Indian Journal of Science and Technology

Abstract

Objectives: To investigate the urban consolidation processes of the municipality of Santiago de Cali, as well as the transformation patterns of urban surfaces to recognize specific phenomena. Methods/Analysis: Communes as urban surfaces with administrative and territorial elements (therefore, common attributes) are the basis for contrasting specific phenomena that mark the links with the population determinants that transform the territory, which accounts for informality (phenomenon of interest) as a particular way of urbanizing. In this sense, the surface/population relationship produces indicators that, recognized from the present, allow connecting sequentially and temporally with the origins of the process, understanding it as a “cause and effect” relationship that can be structured and systematized in matrices of data that allow to visualize the relationship scenarios. Findings: This vision of formality (on the process of urbanization) has not been characteristic, since the acceleration of many of the determinants that generate it as population growth or economic cycles have distorted how it is seen, while other phenomena have occurred where urbanization outside the perspective of the State became informal, demonstrating the low capacity for intervention. The scenarios of public policies that sought to ensure those minimum urban conditions were blurred with the increase of that informality, becoming one of the issues that the State must face; and in the case of the municipality of Santiago de Cali, there are particularities that have manifested this informality in scales that allow understanding and studying the different aspects that produce it and, at the same time, to characterize it. Application/Improvement: The development of the present investigation allowed observing particular conditions in the design of planning instruments that start from the recognition of this informality as another form of city construction and that complement the study of this type of relations in the territory.

Keyword: Cali, Informality, Urban Consolidation, Urbanity