The Outskirts of Lima by Carlos Jiménez Cahua
“The atmosphere of Lima is what attracted me there: the white sky, the bare, brown and barren earth, and also the people who are making their homes on the hillside,” stated photographer Carlos Jiménez Cahua in a 2010 interview, a year after first exhibiting the accompanying photographs of the Peruvian capital’s vast edge settlements and the etiolated landscapes they sit on. Founded in 1535 on a desert coastline fronting onto the Pacific Ocean, Lima has grown into a sprawling metropolitan city—it is home to nine million inhabitants, more than half of who live in barriadas, slum settlements located on low-value public land. “Lima’s urban personality is highly conditioned by the presence and development of barriadas and the dynamic of their residents,” says Ana Fernandez-Maldonado, a Peruvian architect and researcher at Delft University of Technology. A feature of Lima’s urban landscape since the 1950s, Fernandez-Maldonado describes the city’s settled periphery as “the domain of the poor”. While unavoidable, this socio-economic context was not the chief reason Jiménez Cahua made these photographs. A regular visitor to Lima since moving to the United States as a child, he was fascinated by the awkward coexistence of the city—described by Herman Melville in Moby-Dick as “the strangest, saddest city thou can’st see”—with its arid context. “Whereas the people of developed nations affect the form and therefore identity of the land,” he told Guernica magazine in 2009, “the people of Lima quite literally merely scratch the surface—their relationship to the ground is not one of dominance, but acquiescence.
Sources: Interview, Wunderkammer (May 6, 2010); ‘Lima’, Guernica (October 2009); ‘Innovative Policies for the Urban Informal Economy’, UN-HABITAT (2006); ‘Recent trends of urban dis/integration in Lima’, Ana Fernández-Maldonado (2006)