bamboo

Figure 7. Los Bestias, detail of one of the installations from Des-hechos en arquitectura, December 1984. Campus of Universidad Ricardo Palma, Santiago de Surco, Lima. Courtesy of Archivo Bestiario.


quincha, thatched with palm leaves and equipped with fruit crates as seating, had a practical, utili-tarian role: to provide shelter from the sun and a gathering space to rest and talk (Figure 10).43 Hence, just like the winding pathways, it marked the space for and by the collective itself.

With time, through word-of-mouth advertis-ing, a cohort of visual artists, musicians, and the-ater groups coalesced around the group, and their events quickly evolved into multimedia festivals, incorporating rock and folk music, performance, mural painting, art workshops, and scores of other activities.44 Within a couple of years, how-ever, the practice of Los Bestias would also tran-scend the world of the Limea youth subculture. By 1985 municipal officials noticed their energy and their ability to construct on shoestring bud-gets. As a result in 1986 the group was invited to construct the architectural setting for two cul-tural endeavors: the folk art fair held during La semana de integracin cultural latinoamericana (SICLA; Week of Latin American Cultural In-tegration), which took place in the Parque de la Exposicin in the center of the city, and El carpa

teatro del puente Santa Rosa (Tent theater of the Saint Rose bridge).

El carpa teatro (Figure 11) was an arts center established in the heart of Lima as a part of the program of Popular Cultural Participation by the municipal administration of the new mayor, Al-fonso Barrantes, a leader of the leftist coalition Izquierda Unida (United Left). Within the histor-ical context of the decade, the emergence of this

Figure 8. View of Des-hechos en arquitectura, 1984. Courtesy of Archivo Bestiario.

Figure 9. Los Bestias, Arquitectura from Des-hechos en arquitectura, 1984. Courtesy of Archivo Bestiario.


program was a rare opening in whichto use the words of Manuel Castellsthe relationship between the state and the city [was reconstructed] on the basis of their mutual grassroots.45 Progressive-thinking municipal officials were ready to welcome the spontaneous, rebellious so-cial mobilization fueled by young artists in order to channel it and engage disenfranchised inhabi-tants of El Cercado district.46 The Municipal Pro-gram of Popular Cultural Participation aimed to embrace these diverse groups and recognize the richness and variety of cultural forms that they had developed. This was an anthropologi-cal vision of culture conceived from the bottom up as an expression of the wide sectors of popu-lation. The municipality not only worked on

mobilizing various neighborhood associations but also sought their input and comments. We want the organized community to decide on the forms and priorities of the cultural activities in their locality, proclaimed the widely distributed promotional flyer.47 These goals of nurturing cul-ture came from the understanding that social problems of marginalized populations go far be-yond narrowly understood economic issues and that culture can be a useful tool of community empowerment.48 The assumption was that the people would actively participate in the endeavor. The plan is not to offer great spectacles/tricks to escape from reality. . . . The important thing is that the public becomes actors and stops being passive viewers.49

Despite a tight budget, the municipal officials committed to transforming a dilapidated lot on Tacna Avenue, in the center of the city, into an environment that would support the creative, liberating activities designed to take place inside. Multiple agents contributed to the overhaul of the space in its various stages. Initially, the very tent for the performances was assembled by a circus magician from the neighborhood, experienced in creating such structures with canvas bags for storing sugar and flour.50 Jos Nio, a professor at the Universidad Ricardo Palma and a special-ist in quincha construction, designed workshops in the back of the lot. The task delegated to Los Bestias was arguably their most ambitious and most architectural assignment. Using what they called nontraditional materials, Los Bes-tias erected the elaborate entrance to the theater and visually organized the environment.51 Form would not only make a symbolic statement but also perform a utilitarian social function. As before, they employed the stuff that was largely rejected in contemporary architecture sponsored by the state and private capitalthe stuff that, as such, refuted the concrete material discourse of modernism but that nonetheless had been used for generations in traditional rural and popular vernacular construction. To the customary as-sortment of eucalyptus timber, bamboo cane, wood, and woven reed mats, they addedas in their previous enterprisesrecycled and sal-vaged industrial materials.

Figure 10. Los Bestias, Quincha from Des-hechos en arquitectura, 1984. Courtesy of Archivo Bestiario.

Figure 11. El carpa teatro del puente Santa Rosa, 1986. Wall murals by artist Herbert Rodrguez. In the background (left) is the historic Convent of Santa Rosa of Lima. Tacna Avenue, Cercado de Lima, Lima. Courtesy of Archivo Bestiario.


The monumental gate, which welcomed the visitors to El carpa teatro, was perhaps the most noteworthy design element of the theaterfirst of all, simply because of its sheer size (Figure 12). The mostly wooden construction, three stories high, towered over the mural-covered brick wall surrounding the theater grounds. Two brightly painted triangular pillars, built out of eucalyptus and bamboo and tied together with rope, were culminated with a large lattice arch. It was as-sembled from planks of wood that framed a pair of circles with tiny diamond shapes in their cen-ters. This structural element was devised to har-monize with its historical surroundings, echoing the Baroque arches of the Convent of Santa Rosa, located right next door on Tacna Ave nue. The gate was accompanied by an equally high bam-boo tower, in which long, slender canes were in-geniously held together with car tires (Figure 13). Whereas the entrance arch was reminiscent of

colonial buildings, in front of it the architects de-signed a plaza with two concentric circles carved into the ground and laid out with stonea nod to traditional Incan structures (Figure 14).52 As a result, the entire structure was a heterogeneous entity, with references to indigenous, colonial, and popular contemporary traditions that paral-leled the historical and social makeup of the city of Lima.

In order to embrace the diverse groups and fulfill the mission of the municipal program,all events at the theater were free and open to the public. They consisted of a mixture of tradition-ally understood spectatorship and events that aimed to enable and encourage the creative skills of ordinary individuals. Saturdays were dedi-cated to youth, with the evenings filled with underground rock music, and Sundays were planned for family programs, including concerts of traditional Peruvian music and performances

Figure 12. Los Bestias, entrance gate to El carpa teatro, 1986. Courtesy of Archivo Bestiario.


of childrens theater. Dozens of artists passed through the Carpa scene (Figure 15). They in-cluded punk groups, the leading voice of Peru-vian black music, Susana Baca, and the now legendary theater group Yuyachkani, which was renowned for its collective, experimental crea-tion, deep engagement with grassroots commu-nity issues, and commitment to social mobiliza-tion and advocacy.53 The programming consisted also of four workshops aimed at nurturing the innate creativity of the population: an art work-shop lead by the young but seasoned Herbert Rodrguez;54 a theater workshop run by Mauro Sifuentes; a photography workshop organized by the group Agencia No. 2, which set itself the

goal of also organizing the traveling exhibition The Height and Crisis of the Aristocratic Neighbor-hood; and finally, a workshop of testimony and oral history that was run by the students of the School of Literature of San Marcos University.55 The six months of El carpa teatros operations were widely hailed as a success:

In its short but effective existence, [the theater] managed to convene a good quantity of people dedicated not only to a profitable business, not only to entertainment and amusement, but also to informing, teaching, and debating through dif-ferent forms of artistic expression. . . . The people of the neighborhood got engaged, the notice spread through the blocks uptown and downtown, through the peas . . . so, they came: mothers, fa-thers, children, the foreigners, the locals. . . . Many people of different backgrounds and motivations began to visit. . . . We believe that the people who worked on this dream showed that with the imagi-nation and will, you can do many things.56

This dream of El carpa teatro was the vision of inclusive, participatory democracy. The mu-nicipality, which promoted its program with the slogan United we can, divided we do nothing, was open to embracing both unruly youth cul-ture and the social groups disenfranchised by traditional political processes. Within collabora-tive processes such as the creation of the theater, conflict was bound to emerge, and Los Bestias themselves attested to the fact that the trans-formation of conflict in order to achieve their common goals was one of the main productive challenges of their work.57 Inclusion of the multi-plicity of voicesvoices of affirmation or dissent, voices that might contradictwas at the core of dynamics as small as Des-hechos de arquitectura and El carpa teatro and as large as the emergence of the grassroots movements of the Peruvian po-bladores.58 In order to emerge collectively on the social scene, however, both youth subculture and newcomers to Lima had to claim space through which they would assert and articulate their ex-istence. As Henri Lefebvre postulated, the new type of urban social relations could emerge only if specialized knowledgethat of architects,

Figure 13. Los Bestias, entrance gate to El carpa teatro during the process of construction, 1986. Courtesy of Archivo Bestiario.

Figure 14. Los Bestias, detail of the entrance to El carpa teatro during the process of construction, 1986. Courtesy of Archivo Bestiario.


urban planners, and administratorswas uni-fied with praxis, with the everyday lived actions of human groups.59

According to architect and urbanist Wiley Ludea, Peru has never really possessed pub-lic space.60 Historically, its vast lands have been controlled, owned, and regulated by colonial and postcolonial oligarchies that have ruled this highly artificially constructed nation. Through-out the second half of the twentieth century, modest grassroots claims to segments of priva-tized spacemade by the underprivileged new-comers from the Peruvian provinceswere seen as contributions to the increasing fragmentation of the capital.61 This challenge to traditionally un-derstood public space also increased tensions be-tween the criollo (creole) Limeos and the cholos (Andean migrants).

Los Bestias projects were developed on the principles of self-construction and collectivity. Their continuous desire to open up their process and involve other people should be read as an at-tempt to counteract the intensifying fragmenta-tion of the country by materializing do-it-yourself nichessuch as a spatially reorganized plaza of the university campus or an urban theaterin which shared or communal experiences could take place.62 The group intruded upon spaces they could not necessarily claim as legally theirs in order to carve out independent liberated zones where the creation of a total artwork could occurplaces in which visual art, music, the-ater, poetry, pedagogy, and empowerment came into spontaneous free play, bringing together disparate, unruly free agents and engaging those individuals who had been excluded from partici-pation in the cultural projects in the capital.

As the civil war encroached upon Lima, how-ever, any form of cultural, collective grassroots expression became a suspicious site of poten-tial political dissent that had to be quelled im-mediately. The decree of the Ministry of War of July 4, 1986, permitted the organization of cultural days on the condition that they would not touch upon any political matters, include protest music, or incorporate any act related to the recent events in the prisons of the capital.63 That phrase referred to a brutal repression of

riots in Frontn, Lurigancho, and Santa Mnica that resulted in nearly three hundred dead, in-cluding over one hundred prisoners who were executed extrajudicially. Following the munici-pal elections of 1986, El carpa teatro was closed

Figure 15. Los Bestias rock band performing in El carpa teatro, 1986. Courtesy of Archivo Bestiario.

Figure 16. El carpa teatro destroyed. Photograph taken in the first days of January 1987. Courtesy of Archivo Bestiario.


Figure 17. Los Bestias, detail of one of six display panels of the project LimaUtopa mediocre, 1987. Plaza at the end of the Paseo de la Repblica taken over by self-constructed architecture. Center right, the Palace of Justice; upper left, the colorful Centro Cvico; below Centro Cvico, the Sheraton Hotel; below the hotel, the Museo de Arte Italiano. Courtesy of Archivo Bestiario.


promptly, and the fantastic decorations and con-structions created by the artists and architects were destroyed (Figure 16). Pervasive violence and political pressures eventually fractured Los Bestias, too, with the members of the group dis-persing along distinctand sometimes much more orthodoxpolitical lines.

Nonetheless, regardless of divisions within the group, in this volatile context Los Bestias final project must be seen as a defiant stance not only against impotent official urban planning and design policies but also against institution-alized violence and the crackdown of the state on grassroots activities. In 1987 designated by UNESCO as the International Year of Shelterfor the Homelessthe Congreso Latino-americano de Escuelas y Facultades de Arqui-tectura (CLEFA; Latin American Congress of the Schools and Departments of Architecture) was held in Cuzco. Los Bestias presented to the congress LimaA Mediocre Utopia, a critical theoretical proposal in architecture and urban-

ism (Figures 17 and 18). The proposal staged a takeover of the Historic Center of Limawith its symbolic sites of governmental powerby rural migrants. The people would occupy the Palace of Justice, Centro Cvico (a New Brutalist complex of government offices constructed in the early 1970s), the Sheraton Hotel, and the empty plaza between them, reserved for the main station of an electric train. They would invade the center, using spatial channels provided by the nonfunc-tioning tracks and the main northsouth artery of Paseo de la Repblica.64 There, they would erect their ownmeaning self-constructed buildings and institutions. They would also trans form the monotonous concrete greyness of the city with a carnivalesque array of bright colors of ludic aesthetics. Hence, Los Bestias rec-ognized that space was, as Manuel Castells has suggested of urban movements, necessary as a physical base from which the populace could or-ganize their autonomy against the institutional power, that the control of space was a major

Figure 18. View of the Paseo de la Repblica from the Centro Cvico, with the Palace of Justice (lower left). Photograph taken by the members of Los Bestias in the process of preparing the urbanistic proposal LimaUtopa mediocre. Courtesy of Archivo Bestiario.


battle in the historic war between people and the state.65 They rejected the power that sought to discipline bodies through modern architecture and brutal force and aligned themselves with the values and materials of everyday, bottom-up, need- responsive action and construction.

ConclusionLos Bestias projects render visible a number of issues thatto a large extentremain hidden undercurrents of architectural practice and urban life. The demands for physical spacesboth built, constructed infrastructure and open spaces with truly public accessunderlie the discourses of ar-chitectural and urban development. Its shape and principle are at stake for politicians and their pub-lic policies and a wide variety of resistance move-ments alikefor the so-called global metropolises and the Third World cities.66 As David Harvey has recently written, The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from the question what kind of people we want to be, what kinds of social relations we seek, what relations to nature we cherish, what style of life we desire, what aes-thetic values we hold.67

In the context of urban regeneration projects, architecture continues to be associated with permanence and, especially in economically depressed postindustrial areas, with expensive landmark buildings, which are thought to be capable of transforming secondary cities or dis-tricts into new cultural destinations.68 Despite calls to the contrary, far less attention is paid to provisional or ephemeral projects, particularly on the policy level.69 Since the global fiscal crisis of 2008, however, it has arguably been temporary, often vernacular architectural and infrastructural enterprisesfood trucks, urban gardens, pop-up markets, and performance spacesthat have most profoundly reshaped the spaces of everyday urban action and interaction.70 Although some are aimed at pragmatic change, other endeavors blend architecture, art, and activism, inciting the aesthetic and affective sensibilities of urban dwell-ers.71 This array of ephemeral projects can be seen as yet another updated means of the grassroots claiming the Lefebvrian right to the city.72

The assessment of such ventures is often dif-

ficult and messy, as the critic Mimi Zeiger has recently claimed.73 Los Bestias projects remind us that meaning is based on context and that ap-pearance, material, or duration alone cannot be used as effective criteria of evaluation. Thirty years ago in Peru, seemingly emblematic bam-boo could signify poverty in a squatter settle-ment, elitist critical regionalism in an upper-class architect-designed home, and do-it-yourself democratic space in the installations by architec-ture students. Hence, the crucial question to ask is, How do the functional uses of specific mate-rials or approaches to design contribute to the transformation of social relations and everyday life in the city?

Los Bestias ephemeral, makeshift proposals were crucial exercises in the grassroots efforts to reformulate beliefs regarding who would have access and how to access and attain the right to the cityto planning and to utilization of urban space. Between the presumed anarchism of the squatter settlements and the planning of the governmental and private-investment projects, all struggled for control over the space of the Peruvian capital. Los Bestias endeavors called for a collective existence rooted in bottom-to-top decision-making processes and vastly expanded egalitarian participatory democracy. Their com-munity would articulate itself from the ground up, in opposition to homogeneous entities pro-grammed from top to bottom by the dominant ideologiesbe it the nascent neoliberal state or the Leninist-Maoist cause of the relentless Shin-ing Path. Instead, Los Bestias envisioned a non-hierarchical collective body that was organized, to evoke the words of John Friedmann, in op-position to this world [of social planning and the state], asserting itself in a struggle to open new territories for itself.74 From the mundane condi-tions of the appalling present, from the detritus of the quotidian, such a collective body worked from the premise that neither ideological pro-grams nor discipline and violence could inscribe shared aspirations into the people. It refuted bu-reaucratic and authoritarian claims to social in-tegration and coherence. Rather, it operated on participatory, nonidentitarian principles of sub-versive, pragmatic realism of an anarchist kind.


au thor biogr aphyDorota Biczel is a doctoral candidate at the Cen-ter for Latin American Visual Studies (CLAVIS) in the Department of Art and Art History at The University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation research focuses on artistic and architectural urban interventions and the production of space in Lima, Peru, between 1978 and 1989.

notes1. I take the term pirate urbanization from Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (New York: Verso, 2006), Kin-dle edition, chap. 2. The image is a color photocopy of the photograph of a quincha from the project Des-hechos en arquitectura, realized in December 1984 on the campus of the Universidad Ricardo Palma in Limas Surco district.

2. Among the groups members were visual artists Alfredo Mrquez and lex ngeles; architects Jhoni Marina, Jos Luis Garca, Juan Carlos Lpez, Sandro Passalacua, Javier Bonifaz, and Claudia Fernndez; and architectural historian Elio Martuccelli, who are currently involved in preserving Los Bestias legacy. Painter Herbert Rodrguez worked with the group from the very beginning and, following the groups dissolution in 1987, went on to form the graphic-arts collective Taller NN with Mrquez, ngeles, Garca, and another Beast, Enrique Quique Wong. The very name of the group, like the amorphous body that con-stituted it, remains debatable: the projects were pre-sented under the monikers Los Bestias, Las Bestias, and El Bestiario, inspired by the title of the first col-lection of short stories by the Argentine writer Julio Cortzar, Bestiario (1951).

3. Sissi Acha, Arquitectos con caras sucias, Am-auta, November 13, 1986, 2223; Elio Martuccelli, Des-hechos de arquitectura: Reyes de basura, reinas de chatarra, Arquitextos 23 (2008): 7788. All the translations from Spanish are the authors.

4. The Peruvian Internal Conflict lasted from 1980 to 2000. Its outbreak coincided with the first demo-cratic elections following a twelve-year-long military dictatorship and was marked by the burning of ballot boxes in the Andean province of Ayacucho on the eve of the 1980 presidential election. This gesture signaled the taking up of arms against the state by the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist guerilla group Partido Comunista del PerSendero Luminoso (The Shining Path), joined

in 1984 by the Movimiento Revolucionario Tpac Amaru (MRTA). The bloodiest conflict, following the Conquest, in the history of Peru, it claimed nearly 70,000 lives, as accounted for by the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Comisin de la Ver-dad y Reconciliacin; CVR). Massive crimes and abuses of human rights occurred during the dictatorship of Alberto Fujimori (19922000), even after the 1992 capture of the leader of Sendero, Abimael Guzmn. See the commissions final report at Comisin de la Verdad y Reconciliacin, Informe Final, 2003, http://www .cverdad.org.pe/ifinal/index.php.

5. Activities of the group coincide with the admin-istrations of the presidents Fernando Belande Terry (198085) and Alan Garca (198590).

6. Fernando Belande Terry (19122002) was the president of Peru for two nonconsecutive terms, 196368 and 198085. Educated at the University of Miami and the University of Texas at Austin, he was a main champion and political force behind the im-plementation of the principles of architectural mod-ernism in the country, starting with the foundation of the magazine El Arquitecto Peruano in 1937. For a basic study in English, see Sharif Kahatt, Agrupacin Espacio and the CIAM Peru Group, in Third World Modernism, ed. Duanfang Lu, 85110 (New York: Routledge, 2011). On Belandes deployment of the discourse of indigenous patrimony during his politi-cal campaigns of the late 1950s and 1960s, see Luis Castaeda, Pre-Columbian Skins, Developmentalist Souls: The Architect as Politician, in Latin American Modern Architectures: Ambiguous Territories, ed. Patri-cio del Real and Helen Gyger, 93114 (New York: Rout-ledge, 2013).

7. Des-hechos en arquitectura does not have a straight-forward translation into English. Deshecho is a past participle of the verb deshacer, which means to undo, to unmake, or to destroy. The title then could be understood as Architecture unmade, Unmaking of architecture, or, even, Remnants of architecture. The English titles of the two following projects are Tent Theater of the Saint Rose Bridge and LimaA Me-diocre Utopia.

8. In a July 2011 interview, lex ngeles told me that the group would have used spaceship materials if they were something that was there.

9. This analysis owes the most to the writings of Henri Lefebvre. I relied on Henri Lefebvre, The


Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991); Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, trans. and ed. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996); Mary McLeod, Henri Lefebvres Critique of Everyday Life: An Introduction, in Architecture of the Everyday, ed. Deborah Berke and Steven Harris, 929 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997).

10. The students of the Universidad Ricardo Palma (URP) were also commonly seen as less apt, the cast-offs of the more selective institutions, literally uncivi-lized beasts, which contributed to coining the name of the collective. Alfredo Mrquez claims that the best-prepared and most financially secure people studied at the more prestigious, long-established schools UNI (Universidad Nacional de Ingeniera) and PUCP (Pontificia Universidad Catlica del Per). Alfredo Mrquez and lex ngeles, interview with the author, July 2011.

11. Las Bestias, Boletn de la Universidad Ricardo Palma (Lima: Universidad Ricardo Palma, 1985).

12. Las Bestias, Boletn de la Universidad Ricardo Palma.

13. The cultural movement to which the group re-ferred can be most immediately understood as the nascent Limea Movida Subterrnea (Underground Scene). Olga Rodrguez Ulloa, Movimiento Subter-rneo y espacios polticos en la cultura peruana de la dcada del 80, Critica Latinoamericana, http:// criticalatinoamericana.com/movimiento-subterraneo-y- espacios-politicos-en-la-cultura-peruana-de-la-decada-del-ochenta.

14. Henry Dietz, Urban Poverty, Political Participa-tion, and the State: Lima 19701990 (Pittsburgh: Uni-versity of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), 2.

15. Comisin de la Verdad y Reconciliacin, In-forme Final.

16. See Dietz, Urban Poverty, 2; Jean-Claude Driant, Las barriadas de Lima: Historia e interpretacin (Lima: Instituto Francs de Estudios Andinos and Centro de Estudios y Promocin del Desarrollo, 1991), 183.

17. This view of the period is common. See, for example, Gustavo Buntinx, La utopa perdida: Im-genes de la revolucin bajo el segundo belaundismo, Mrgenes 1 (March 1986): 5298.

18. As Manuel Castells observes, the land inva-sions could occur and be tolerated only due to either the permissiveness of the officials or the strength of

the urban social movements. According to him, the increasing cases of land takeovers in Lima happened mostly because of the electoral game of populist clien-telism played by the subsequent governments, from the regime of General Manuel Odra (194856) to that of the democratically elected Fernando Belande Terry (196368). The Revolutionary Government of the Peruvian Armed Forces of General Velasco Al-varado (196880) ended up legalizing land invasions after the public conflict with the Catholic Church, caused by the brutal repression of the squatters of Pamplona in May 1971. As a result of this political maneuver, the barriadas were transformed into of-ficially recognized pueblos jvenes. The regime also worked on political organization of the new districts, andas Castells notesit was so successful that the game eventually turned against them. By the 1980s the pobladores were successfully petitioning on their own behalf for their own self-defined needs, contrary to the program and expectations staked out by those in power. Manuel Castells, The City and the Grass-roots (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 19094. For example, in 1980 the First National Con-gress of New Settlements (Primero Congreso Nacio-nal de PPJJ) took place in Lima. The group formulated a broad program of economic, social, educational, and cultural demands that included making the Quechua language official. It also called for political autonomy and democracy of the neighborhood movements, cut-ting itself off from the states sponsorship. See Con-federacin General de Pobladores del Per, Acuerdos del Primero Congreso Nacional de PPJJ y UUPP del

Per, Lima, July, 46, 1980.19. Wiley Ludea Urquizo, Las Torres de San Borja o

el ocaso de la urbanstica (Lima: Lluvia Editores, 1983); Wiley Ludea Urquizo, Tres bueno tigres: Vanguardia y urbanismo en el Per del Siglo XX (Lima: Ur[b]es Edi-ciones y Colegio de Arquitectos del Per, 2004).

20. PREVI (Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda), which left room for substantial agency of the inhabi-tants, allowing and providing for expansion and modi-fication of the basic housing units, can reasonably be seen as an exception, since its foundational principles went very much against a closed, highly structured ordering of residential complexes. See Fernando Gar-ca-Huidobro et al., El tiempo construye!: El Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda (PREVI) de Lima: Gnesis

y desenlace / Time Builds!: The Experimental Housing


Project (PREVI), Lima: Genesis and Outcome (Barce-lona: Gustavo Gilli, 2008).

21. Revolucin habitacional en democracia: Plan de vivienda del gobierno peruano, 19801985 (Lima: ENACEEmpresa Nacional de Edificaciones, 1985).

22. Ludea Urquizo, Las Torres de San Borja, 15.23. Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social

Forms, ed. D. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 143, as quoted in Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 144.

24. Cholo is a new type of mestizo who emerges with the phenomenon of urbanization. Cholo is not the mestizo of blood but rather a person of indige-nous origin who tries to assimilate into the dominant culture. For a long time, a cholo was perceived as a person who was basically forcefully uprooted from his or her original community and lost his or her authen-tic identity, with disturbing social repercussions.

25. The term urbanization without socialization aptly applies to the situation of Lima (as well as other megapolises of the so-called Third World) in the second half of the twentieth century. Davis, Planet of Slums.

26. Ludea Urquizo, Las Torres de San Borja, 10.27. Enrique Bonilla Di Tolla, Los 80s, in El arqui-

tecto y su obra: 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 (Lima: Agencia Es-paola de la Cooperacin Internacional, Centro Cul-tural de Espaa, Universidad Ricardo Palma, 2009), 147. Ludea Urquizo in Las Torres de San Borja hits a similar register, focusing on the flawed distribution of different functional spaces of the complex and its separation from the fabric of the city.

28. Ludea Urquizo, Las Torres de San Borja, 52.29. This is how Elio Martuccelli characterized the

building of Banco de Crdito in La Molina, which won the main prize of the VII Biennial of Lima in 1988. Elio Martuccelli, Arquitectura para una ciudad frag-mentada: Ideas, proyectos y edificios en la Lima del siglo

XX (Lima: Universidad Ricardo Palma, 2000), 212.30. Kenneth Frampton, Critical Regionalism:

Modern Architecture and Cultural Identity, in Mod-ern Architecture: A Critical History (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992), 31427. Frampton deployed the term as a response to the perceived homogenization of the world by consumer mass culture, especially dan-gerous to developing nations. Seeking to rejuvenate the emancipatory aspects of the modernist legacy, he sought to identify regional schools that would re-

interpret local vernaculars in pursuit of regionally based world culture (327).

31. Bonilla Di Tolla, Los 80s; Martuccelli, Arqui-tectura para una ciudad fragmentada. Interestingly, Barraco is credited with some major pedagogical in-novations instituted at the university, most notably, the creation of so-called vertical workshops. Many of the Beasts were his students; however, according to the former members of the group, their relationship was to a large degree contentious.

32. See Bonilla Di Tolla, Los 80s; Martuccelli, Arquitectura para una ciudad fragmentada. For the one comprehensive monograph of Baraccos work, see Juvenal Baracco, Juvenal Baracco: Un universo en casa (Bogot: Facultad de Arquitectura, Universidad de los Andes; Miami: School of Architecture, University of Miami, 1988).

33. Keith Eggener, Placing Resistance: A Critique of Critical Regionalism, Journal of Architectural Edu-cation 55, no. 4 (May 2002): 22837.

34. See an interview with Baracco in Juvenal Baracco, 38.

35. Baracco, Juvenal Baracco, 38.36. Baracco, Juvenal Baracco, 52, 126.37. For the historical roots of this phenomenon,

see Cecilia Mendez G., Incas Si, Indios No: Notes on Peruvian Creole Nationalism and Its Contemporary Crisis, Journal of Latin American Studies 28, no. 1 (February 1996): 197225.

38. For an exemplary debate, see Andrew Maskrey and Gilbero Romero, Auto-construccin: Mito o so-lucin, Plaza Mayor 2 (1982): 3538; Autoayuda y vivienda, Habitar 1 (1983): 912; Andrew Maskrey and Gilbero Romero, Mas all del viviendismo, Plaza Mayor 7 (1983): 1112. Such perspectives per-sist today. For example, in Planet of Slums Mike Davis condemns John Turners celebrated model of self-help and legalization of spontaneous urbanization as an amalgam of anarchism and neoliberalism that spurred radical departure from the policies of public housing, led to the withdrawal of the state, roman-ticized the cost and results of slum upgrading, and, finally, brought about commodification of informal housing.

39. Alfredo Mrquez, interview with the author, Lima, September 2010.

40. John Friedmann, Insurgencies: Essays in Planning Theory (New York: Routledge, 2011), Kindle edition.


41. Alfredo Mrquez, interview with the author, Lima, July 2011.

42. The full quote reads: Al eliminar la ansiedad del ascenso social por la adopcin del otro cosmos que viene implcito en el conocimiento que se imparte [en la universidad] se podr producir individuos que sean capaces de extraer de su propia cultura para enfrentar coherentemente al medio y al sistema junto a las may-oras a las que pertenecen, en ese momento el ttulo universitario habr dejado de ser de la nobleza.

43. Martuccelli, Des-hechos de arquitectura, 82. Quincha is the word that the members of the group themselves use in reference to this construction. It evokes a traditional colonial construction system in which wood and bamboo frames are covered with mud and plaster. Alfredo Mrquez and lex ngeles, interview with author, August 2012.

44. Here, I would like to mention the concert De-nuncia por la vida that was supposed to take place on September 21, 1985, on the campus of Univer-sidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (UNMSM), organized by Herbert Rodrguez to protest human rights violations and bloody massacres in the prov-inces. The event, conceived as free and open to the public, was intended to bring together the spontane-ous generational movement, 15 [underground rock] groups and performances of art and architecture. The concert never took place, however. While it is not clear if they were sympathizers of Sendero or hard-line Marxist leaders of the Student Federation of San Marcos University, some youth, outraged at the ap-propriation of the circle-A symbol for anarchy and the swastika by the artists, accused them of being agents of Western imperialism and kicked them off the university grounds. Musicians and artists moved to the roof of one housing block in the project Unidad vecinal no. 3 to continue with the event, but they ended up being thrown out by the police. The organization com mittee to the rector of UNMSM, Antonio Cornejo Polar, September 11, 1985, collec-tion of Herbert Rodrguez.

45. Castells, City and the Grassroots, 14.46. The two agencies directly involved were Secre-

tara Municipal de Educacin y Cultura and Oficina de Participacin Vecinal.

47. Flyer in the collection of Herbert Rodrguez.48. For example, see John Friedmann, Rethinking

Poverty: The Dis/Empowerment Model, in Insurgencies.

49. Juan Luis Dammert, coordinator of the cul-tural promoters of the six municipal agencies of El Cercado district, quoted in Sissi Acha, Arquitectos con caras sucias, Amauta, November 13, 1986, 22.

50. lex ngeles to the author, e-mail, February 12, 2013.

51. Acha, Aquitectos con caras sucias, 22.52. Alfredo Mrquez, interview with the author,

Lima, July 2011.53. For more information on Yuyachkani, see Yuy-

achkani: Performance and Politics in Peru, Hemi-spheric Institute website, http://hemisphericinstitute.org/cuaderno/yuyachkani/index.html.

54. Born in Lima in 1959, Rodrguez established himself as one of the most important artists of the 1980s, exhibiting at the XVII Biennial of So Paulo in 1983 and I Havana Biennial in 1984. More recently, he has been a vocal cultural activist. Between 1976 and 1981, he studied at the School of Art of the Catho-lic University of Peru in Lima. As a student, he was a member of the important experimental artistic group EPS Huayco (197981). In 1982 he cofounded Artis-tas Visuales Asociados. He participated in all of the events organized by Los Bestias and is credited by the group with teaching them serigraphy.

55. Acha, Arquitectos con caras sucias, 22. The end product of the literature workshop was the book Habla la ciudad (Lima: Municipalidad de Lima Metropolitana/ Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 1986).

56. Paul Gogin, La carpa teatro: El suplicio de Santa Rosa, newspaper clipping, n.d., G3.

57. Acha, Arquitectos con caras sucias, 22.58. Poblador can have multiple connotations in

Spanish. Here, it indicates an urban squatter or a semi-legal settler.

59. Especially useful in understanding Lefebvres position are Philosophy and the City, 8693, Spec-tral Analysis, 13946, and The Right to the City, 14760, in Writings on Cities.

60. Wiley Ludea Urquizo, interview with the au-thor, September 2010.

61. Such a view of Lima persists. See Pablo Vega Centeno, ed., Lima, diversidad y fragmentacin de una metrpoli emergente (Quito: Organizacin Latinoameri-cana y del Caribe de Centros Histricos, 2009).

62. Or to unite the dispersion. See Martuccelli, Arquitectura para una ciudad fragmentada, 243.

63. Ministry of War, Decree No. 5887, July 4, 1986,


collection of Alfredo Mrquez. For the prison riots, see Comisin de la Verdad y Reconciliacin, Las ejecucio-nes extrajudiciales del penal de el Frontn y el Lurigan-cho (1986), 2003, http://www.cverdad.org.pe/ifinal/pdf/TOMO%20VII/Casos%20Ilustrativos-UIE/2.67 .FRONTON%20Y%20LURIGANCHO.pdf.

64. The electric train, the landmark project of the first presidency of Alan Garca (198590), can be seen as yet another testimony to the failure and weaken-ing of the state. For more than twenty years, gigantic steel-enforced concrete pillars that supported nothing appeared as brutally materialized ghosts in the fabric of the city, attesting to the collapse of the central tech-nocratic planning. The trains official opening in July 2011 preceded by days the inauguration into office of the successor of Garcas second term (200611), Ol-lanta Humala. It did not, however, begin actual func-tioning until March 2012.

65. Castells, City and the Grassroots, 70. Castells was indebted to Lefebvre for many of his formulations. What distinguishes The City and the Grassroots is Cas-tellss insistence on the dependence of social move-ments on the material structure from which specific cities arise. For a critique of Lefebvre and Castells and their relationship to their Marxist foundations, see Ira Katznelson, Towards a Respatialized Marxism: Lefe-bvre, Harvey, and Castells, in Marxism and the City (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), Kindle edition.

66. For example, see James Holston, Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity

in Brazil (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008); Ana Sugranyes and Charlotte Mathivet, eds., Cities for All: Proposals and Experiences towards the

Right to the City (Santiago, Chile: Habitat Interna-tional Coalition, 2010); Neil Brenner, Peter Marcuse, and Margit Mayer, eds., Cities for People, and Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City (New York: Routledge, 2010). Among recent cases deserving special mention are student-led protest movements concentrated in Santiago, Chile; Spains Movimiento 15-M (also known as the movement of the indignados); the Occupy Wall Street movement; and the Canada-originated, indigenous Idle No More.

67. David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (London: Verso, 2012), 4.

68. The global museum-building boom, a prime example of such an approach, has been extensively discussed both in professional and popular literature and press. For recent analysis of the common falla-cies associated with the desire to reproduce the Bilbao effect, see Joanna Woronkowicz et al., Set in Stone: Building Americas New Generation of Arts Facilities,

19942008 (Chicago: Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago, 2012), http://culturalpolicy.uchicago.edu/setinstone.

69. On mobile and temporary architecture, see Rob-ert Kronenburg, Flexible: Architecture That Responds to Change (London: Laurence King, 2007); Robert Kro-nenburg, Portable Architecture (Burlington, Mass.: Ar-chitectural Press, 2003); Houses in Motion: The Gene-sis, History and Development of the Portable Building (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Academy, 2002). For a recent assessment in the popu lar press, see Allison Ar-ieff, Its Time to Rethink Temporary, New York Times, December 19, 2011, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes .com/2011/12/19/its-time-to-rethink-temporary.

70. For a down-to-earth appraisal of DIY urban-ism, see Mimi Zeiger, The Interventionists Tool-kit series, Design Observer, January 21, 2011March 27, 2012, http://places.designobserver.com/feature/the-interventionists-toolkit/24308.

71. A multiplicity of recent exhibitions speak to the widespread popularity and perceived importance of such projects. Especially worth mentioning are Living as Form, curated for Creative Time by Nato Thomp-son, Historic Essex Street Market, New York, Septem-ber 24October 16, 2011; Oh, My Complex: On Unease at Beholding the City, curated by Hans D. Christ and Iris Dressler, Wrttembergischer Kunstverein Stutt-gart, May 17July 29, 2012.

72. On the resuscitation and current relevance of the Lefebvrian concept, see Harvey, Rebel Cities.

73. Zeiger, The Interventionists Toolkit: Our Cities, Ourselves, Design Observer, 12 September 12, 2011, http://places.designobserver.com/feature/the-interventionists-toolkit-part-3/29908.

74. Friedmann, Insurgencies, chap. 3.

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Biczel Viewpoint Fall2013