FROM EDEN TO BABYLON. THE ROLE OF NATURE IN LIMA’S NEIGHBOURHOOD UNITS

Soon after the end of WWII, architects in Lima were vividly debating the urgency of planning the city’s growth. The discussion was centered on the idea of Neighbourhood Unit which condensed and incarnated many different social, cultural, economic, architectural, and urban design ideals of that period. Responding to the need to provide mass housing and large-scale green areas in Lima, the concept Unidad Vecinal became the main design and planning instrument for the renovation and expansion of the city. This urban development provided a variety of housing typologies, traffic separation, open green areas, recreational and educational infrastructure, commercial spaces, and sports facilities. The essential principles of this concept were thought to organize the growth of the cities and had to provide good living conditions to all residents. In order to achieve that challenge, “nature” played different roles: in the first projects nature had a fundamental role of holding the architecture and give quality to the urban project, and later on, in the last projects, nature was placed within architecture to ensure good living conditions to the urban projects. This paper will study two cases of Neighbourhood Units in Lima, the first built between 1945 and 1949 and the second around 1968 and 1975. In the first case, architecture was placed in the middle of agricultural lands and projecting a “natural Eden-like” context. In the second case, architecture was placed in the arid city’s outskirts and deployed vegetation and green areas in some specific places -as Babylon Gardens did- to represent “nature” and enhance the urban spaces. In this sense, Unidad Vecinal 3 (1946) and PREVI Lima (1969), not only stand out for being the most ambitious, and coherent examples of each ‘moment’, but also, because they presented different roles of nature incarnated in the same urban design concept.