A villa miseria is a form of shanty town or slum found in Argentina, mostly around the largest urban settlements. The term is a compound noun made of the Spanish words villa "village, small town" and miseria "abject poverty". The name was adopted from Bernardo Verbitsky's 1957 novel Villa Miseria también es América ("Villa Miseria is also [a part of] America"). Shanty towns are units of irregular low-cost and self-constructed housing built on terrain seized and occupied illegally -- usually on lands belonging to third parties, most often located in the urban periphery of the cities. ... A boy from an East Cipinang trash dump slum in Jakarta, Indonesia shows his find. ... A compound is a word (lexeme) that consists of more than one free morpheme. ... 1957 was a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... A novel is an extended work of written, narrative, prose fiction, usually in story form; the writer of a novel is a novelist. ...

These settlements consist of small houses or shacks made of tin, wood, and/or other materials (whatever can be found). The streets are usually not paved — narrow internal passages may communicate the different parts. The villas miseria have no sanitation system, though there may be water pipes passing through the settlement. Electric power is sometimes taken directly from the grid using illegal connections (which are perforce tolerated by the power companies). General Name, Symbol, Number tin, Sn, 50 Chemical series poor metals Group, Period, Block 14, 5, p Appearance silvery lustrous gray Atomic mass 118. ... A news/talk radio station on the frequency of 1300 AM in Grand Rapids, Michigan. ... This article is about the American English usage of pavement as the durable surfacing of roads and walkways. ... Sanitation is a term for the hygienic disposal or recycling of waste materials, particularly human excrement. ... Transmission lines in Lund, Sweden Electric power, often known as power or electricity, involves the production and delivery of electrical energy in sufficient quantities to operate domestic appliances, office equipment, industrial machinery and provide sufficient energy for both domestic and commercial lighting, heating, cooking and industrial processes. ...

The villas range from small groups of precarious houses, well inside the urban grid, to larger, more organised communities with thousands of residents. In rural areas, villas miserias might be made of mud and wood. In computer gaming, a MUD (multi-user dungeon, dimension, or sometimes domain) is a multi-player computer game that combines elements of role-playing games, hack and slash style computer games, and social Internet Relay Chat channels. ...

Villas miseria are found around and inside the large cities of Buenos Aires, Rosario, Córdoba and Mendoza, among others. At the turn of the millennium they already comprised a relatively large part of the total population of their respective cities. Buenos Aires (Good Air in Spanish, originally meaning Fair Winds) is the capital of Argentina and its largest city and port, as well as one of the largest cities in South America. ... Rosario viewed from a point above the Paraná River Rosario is the largest city of the province of Santa Fe, Argentina, and the second most populous in the country, with 1,121,441 inhabitants (2001 census [1]), a position it shares with Córdoba city (the largest being Buenos Aires). ... Córdoba Córdoba is a city located in the foothills of the Sierra Chica mountains on the Suquía river, the center of Argentinas most productive agricultural area. ... Park of General San Martín in Mendoza. ...

These shantytowns are also euphemistically called asentamientos irregulares ("irregular settlements") or villas de emergencia ("emergency villages"). In most of Argentina, the unqualified word villa usually refers to a villa miseria. A euphemism is an expression intended by the speaker to be less offensive, disturbing, or troubling to the listener than the word or phrase it replaces. ...

The villas draw people from several backgrounds. Many of them are migrants, coming from poorer provinces or from impoverished rural areas near the cities, specially during Perón's first government, or even from other countries (mostly Bolivia and Paraguay). Others are local citizens who have fallen from an already precarious economic position. In most cases, of course, the villa miseria is populated by the children and grandchildren of the original settlers, who have been unable to raise their economic status. Human migration denotes any movement of groups of people from one locality to another. ... Juan Domingo Perón (October 8, 1895 – July 1, 1974) was an Argentine military officer and the President of Argentina from 1946 to 1955 and from 1973 to 1974. ...

Even though criminality in the villas is significantly higher than in wealthier neighborhoods, it is not comparable to that of Brazilian favelas. There is little, if any, organized gang warfare. Villas miseria, however, are considered by most citizens as havens for criminals, from minor thieves to drug dealers. A Rio de Janeiro favela Favela is a term commonly used in Brazil to describe areas such as shanty towns or slums. ... Gang warfare is the conflict between differing groups of people identifying themselves as gangs. ...

Argentine painter Antonio Berni dealt with the hardships of living in a villas miseria through his series Juanito Laguna, a slum child, and Ramona Montiel, a prostitute. Prostitution is the sale of sexual services (typically manual stimulation, oral sex, sexual intercourse, or anal sex) for cash or other kind of return, generally indiscriminately with many persons. ...

Statistics

The 2001 census and the ARRAIGO government program provide revealing figures: over a population of almost 36 million, about 13.6 million had difficulties in their access to terrain. Of these (approximately 2.7 million households), 37% correspond to homes in irregular settlements. The ARRAIGO program estimates that, in 2004, a number of homes between 500,000 and one million were located in irregular settlements, with 100,000 over national fiscal terrain. 2004 is a leap year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

According to July 2004 estimates, there are about 640 "precarious neighborhoods" in suburban Buenos Aires, comprising 690,000 residents and 111,000 households. The population of the villas miseria doubled during the 1990s, reaching about 120,000 as of 2005. 2004 : January - February - March - April - May - June - July - August - September - October - November - December See also: July 2004 in sports Deaths in July • 31 David B. Haight • 29 Francis Crick • 29 Nafisa Joseph • 23 Joe Cahill • 23 Mehmood • 23 Illinois Jacquet • 23 Carlos Paredes • 22 Sacha Distel • 21 Jerry Goldsmith • 21...

Source: El derecho a la vivienda en Argentina, Informe misión de investigación, 2004 (in Spanish), Centre of Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE)

See also

• Favela
• Poverty
• Argentine economic crisis