Abstract :
[en] Since about three decades ago, the networking services (water, energy, transport and telecommunications) are the subject of studies and mainly reforms (liberalization, privatization and concessions to private companies, etc.) and also an important economic policy issue. However the possible effects of these reforms on the fragmentation or integration of urban societies are still poorly studied, although some studies (mainly on developing cities) support the thesis that there would be a growing urban fragmentation, reinforced by the dominant modes of implementing reforms network services.
One of the most important theses about the subject is in a relatively recent development of the English authors Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin (2001). Their work generalizes the motion of fragmentation (splintering Urbanism) to all network services and a set of economic regions in the world. While this thesis presents consistency and validity - since it is known that the application of models of decentralization and liberalization of services has an effect on the fragmentation - the position of fragmentation due to centralized networks is inside a new analysis framework and still incomplete considering the absence of more empirical evidence. The thesis of fragmentation from centralized networks suggests that powerful factors are contributing to the disintegration of infrastructure, favoring the fragmentation of the social structure and material of cities. In fact, this breakdown of infrastructures makes possible many strategies of evasion; they are addressed to connect powerful users and valorized spaces, preventing the connection with less powerful users and poor spaces. These processes lead to the creation of spaces from different social networks, resulting in social elites living every day in places disconnected from the urban structure of the set (in gated communities, new complex people and other planned communities), as well as the lower classes, but the latter with the worst conditions. The main hypothesis of the "splintering Urbanism" argues that network services have an integrated character and are precisely the privatization and liberalization of services that contribute to the breakdown of network infrastructure and urban fragmentation feed. The control of networks from powerful coalitions of actors, separation and segmentation boost infrastructure in different network elements and service pack (2001: 141). This separation would occur across strategies "bypass" or "wrap" seeking to connect users, valuable or powerful places, and through discarding or dodge weaker users and worthless places.
Our thesis "Urban Fragmentation through technical networks," confirms and reinforces the thesis made by Graham & Marvin, across expounding on the Cochabamba Bolivian context, a set of technical networks of small-scale or micro decentralized networks which are managed by autonomous social organizations that also fragment the territory without the need for "by pass" and the socio-spatial differentiation, but through the realization of strategies linked to autonomous administration and management of common and basic goods like water. This thesis demonstrates the existence of processes of spatial dislocation and loss of solidarity (main evils of urban fragmentation) across the dynamics of technical devices and decentralized networks infrastructure services from private-community water and small scale. However, our work describes in its urban development, territorial and environmental problems inside the phenomenon. The paper first presents a set of theories that attempt to explain the fragmentation and its particularities, then describes the socio-spatial formation of the study area whose characteristics allow this type of phenomenon, to arrive to a section that exposes all the particularities of the management water from public and local actors, analyzed from the environmental logic of urban water cycle, including the specifics of the main stage of study of this thesis, the municipality of Quillacollo in Cochabamba.
From a spatial perspective, the thesis exhibits the characteristics of urban fragmentation across technical networks, exposing the details related to the organization of urban space as a result of processes of spatial dislocation, loss of solidarity and exercise of territoriality in small networks. It is concluded in a discussion about the validity of the strategies in terms of access to the resource, the possibilities of intervention and reflections about the power relationships among fragments and for water control. Finally, as a supplement, urban fragmentation through small technical networks, also allows to display the tensions between two ways of managing the territory (centralized view from the public sector and decentralized vision from local communities) highlighting the uncomfortable and marginalized urban planning position, but challenging the urbanism to recover to action on the highly fragmented contemporary cities with complex scenarios of governance and sometimes rare or endangered resources.
