Tras la pared respira gente

The above words of encouragement were published in January of 1755 at the request of Governor Tomás López del Corral, as part of the proclamation ordering that the lands of Boca del Monte around the new church of San José (where the Scaglietti store is located today) be populated within a period of no more than 40 days; 18 years after its founding and already solved the problems of water supply, people already visited this church to fulfill their liturgical obligations, but as stated at a time (as written by Cleto González Víquez), these people seemed illogical to completely abandon the investment made in land and farms, because they preferred to live in their own rather than concentrate in community to “lead a civilized life, in Christian politics”.

Although the village was finally populated and over the years it grew in infrastructure and people, a similar question, although with a different institutional tone would be worth asking today in the face of a not-so-new situation: What happened to Chepe, did the water run out again?

The centre of San José is one of the areas with the highest real estate added value in the country, where two of the powers of the republic are concentrated, in addition to the headquarters of several autonomous institutions and the State; add to this that it is the national financial centre and perhaps the area per square meter in which there is the greatest investment in public infrastructure. However, according to a study on the percentage variation of the population in the four central districts of San José, at least between 2000 and 2011, the percentages down reached up to -20.3%.

Much of the data and questions that follow are part of a long-term research project on an area delimited within what is traditionally known as the central area of San José (1). According to INEC data, from the 2011 census, 3285 people are living here, in 1124 dwellings, of which less than 300 are owned by the people who live there. But these people could in no way be responsible for the 9 tons that the municipal workers collect daily in four shifts, and even less, the only beneficiaries of the 60 MVA of a load of the three substations of 120 MVA that the CNFL has arranged in the outskirts of the central sector (2).

According to graphical data on the approximate number of insured -provided by the Inspection Directorate of the CCSS-, between 150 thousand and more than half a million insured workers could coincide in this delimitation, concentrated according to their employer’s location as shown in the following graph:

It is evident that the highest densities are found in the hospital headquarters (the Children’s Hospital and San Juan de Dios) and the headquarters of the Legislative and Judicial branches, the central offices of the CCSS and the state bank; however, the middle ranges are dominated by private enterprise in the service sector, markets and department stores, finally intermingled with retail businesses, among others. Although it is not visible in the previous image, the density decreases towards the periphery.

In the context of census exercises, UNECE (United Nations Economic Commission for Europe) defines a population as the group of people attributed to a geographical entity that meets certain criteria at a certain point in time. In the case of these tens of thousands of people, a common characteristic would be their obligation to report for work duties within the relevant contractual hours, which may not categorize them as a fixed resident population, but a floating one, as they are forced by the “tide of work” to live periodically for a significant period at their work.

Although variable, the dimension of this concentration and, therefore, the city life of this de facto population is not marginal (3): each citizen participates and is directly affected by the social practices that develop in it. Dynamics that, although they are not new, force us to formulate another type of question, to work this piece of the city from those who for an important range of time is at the mercy of its conventions, intentions and order. Because spaces are not innocent, those produced by the human being always carry an intention in themselves productive and therefore subscribe to their use rules in their form and use: just as a word is not the object that points, but an abstraction that tries collectively to point it out, to give it form, space is social morphology, as Lefebvre affirms (4), that is to say, it propitiates social relations and subordinates what is produced in it.

It is common in the elaboration of diagnoses to emphasize the efficiency of processes, without taking into account the danger to which the individual is exposed when their discussion reduces their tensions to anonymous mass traffics. Thus, a vital consequence is the disappearance of its actors from certain statistical cells and the denial of their political influence; in our case, almost half a million people are being left out of consideration. Should we consider the participation of these people in organized decision-making processes, at least within the planning stages of projects that may affect them?

The important thing is to verify that as a canton and partly as an area, San José is the most important nomadic axis of the country, that is to say, that there is a population in multiples greater than its residents that makes socioeconomic life, almost daily, and does not seem to be considered in terms of stability in the urban plans.

For the above and taking into account not only the lesser capacity of states to solve more and more varied problems but taking advantage of their technical guidance and executive regency, it would be useful to consider the implementation of participatory planning models (Altman and Rogoff 1987, Whyte, 1991) that allow, besides the resolution of contradictions with shared decisions, to avoid the repetition of homogeneous and coercive policies, which, as Florencia Quesada (5) analyzes, at the end of the XIX century and beginning of the XX, marked a period of segregation and social control in San José, presenting to the world and a certain sector of the national historical imaginary a biased image of progress.

In this line it is good to clarify that, at least at the local level, although the Municipality of San José has had a leading role since the nineties of the previous century in the planning and development of the canton, “the strategies to achieve major urban changes cannot be built from a municipality, even if it is the capital, because almost all the structural elements of the city (roads, transportation, housing, water and electricity services, as well as 98% of the country’s public resources) are in the hands of central institutions” (Klotchkov, 2013, Klotchkov, 2013). (Klotchkov, 2013)

Consider the following: in addition to the population ranges per block, the graph also shows the air quality monitoring points, which are under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Environment and Energy, the Ministry of Public Works and Transportation, and the Municipality of San José, with the technical collaboration of the Environmental Analysis Laboratory of the National University. One of them, the one located in the northeast corner of the San Juan de Dios Hospital, since the beginning of the monitoring program has been the one that has collected the highest annual concentrations of NO2 particles, always above the limits recommended by the WHO (6).

It is evident that the agents involved in an aspect of a single point on the map are many, their coordination complex (regulatory diversity, inter-institutional distrust), but sharing the responsibility of the planning, actively linking large plural groups, those who experience the impact of each particular circumstance, beyond lightening the technical processes, would give clarity to each institution on its role on the board, on the expectations and the follow-up of the programs proposed. This, in addition, should be used to start with the identification of the factors of perceived environmental quality (how people live the space, what they do at lunchtime, where they go to the bathroom if they get sick what they do, what happens to them when they live with others in the public space par excellence: the sidewalk), in short, to talk with the people, with those who make the city at all levels, to build a more human map, one that moves away from the city skein and prevents a solution from aggravating another conflict previously unsuspected. Of course, participation must be delimited and not confused with consultation processes that, although important, do not shorten the distances between inhabitants, political life and institutions.

Crudely, before thinking about a repopulation based on expanding residential life, which would require in the first instance a change in land titling (64% is certified for exclusive commercial use), why not work on the positive management of the environmental quality indicators of this population that already exists, and then entice them to remain residential? Advocate for a topological transformation by creating spaces that provoke at least an affinity to stay for a while (Felonneau, 2004), to leave the office at lunchtime and go for a walk, to guarantee their safety and physical integrity within reasonable and ethical limits. To aspire to a true mixed-use that incites diverse contacts, the gestation of multiple weak ties (Granovetter, 1973), always taking into account in this discussion principles of environmental justice, that is to say, to attend the accessibility to spaces perhaps limited by perceptions of socioeconomic character, gender or age (7) and to stop this unjustifiable process of urbanicide.

Private and public initiatives continue to invest in the improvement and expansion of services, which is not new, but occurs in parallel with the abandonment of sectors such as Avenida Quinta. To better channel these undertakings, and identify common opportunities, why not take advantage of new information technologies and work from the private sector, the Civil Service and autonomous institutions (in our area at least 68 headquarters of public institutions, central and annexed) in primary consultations, to assist the local government to devise and coordinate a participatory strategy from the knowledge of its inhabitants as political agents and not just as passive users? Despite the instruments of denunciation, reporting and lobbying, develop more productive, more binding participatory planning tools, because, despite a certain line of widespread ignorance, the centre is not dead.

Although sometimes the water runs out, it is no longer necessary to make accountants, shopkeepers, students, artisans, engineers, administrators or managers come down from the mountain; their congregation in the centre is a daily occurrence, due to diverse incentives. Beyond the responsibility with the memory of the nation, as a project and metonymic opportunity, this piece of the estate could be the experiment of the Costa Rican focal urbanity, regenerated in a place of residential and commercial coexistence; that is to say, a heterogeneous space, open, restless, that propitiates social relations, rootedness, always knowing its ephemeral personality not because it may be fatal, but because of its constant reformulation: the city as a liquid practice of recognizable, manageable variables, although variables in the end.