Impacto de los asentamientos urbanos irregulares en la calidad de vida de las comunidades afrodescendientes de Machala.

Abstract

This research work reviews the impact of irregular urban settlements of Afro-descendant communities in the city of Machala and their incidence on the quality of life. It begins with the description of the problem under study where the possible causes, consequences and statistics of the problem at the Latin American, national and local levels are presented, followed by the definition of the main variable informal settlements, aspects closely related to the object of study such as basic services, poverty, vulnerability, planning, public policies, among others, are addressed. The Afro-descendant community of Machala located in the informal settlements, which are currently part of the urban slums, arrives in the city in search of job opportunities, since 1950 with the boom in banana exports, labor is required, and poor families from Esmeraldas, with ravages of exclusion, marginality, difficult access to employment, education, etc., come to be linked as stevedores and day laborers in the banana plantations. Due to population growth, migration to the city also generated a demand for housing that the city was not prepared to assume, so people coming from Esmeraldas and other provinces began to settle on the outskirts of the city, in temporary houses, in risky conditions and without basic services, which worsened the quality of life of thenewcomers. A housing problem begins, which becomes social and political, the invasions begin, often stimulated by politicians, who offer to hand over property titles and in exchange for political niches of populism. Clearly, promises are not kept and the poor are left for many years in conditions of neglect. The invasions also have the characteristics of overcrowding and with-it other problems of health and healthy coexistence. As for the methodology used, it is based on the quantitative methodological approach that recommends the collection of statistical data, to quantify the indicators and explain the variable derived from the hypotheses. The technique used in the field work was the survey and the observation sheet, which was applied to 206 families of the six informal settlements that were the object of the study, which allowed triangulating the information and obtaining reliable results, among them to identify the scarcity of economic resources that does not allow the purchase of land for housing, stimulates the formation of poor neighborhoods, without attention to basic services. It is common for people to make illegal use of electricity, which puts the lives of families at risk. The study shows that there are no contingency plans or development projects for the urbanization of settlements in urban planning, so the problem threatens to persist for a long time. With this study, we propose work sessions meetings with all the involved citizens and authorities of the cantonal GAD of Machala in order to establish updated statistics and from them determine commitments between citizens and municipal authorities.