Continuidad del habitar en territorios interrumpidos: arquitectura y urbanismos para comunidades en proceso de reasentamiento por motivos de desarrollo de infraestructura. Caso de estudio El peñol, Antioquia.

Abstract

What happens to a community's way of life when its territory disappears due to an institutional decision? What is lost in a resettlement that no contract can measure? The case of El Peñol, a municipality in Antioquia relocated between 1978 and 1979 to make way for the Peñol-Guatapé reservoir, offers an exceptional scenario for answering these questions: forty-seven years of built history allow us to evaluate, with concrete evidence, the gap between what a resettlement promises and what it actually restores. The research articulates three dimensions of analysis. The first is theoretical, based on the concepts of lived space, topophilia, territory, and roughness, which allow us to understand rootedness not as a subjective phenomenon but as a verifiable spatial condition. The second is documentary: the analysis of the 1969 Master Contract reveals patterns of compliance and non-compliance that precisely indicate where institutional planning operates and where it stops. The third is morphological: the comparison between Old and New Peñol reveals the transformations of the urban fabric and what these reveal about the community's ways of living before and after the relocation. The findings point to a conclusion that extends beyond the specific case of El Peñol and raises a fundamental question for any involuntary resettlement process: Is there a methodology that allows us to understand a territory before moving its inhabitants? In response, this study proposes a system of concrete tools, aimed at both technical teams and affected communities, designed to operate at the critical moment that conventional planning has systematically ignored: the moment before the design phase. What follows is a record of that search.