Valeria Barrientos stands in the recreational area of La Containera, the modern complex of 120 social dwellings that was inaugurated in 2017 inside Villa 31, a shantytown embedded in a central area of Buenos Aires. The rooftops of the buildings are covered by solar panels, which guarantee electricity for the residents. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Feb 12 2019 (IPS)

Solar panels shine on the rooftop terraces of 10 neat buildings with perfectly straight lines and of uniform height, an image of modernity that contrasts with the precariously-built dwellings with unplastered concrete block walls just a few metres away, with rooms added in a disorderly manner, surrounded by a tangle of electric cables.

Villa 31, the most famous shantytown in the capital of Argentina, due to its location in a central area of Buenos Aires, is undergoing a transformation process, not without controversy, in which clean energies play an important role.

The State is building hundreds of new homes with rooftops covered by solar panels, which bring energy to a neighborhood where access to basic services has always depended on informal and unsafe connections."The change today is huge, because the new houses have a guaranteed power supply and do not have to pay for the energy. In addition, the surplus electricity can be injected into the grid." -- Rodrigo Alonso

For decades, Buenos Aires city government authorities periodically promised to eradicate Villa 31, which first emerged nearly 90 years ago, and today is a postcard of poverty, which at the same time shows the vitality of thousands of people who carry out commercial and productive activities despite their deprivation anddependence on the informal economy.

But the threats turned into hope in 2009, when a local law was passed that ordered the urbanisation of the Villa, paving streets, giving property titles to the local residents and – in short – turning it into just another neighborhood of a city that historically saw it as a foreign body impossible to hide.

In Argentina, the word for slums and shantytowns is villa. A survey released by the government in 2018 indicates that around the country there are 4,228 villas, home to around 3.5 million people, out of a total population of 44 million.

In particular, in Buenos Aires proper there are 233,000 people – or 7.6 per cent of the population, not counting the working-class suburbs – living in shantytowns.

The urbanisation of Villa 31 is a monumental task that only began to be carried out in 2016 and today is slowly changing the face of a veritable city within a city, which has grown enormously in size in recent years.

According to the latest official data, 43,190 people live there, in 10,076 houses, compared to just 12,204 people livingthere when the severe economic crisis broke out in 2001.

Since then, despite the fact that Argentina experienced several years of economic growth, Villa 31 was the only option found by more and more families who couldn’t afford to buy or rent a house in the formal market.

Solar panels are seen on rooftops of the La Containera social housing complex in Villa 31, and in the background can be seen the towers of the luxurious office area of the Argentine capital. The shantytown has a privileged location within Buenos Aires, next to La Recoleta, one of the city’s most sought-after neighborhoods. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

Villa 31 covers 44 hectares between Retiro, one of the capital’s main railway stations, and La Recoleta, one of the most sought-after neighborhoods in Buenos Aires.

“We came to Villa 31 four years ago, after the building where we lived in the neighborhood of La Boca burned down and we ended up on the street,” Valeria Barrientos, a married mother of four children between the ages of two and 13, told IPS.

Barrientos, whose husband is a truck driver, says it is “a gift from heaven” to have hot water and electricity provided by solar energy, even when there are power outages – especially frequent in Villa 31, where the supply is unstable, and where many homes have irregular, precarious connections to the grid.

Her family has been living in the La Containera section of the Villa since September 2017, which takes its name from the fact that it was a depot for old containers until three years ago. They were offered an apartment there, to be paid over 30 years, because they lived on a plot of land in the Villa where a highway is now being built.

La Containera has three-storey buildings with solar panels to power the thermotanks that heat water for bathrooms and kitchens, to fuel the pumps that raise the water to the tanks, and to provide the homes with electricity.

“We installed 174 solar panels on the rooftops in La Containera,” Rodrigo Alonso, general manager of Sustentator, an Argentine company with 10 years of experience in renewable energy, told IPS.

Alonso recalls that “the first time I came to the Villa I was amazed when I saw the huge bundles of cables running from the electricity poles to the houses. The power is paid by the state, but the houses have very unsafe connections.”

A street in Villa 31, with informal dwellings up to five storeys high and tangles of electric cables unofficially connected to the grid. More than 43,190 people live in the shantytown, according to the Buenos Aires city government, which in 2016 launched an ambitious plan to urbanise the neighbourhood. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

“The change today is huge, because the new houses have a guaranteed power supply and do not have to pay for the energy. In addition, the surplus electricity can be injected into the grid,” he added.

Arrangements to feed the energy generated by the solar panels into the power grid and to obtain a credit from the distribution company are expected to be formalised in Argentina this year, when the Distributed Generation of Renewable Energies Law, approved in 2017 and whose regulations were completed last November, comes into effect.

The solar panels are part of the building and are not individual. Therefore, if in the future there is surplus energy to add to the grid, it will be compensated with a credit for the consortium managing the buildings, which will be subtracted from the charge for energy consumption in the common areas of the housing complex.

Solar panels are also being installed to guarantee energy in the most ambitious project going ahead in Villa 31: the construction of 26 buildings with more than 1,000 homes, on land that belonged to the state-owned oil company Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (YPF).

These new homes are earmarked for the people whose houses will be demolished for the construction of the highway and other roads, although many local residents are skeptical.

A total of 174 solar panels and 55 solar-powered water heaters were installed on the rooftops of the new social housing complex in Villa 31, in the Argentine capital. Each water heater has a capacity of 300 liters and supplies two homes, based on the estimate of an average of three people per apartment, who use 50 litres of hot water a day. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

“We are concerned that the promises will not be kept and that many families will end up in the street. We are going to defend each family’s relocation,” Héctor Guanco, who has lived with his family in Villa 31 for nearly 20 years, told IPS.

The availability of solar energy makes a decisive difference in a country where electricity tariffs have risen by more than 500 percent in the last three years.

“Going from informality to formality can mean economic pressure that is very difficult to bear, because you have to pay a mortgage for housing, plus taxes and the public services,” Facundo Di Filippo, a former Buenos Aires city councilor, told IPS.

Di Filippo was the author of the law for the urbanisation of Villa 31 and is now president of the non-governmental Center for Studies and Action for Equality.

He is critical of the way in which the city government approached the urbanisation of Villa 31, arguing that “the focus has been on improving the vicinity of an area of Buenos Aires that has a high real estate value, in order to benefit private businesses.”

The new buildings were built with sustainability criteria that are unprecedented in Buenos Aires, as demanded by the World Bank, which provided a credit of 170 million dollars to finance the urbanisation process.

“The walls have both thermal and sound insulation, which reduces energy consumption. In addition, a rainwater collection system was placed on the roofs to irrigate the housing complex’s green spaces,” Juan Ignacio Salari, undersecretary of urban infrastructure for the government of Buenos Aires, told IPS.

“We are also trying to move forward with the World Bank to finance a programme to replace household appliances, because many Villa 31 residents have very old refrigerators or air conditioners, which are very energy inefficient,” he added.

“The people of Villa 31 want to regularise their situation and pay for the services they receive. The state must help them do this,” said the official, who added that the plan is to put solar panels on the new buildings and formally connect the other houses to the power grid.

A Metrobus stop on 9 de Julio avenue in Buenos Aires, with the famous Obelisk in the background. Credit: Juan Moseinco/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Jan 6 2014 (IPS)

Sustainable transport grew in the Latin American cities of Buenos Aires, Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro in 2013.

The left-wing government of the Mexican capital inaugurated the fifth Metrobús bus rapid transit (BRT) system route and extended the Ecobici Individual Transport System.

It also expanded the Ecoparq parking meter system – a new parking management scheme – into new areas on the west side of the city and opened up a new pedestrian-only street in the old city.

In the Argentine capital, meanwhile, the third Metrobús line began to operate with great success on Avenida 9 de Julio, and the government expanded its “Buenos Aires, mejor en bici” (Buenos Aires, Better by Bike) programme.

In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the centre-right city government forged ahead with the construction of the Transcarioca and Transbrasil BRT corridors, while the second stage of the Transoeste BRT project got underway.

The network of bicycle paths was also enlarged, as part of the infrastructure planned for the FIFA World Cup, to be held in Brazil from Jun. 12 to Jul. 13, and the 2016 Olympic summer games in Rio de Janeiro.

In Mexico City, “there have been interesting projects, but they haven’t been carried out at the desired speed,” Bernardo Baranda, Latin America director for the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), told IPS.

He called for more initiatives and said they should be more rapidly implemented, aimed at “a further reduction of the use of automobiles” in greater Mexico City, home to more than 20 million people.

As part of that objective, he said it was important to expand Ecobici, which includes exclusive and non-exclusive bike lanes as well as a bike-share system.

What is happening in greater Rio de Janeiro, population 11.7 million, “is very exciting,” he said. “A great deal has been invested in infrastructure. Bicycle use has expanded. The centre has great potential for better transport conditions.”

The ITDP Latin America director said that in greater Buenos Aires, home to some 13 million people, “the use of public bicycles has been fomented, along with the idea of turning several streets in the microcenter into pedestrian-only.”

Roberto Remes, an independent Mexican expert in public policies on the environment and transportation, also pointed to interesting developments in the three cities.

He explained to IPS that in Buenos Aires, right-wing Mayor Mauricio Macri “is trying to build an alternative system to the subway,” which turned 100 years old in December.

Meanwhile, “in Mexico we see mainly plans. Apparently we’ll do ok, we’ll have an integrated system with policies focused on mobility and a person-oriented, rather than car-oriented, perspective.”

With respect to Rio de Janeiro, he said “they want their prepaid public fare cards and their institutional image to be the same across the entire country – something that not many countries have achieved.”

The three cities face similar challenges, such as heavy dependence on private vehicles, the proliferation of parking garage buildings, and virtually no progress on road safety, except in the case of Buenos Aires.

In addition, there have been social protests against the infrastructure work accompanying the development of sustainable, multimodal transportation systems.

Baranda said “the bicycle must be better integrated with mass transit, and more integrated transport is needed in order to make it easier to get around.”

On Jan. 15, the ITDP and eight other organisations will grant the Sustainable Transport Award in Washington, DC. This year’s nominees include Buenos Aires, Lanzhou, China and Suwon, South Korea. Mexico City won the award in 2013.

The prize, granted since 2005 to cities of more than 500,000 people, awards accomplishments such as improving public transportation and public spaces, reducing transport-related air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, and improving safety and access for cyclists and pedestrians.

This year, the Mexico City government will build another Metrobús line and will expand segregated and non-segregated bike paths.

For its part, the ITDP will focus on reducing the number of parking garages, and drew up a study on the viability of a Metrobús line on the central Avenida Reforma.

For the 2013-2016 period, the Rio de Janeiro city administration plans to build 150 km of bike paths, as well as bicycle parking stations, to reach a total network of 450 km by 2016.

Buenos Aires projects the creation of another four Metrobús routes for 2014-2015.

The December report on “Social, Environmental and Economic Impacts of BRT Systems” stresses the benefits of bus rapid transit in Bogotá, Colombia; Mexico City; Johannesburg, South Africa; and Istanbul, Turkey.

The report was produced by EMBARQ, the sustainable urban transport and planning programme of the World Resources Institute (WRI).

The study shows that BRT systems have led to travel time savings, a reduction in vehicle operating costs, improvements in health due to reduced pollution, and improved road safety.

But it also identifies challenges such as declining quality of service, the exclusion of the poorest residents from the system, limited integration with other transport systems, and competition with subways.

Remes warned that it was not enough to focus transport strategies on merely establishing BRT systems without addressing other possibilities, such as urban trains.

“The existing models of financing, management and planning only allow for the expansion of these systems. If we create BRT corridors, we can cover the cities in a decade, but there is still a problem: transfers and switches from one system to another. There’s something that’s not working in the long-term vision,” he said.

In the 1970s, nations like Japan, South Korea or Singapore began to build railway networks to foment a mix of transport, employment, financing and economic development in big cities.

In Latin America, “we are a millennium behind,” Remes lamented.

A Metrobus stop on 9 de Julio avenue in Buenos Aires, with the famous Obelisk in the background. Credit: Juan Moseinco/IPS

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Aug 27 2013 (IPS)

A new system of exclusive lanes for bus rapid transit appears to be benefiting public transport passengers and bus drivers in the most congested part of the centre of the Argentine capital.

Although there are as yet no studies on its impact, users interviewed by IPS said the new Metrobus on 9 de Julio Avenue, the second widest thoroughfare in the world at 140 metres and 14 lanes wide, delivers faster journeys, with fewer stops and for the same fare.

Built in just six months, the system of exclusive lanes and stops for 10 bus lines began to operate on Jul. 24. The project was controversial because it involved removing small plazas and transplanting nearly 1,500 trees.

Critics claimed that quick journeys over that stretch were already available on the subway, which meant the Metrobus was redundant.

The bus rapid transit (BRT) corridor is 3.5 km long, stretching from the ground-level railway stations of Retiro, north of the city, and Constitución, to the south, which connect with the subway lines.

But the Government of the City of Buenos Aires, the national Transport Secretariat and the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP, an NGO) stress that different groups of people use each of these systems.

Around 13 million people live in the Greater Buenos Aires metropolitan area.

A survey by the Transport Secretariat found that 89 percent of people who travel in the metropolitan area make their journey as a single stretch. And those who choose the cheapest option say the Metrobus is “all gain.”

They arrive in the city centre by bus, from their urban neighbourhoods or from the suburbs, and remain on board the same vehicle until reaching their destination.

Previously they had to endure a slow, stop-and-start trip across the city centre if they wanted to avoid transferring to the subway for the short journey to the final station, which would make the trip more expensive.

The new Metrobus, on the avenue where the Obelisk monument, a city centre landmark, is located, now concentrates the six bus lines that used to mingle with the cars and taxis on the avenue, and another four lines that used to move at snail’s pace on the narrow streets on either side of 9 de Julio.

Now the 10 bus lines run down the centre of the avenue, carrying around 200,000 passengers a day. The narrow side streets have been cleared of bus traffic and are in the process of being pedestrianised, and air pollution has been reduced.

Braking and acceleration have been minimised, increasing fuel efficiency and generating lower volumes of the greenhouse gases that are responsible for global warming.

When IPS rode one of the bus lines, passengers and drivers agreed that the system inaugurated in July is faster. Some people said their travel times were halved.

“It used to take me an hour to get downtown from my home, and now it takes just over 30 minutes,” said a passenger, pointing out that previously, her bus travelled along the most congested part of the avenue, and now it drives in the fastest lane, “all without a fare increase.”

Bus services are provided by the private sector and subsidised by the state. The minimum bus fare, for the shortest distance, costs 1.50 pesos (25 cents of a dollar), while the subway has a flat fare of 2.50 pesos (45 cents of a dollar).

Two other passengers travelling the full distance from Retiro to Constitución said the trip previously took 45 minutes and now only 15. “But you have to look sharp, because now it doesn’t stop so frequently, it’s like the subway,” one of them said.

In effect, the system is similar to trains. Buses go along a single lane and only stop every 400 or 700 metres, at raised platforms level with the bus floor. If they do not need to stop, they travel freely in their exclusive lane, with no taxis or cars in the way.

“It’s much better for us,” one of the line 67 bus drivers told IPS. “On one occasion it took me an hour and 15 minutes to get from Constitución to Corrientes avenue, but now I always do it in 15 minutes.”

Andrés Fingeret, the head of ITDP Argentina, told IPS that while it is too soon to evaluate the results, so far the response received is that “for the vast majority of the travelling public, it has been positive.”

“Not just for passengers, who save time and have a more enjoyable travel experience, but also for bus drivers and for cars and taxis, who experience relief because the streets are less congested,” he said.

Fingeret emphasised that building bus rapid transit networks costs 10 percent of what it would cost to build equivalent subways. He also said they are very effective and can be set in motion much more quickly. For example, the 9 de Julio system was established in just six months, he said.

“One kilometre of subway costs around 250 million dollars and the same distance of Metrobus costs between eight and 15 million dollars, for a much more sophisticated system than was installed in Buenos Aires,” he said.

BRT systems have spread around the world and can be found in over 150 cities, the Buenos Aires city government reported.

In Latin America, the pioneers were Curitiba in Brazil, and Bogotá in Colombia. With variations, the system has also been introduced in Santiago, Chile and in Mexico City.

In Buenos Aires, the first BRT network was constructed in 2011 on Juan B. Justo avenue, comprising a 12-km corridor between the neighbourhoods of Liniers and Palermo, two public transport hubs for buses and trains.

This bus corridor reduced travel times by 40 percent, according to the city transport under-secretariat. And after the 9 de Julio system was installed, a third network came into operation this month between Constitución and Puente La Noria, in the south of the city, over a distance of 24 km.

“It’s a system that offers a lot of advantages and that could still grow ten-fold in Buenos Aires. In fact, the city government is carrying out feasibility studies on further corridors,” said Fingeret.

However, he thinks the network has room for improvement. “There’s a lot to be done to improve integration with other services, such as the subway, trains or bicycles,” he said.

He also thinks better services could be provided for passengers at the bus stops. The stops have seats, roofs and lighting, but they could also have ticket offices, information, sales of soft drinks or cellphone recharging facilities, Fingeret said.