Effects of neighborhood upgrading programs on domestic violence in Bolivia

By Nora Ruth Libertun de Duren

Landlocked in the center of South America, Bolivia experienced rapid urbanization only in recent decades. Its urban population became a majority in the 1990s, almost three decades later than the rest of Latin America’s southern cone. However, the country has made up for lost time since then with a very sharp transition from a rural to an urban society. The 2012 urbanization rate was 6.75 percent, more than four times the average for the rest of the region. Currently, one in three urban residents in Bolivia is a rural migrant who arrived in a city between 2006 and 2011 (Trohanis, Zaengerling, & Sanchez-Reaza, 2015). By 2025, three-quarters of Bolivia’s projected 14 million people will live in cities (UN-DESA, 2012). As in many developing countries, the majority of rural migrants in Bolivia settle in informal neighborhoods in peripheral areas of the country’s largest cities. It is estimated that 45 percent of Bolivia’s urban residents reside in an informal neighborhood (IDB, 2016). The housing units in these neighborhoods often resemble rural dwellings; they are usually self-built, and they are not connected to basic services such as water and sanitation. The neighborhoods frequently have unpaved, fuzzily demarcated, and unlighted roads of diverse widths. Accordingly, property boundaries among residents are blurry and may lead to conflicts among neighbors. Nevertheless, lack of formal titles does not preclude the existence of an active real estate market (Birch et al., 2016). Properties are traded and leased. There is an important income inequality within informal neighborhood residents; those who rent tend to be significantly poorer than those who own property (Talukdar, 2018). Typically, informal neighborhoods residents are more exposed to violence and insecurity, given that police and firemen do not often service these neighborhoods (Perlman, 2010). While there are no official crime statistics in Bolivia for these neighborhoods, residents report a high sense of insecurity (Gamboa, 2014); a phenomenon seen in informal neighborhoods in other countries, too (Parks, 2014). Also, while there are no formal statistics on violence against women, its main risk factors. -family history, early cohabitation, alcohol abuse, and low level of education- (Klugman et al., 2014)- are highly prevalent in informal neighborhoods (McIlwaine, 2013).

World Development Perspectives. Volume 19, September 2020, 100231