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Anarchy Works
are guiding principles in many shantytowns. It is also important
to note that, in an era of growing environmental devastation,
shantytown dwellers subside on just a fraction of a percent of the
resources consumed by suburbanites and formal city dwellers. Some
may even have a negative ecological footprint, in that they recycle
more waste than they generate.55 In a world without capitalism,
informal settlements would have the potential to be much healthier
places. Even today, they disprove the capitalist myths that cities can
only be held together by experts and central organization, and that
people can only live at today's population levels by continuing to
surrender our lives to the control of authorities.
One inspiring example of an informal city is EI Alto, Bolivia.
EI Alto sits on the Altiplano, the plateau overlooking La Paz, the
capital. A few decades ago El Alto was just a small town, but as
global economic changes caused the shutting down of mines and
small farms, huge numbers of people came here. Unable to reside
in La Paz, they built settlements up on the plateau, changing the
town into a major urban area with eight hundred fifty thousand
residents. Seventy percent of the people who have jobs here make
their living through family businesses in an informal economy. Land
use is unregulated, and the state provides little or no infrastructure:
most neighborhoods do not have paved roads, garbage removal
services, or indoor plumbing, seventy five percent of the population
lacks basic health care, and forty percent are illiterate. 56 Faced with
this situation, the residents of the informal city took their selforganization
to the next step, by creating neighborhood councils,
or juntas. The first juntas in EI Alto go back to the '50s. In 1979
these juntas started to coordinate through a new organization,
55 The Curious George Brigade, Anarchy In the Age of Dinosaurs, Crimethlnc.
2003, pp. 106-120. The statistic from Ghana appcars on page 115.
56 Emily Achtenberg, "Community Organizing and Rebellion:
Neighborhood Councils in ElAlto, Bolivia," Progressive Planning,
No. 172, Summer 2007.
the Federation of Neighborhood CouncUs, FEJUVE. Now there are
nearly six hundred juntas in EI Alto. The juntas allow neighbors to
pool resources to create and maintain necessary infrastructure, like
schools, parks, and basic utilities. They also mediate disputes and
levy sanctions in cases of conflict and social harm. The federation,
FE]UVE, pools the resources of the juntas to coordinate protests
and blockades and constitute the slum dwellers as a social force.
In just the first five years of the new millennium, FE]UVE took a
lead role in establishing a public university in EI Alto, blocking
new municipal taxes, and deprivatizing the water services. FE]UVE
also was instrumental in the popular movement that forced the
government to nationalize the natural gas resources.
Each junta typically contains at least two hundred people and
meets every month, making general decisions through public
discussion and consensus. They also elect a committee that
meets more frequently and has an administrative role. Political
party leaders, merchants, real estate speculators, and those who
collaborated with the dictatorship are not allowed to be committee
delegates. More men than women sit on these committees; however
a greater percentage of women take on leadership roles in FEJWE
than in other Bolivian popular organizations.
Parallel to the organization in neighborhood councils is the
organization of infrastructure and economic activity in unions or
syndicates. The street vendors and transportation workers, for
example, self-organize in their own base unions.
Both the neighborhood councils and their counterparts in
the informal economy are patterned after the traditional
communitarian organization of rural indigenous communities
(ayllu) in terms of territoriality, structure and
organizational principles. They also reflect the traditions
of radical miners' unions, which for decades led Bolivia's
militant labor movement. Fusing these experiences, EI Al-
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