Abstract:
The country of Colombia has been afflicted by a series of internal conflicts that historically have driven the population to migrate from rural to urban areas contributing to the development and densification of informal settlements. The conflict is driven by political, economic, and specially narcotraffic reasons are linked to the routes established throughout South, Central and North America to grow, harvest, produce and traffic cocaine.
The displaced population choose the most significant urban centres as their primary destination, in this case, the city of Bogota and, more specifically, the neighbourhood Caracoli in the locality of Ciudad Bolivar. The study aims to identify to what extent has the built landscape of Caracoli, an informal self-developed settlement, reflected the arrival influx of population? To respond to this question, the investigation first revised literature on informal settlements and identified key characteristics for the analysis of its unique built landscape. Furthermore, the research deepened into the resilience framework in order to approach the settlement as a system, mainly analysing the different types of change that the urban elements reflected during the measured periods of time.
Although the developed method to measure the change of the neighbourhood presented the limitation of relying on satellite pictures. The results of the comparative analysis suggest that the landscape presents changes not only in its composition but also in the variety of the components of each element as the population increases from the year 2001 until the year 2018. Furthermore, it also suggests a direct relationship between the stages of development of the settlement linked to urban density and the resilience capacity of the neighbourhood linked to the variety presented by each urban element of the landscape.
