(The Lincoln Institute for Land Policy released the final working paper in July 2013. Click here to read the report)
This spring, as part of our research on climate change adaptation in the Andes, I traveled to the sister cities of El Alto/La Paz, Bolivia. I landed at 5am in the dark at the El Alto airport, seeing only a sea of street lights that plunged into darkness where the La Paz Valley was covered by mist. When I opened the curtains that morning in La Paz, broad daylight revealed a honking metropolis surrounded by snowy mountain peaks and cliffs.
I’m here with colleagues from the Stockholm Environment Institute to understand the relationship between future water shortages and land use planning in El Alto. On this trip, we organized a workshop with diverse stakeholders to introduce the project, and met with community associations, local planning and environment offices in La Paz and El Alto, and international stakeholders to begin understanding the situation in El Alto. So far what we’ve found is that the relationship between too much water has much clearer implications for land use decisions – don’t build in flood zones, protect coastal habitat, enhance permeability. But what about drought and water scarcity? In this modern era, does a city with few water resources look inherently any different from cities with ample water supplies? Is planning for droughts purely a task for water infrastructure engineers, or does it have implications for urban planning?
Founded in 1548, La Paz grew as a halfway point between Lima and the Spanish Empire’s mines in Potosi. The plateau of El Alto, located at 4,080 meters above sea level and 400 meters above the La Paz valley, attracted industrial uses early on due to its flat terrain. The country’s first airport, the Aviation School, the Navigation Company of Lake Titicaca, and a rail company were some of the first to locate here. In the last 40 years, El Alto has grown from an empty plain to a city of over 1 million people, 85% of whom are Aymara and Quechua. Now larger than La Paz, El Alto remains one of the fastest growing cities in the Western Hemisphere. As ever, its development is tied to the needs of the capital city, serving in turn as the dormitory, railroad, airport, customs depot, and production center of La Paz. Most of the economic activity takes place near “La Ceja” (the eyebrow, or rim of the plains), where roads traversing the mountainside link El Alto with La Paz. When I drove through the rest of El Alto, down the wide, dusty, over-sized roads, I found the city emptied of its inhabitants.
For El Alto, the answer as to how the city should physically respond to drought is not at all clear. In some countries, such as the United States, single family homes with lawns consume significantly more water than urban condo residents. But here in El Alto, there are no pools, no grassy lawns, no ostentatious consumption of water by some land use zones versus others. Although the census hasn’t been taken in over 10 years and disaggregated data is not available, the city appears to be relatively economically homogenous – the inhabitants are the poor who can’t afford to live in La Paz. In fact, nearly 90% of households consume less than 15 cubic meters of water per month – or less than 100 liters per person per day, a level set by the World Health Organization as a minimum amount for healthy and hygienic living. Accordingly, “demand side management” or efforts to reduce consumer water demand will have limited impact. Instead, the focus will be on physically expanding the city’s supply of water by building or expanding new reservoirs and supply lines.
At the same time, it is also clear that the flat terrain of plains cities such as El Alto that makes them susceptible to drought also fosters extensive development. In the peri-urban areas, “loteadores” (or subdividers) will buy land from a farmer, get someone to draft a plan meeting minimum zoning standards, and sell the lots to rural migrants. Once settled, new communities demand services from the municipal government. A property with services is twice as valuable, and many migrants will then choose to sell the property at a profit and move to La Paz, and then on to Santa Cruz, repeating the cycle each time. No one wants to live 4,000 meters above sea level, I’m told, where it never warms above 60°F. Sixty degrees isn’t so cold – until you realize no one in the city has heating.
The fact that there are no natural limits to growth – and that there are substantial investment in ample road networks – incentivizes peri-urban expansion. This, in turn, dramatically increases infrastructure costs that local communities cannot afford to pay. The question of who should pay for water services is one of the most contentious in the country.
Bolivia’s first War on Water in Cochabamba, the one in which local riots and protests ousted the private water company Suez, is pretty well known. But few are aware of the country’s second War on Water, which took place in El Alto to oust the private company Aguas de la Illimani. Before Aguas, El Alto and La Paz had SEMAPA, a public water company, and since then, it’s been replaced by another public water and sewerage company called EPSAS. Whether public or private, water services will always be a challenge to finance given local levels of consumption and ability to pay. It’s a story familiar to informal settlements and slum communities worldwide. For residents in El Alto and elsewhere, the prices for water – as well as food and energy – will only increase with projected climate change.
Distinct from other cities, however, are El Alto’s exceptionally strong social movements and community associations. Every day of my visit, there are protests, blockades, marches, anything from asking government for support for families of political detainees, to stopping price hikes in private transport. These protests have been effective in forcing local governments to respond to their requests, including to lower tariffs and extend basic services. However, this development strategy poses a challenge to much needed longer-term planning, particularly given that the city will double in population by 2025, but will exceed its available water supply by 2018.
In this context, we are working with the Stockholm Environment Institute to research how strategic land use planning in El Alto can support more efficient and equitable use of water. We are gathering information that will serve as the basis for modeling water consumption patterns in El Alto, as well as planning and zoning information that will help inform potential points of intervention in land use planning that will have impacts on water supply.
The project is funded by the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy in Cambridge, MA. Learn more about this project here.
by Linda Shi