The pilot experience of the Plan Maestro for the “Ramal A” of Zacatecoluca (El Salvador)

Policies for the informal city of the America Latina have seen an evolution of approaches. During 50s, the topic of the “City of Invisible” has been faced trying to solve the problem in its effects, not in its causes, through the uprooting, relocation of the inhabitants and the demolition of the settlements. In 90s the approach changed, facing the need for a simultaneous coordinated action, top-down and bottom-up, ensuring the Right to the City, previously denied, that can be implemented moving from "doing" to "putting-in-able-to-do," through communities’ formation and empowerment. In this context, we find the Plan Maestro for the recovery and integration of the Ramal “A”, one of 26 most precarious urban settlements in the city of Zacatecoluca, identified in the Map of Urban Poverty and Social Exclusion in El Salvador by the Program for Development of the United Nations. The Plan Maestro is framed in the context of the Project “Strengthening of the Ministry of Culture of the Presidency of El Salvador through the valorization of cultural heritage”, funded by the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation and carried out by the Roma Tre University and Ministry of Culture, with the cooperation of FUNDASAL Salvadoran Foundation for Development and Minimum Housing. The Plan Maestro sets as main goal the transformation of poverty and exclusion conditions in which the Ramal community lives, through the participatory construction of a strategic and operational plan that provides, on the one hand, the involvement of the experts (planners, architects, technologists, engineers) of Roma Tre and FUNDASAL, together with the experts of the Universidad de El Salvador and the technicians of the Municipality of Zacatecoluca and the Ministry of Public Works of El Salvador, on the other, the Ramal community, and it has been very effective. The active participation of all these actors, institutional and non-institutional, implemented the metaphor of the “bridge”, by using a top-down and bottom-up approach, which represents an effective modality of intervention in informal contexts of social and urban degradation.