Havana
Against the backdrop of today’s planetary urbanisation, Havana presents itself as a unique case: while the urbanisation process continues to advance on a global scale, creating sprawling urban landscapes in various locations around the world, this development seems to have passed Havana by almost entirely. The Caribbean metropolis has grown comparatively little over the last fifty years. With around 1.4 million inhabitants, Havana was one of Latin America’s major cities in 1958 and was characterised at that time by rapid urbanisation and a strong construction boom. The Cuban Revolution of 1959 brought this urbanisation process to an abrupt halt. This is evidenced, for example, by the high-rise buildings on the Malecon, which still form an unfinished skyline today, and there is still a clearly recognisable edge of the city. In 2020, Havana had a population of just over two million, but the current massive economic crisis has since led to massive emigration abroad and thus to a significant process of shrinkage.
The urban question
To this day, Havana’s urban development has been decisively shaped by the revolution, which preserved the existing urban structure of Havana through rigorous land policies and a consistent policy of decentralisation. Unlike almost any other city of comparable size, Havana’s historic neighbourhoods were therefore not destroyed by the urban transformation processes of the past, but were preserved. In recent decades, Havana has therefore attracted increasing attention, particularly from an urban planning perspective. However, interest has been heavily concentrated on Habana Vieja, which has been declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. As our analysis shows, however, the historically and urbanistically significant part of Havana is much larger. The great diversity and richness of the urban structure make the city as a whole a unique museum of urbanism. However, little attention has been given to the great qualities of Havana’s inherited urbanistic structures. In all the years since the revolution, the buildings and the infrastructure have been severely neglected. In many cases, even maintenance was not ensured and the fabric of the city was depleted. Thus, the revolution also marked the beginning of the city’s slow deterioration. Today, the exotic beauty so admired by foreign visitors masks an urban everyday life that has become very difficult for most residents. In recent years, the city’s decline has accelerated significantly, and everyday life has become precarious for many people.
Peña Díaz, Jorge und Christian Schmid: Deep Havana (2008)
In: H. Gugger und H. Spoerl (eds.): Havana Lessons. Lapa, ENAC, EPFL, Lausanne, 2008, 156–167.
An urban analysis of Havana
The project SeDUT (Seminario Internacional de Desarrollo Urbano y Transporte) project was a Swiss-Cuban research and cooperation project on urban development in Havana, which ran from 2004 to 2007. On the Swiss side, this project was supported by the Chair of Sociology at the Department of Architecture, ETH Zürich and the planning office Metron AG. On the Cuban side, the most important institutions were the CEU H (Centro de Estudios Urbanos de La Habana, Facultad de Arquitectura, CUJAE), the IPF (Instituto de Planificación Física) and the DPPF-CH (Dirección Provincial de Planificación Física de la Ciudad de La Habana). The project was financed by the Swiss Federal Office for Education and Research (SBF), among others.
The central element of this project was a series of five workshops in which urban planning and urban research experts from Havana worked together with the Swiss team to develop analyses of urban development and mobility. This was a participatory process involving around fifty experts in various combinations. The most important method used in these workshops was a specific form of mapping. This analysis identified a total of seven different urban configurations. Two urban configurations in particular stand out as being of special significance for Havana: the Blue Strip and Deep Havana. The results were widely discussed in Havana’s planning institutions, but to date they have only been made available to the public to a limited extent.
Perspectives for Havana: Elective course, summer semester 2005
Blue Strip and Deep Havana
The Blue Strip refers to a diverse and heterogeneous area along the coast, that shapes the image of Havana until today, attracting tourists and international capital. The most important cultural institutions and services are also concentrated here, and international architecture and research projects are almost exclusively limited to this area. The image of a tropical urban El Dorado, cultivated for decades in film, literature and advertising, finds its world-famous iconography here, in the exclusive city along the coast.
Behind the Blue Strip lies a largely forgotten and overlooked area, far from the crowds of visitors and capital flows: “the south”, which lies in the shadow of the famous neighbourhoods along the coast. But the south of Havana is also very heterogeneous and encompasses highly diverse urban configurations. At its centre, we identified a large contiguous area that we call Deep Havana (La Habana Profunda). Although geographically located in the centre of Havana, it is far removed from the centres of the Blue Strip and also from the national centre around the Plaza de la Revolution. Our analyses have shown that the social situation in Deep Havana is difficult today: access to the centres is arduous, incomes are often low, and the building fabric is decaying. In social terms, large parts of Deep Havana can be considered peripheral.
Urban Atlas of Havana / Atlas Urbano de La Habana
This is a project by Jorge Peña Díaz, professor of architecture at CUJAE (Universidad Tecnológica de La Habana José Antonio Echeverría, Havana) and Christian Schmid, professor of sociology at ETH Zurich. It is based on the SeDUT project and has been supplemented with further analyses and maps over many years. The Urban Atlas of Havana offers the opportunity to take a look at some of the central issues of urban development in Havana at a difficult historical moment and thus make our findings accessible to a broader discussion. It is aimed at both a Cuban and an international audience and will therefore be published in Spanish and in English. It will be published in 2027 by Park Books Verlag Zurich.