HABITATSUR: a travel through the autogenerated settlements of the andean territory. Part 2 Dissertation 2006 Juan Camilo MayaCarlos Fernando Quiceno National University of Colombia - Manizales campus | Colombia The work presents a research, that takes as study objective, human settlements built outside of the official planning in four cities: La Paz(Bolivia), Cusco(Peru), Quito(Ecuador) and Manizales(Colombia), all of them located on the Andean Mountain range, in southamerica.This analisys considers under the perspective of the habitat, thus a wide dissertation is made on this concept and the implications that its use has in the planning and construction of the cities. From the habitat definition, it proposes a reflection on the inequality and the segregation of the Latin American and Andean city in individual, and upon concepts that have been used commonly to talk about to the forms of the city, which arise outside the mechanisms formally established, like “marginal”, “informal” or “illegal”. Moreover, the concept of autogenerated settlements sets out as a form to study these phenomenons from their own formal, social and historical characteristics.Under this criterion, the study carried out in these four Andean neighbourhood, has as aim to identify and to analyze the forms of appropriation and territorialization that have affected their conformation, proposing a methodology that establishes two moments of analysis:The formation and The transformation of the settlement.In each moment two processes are analyzed: The appropriation, focused in the construction of the house and the relationship of the home with the neighbourhood; and The territorialization, focused in the physical-space and social organization of the neighbourhood and its relationships with the city and the State. These processes are considered under variables of type legal, symbolic, social and aesthetic, which allow to systematize the information and then to make a comparative study among the studied cities, differentiating between the capital and intermediate cities. Finally it is reflected on the forms like, from the architecture, the Latin American urban habitat could be proposed and be improved. The comparative study about self-generated human habitats in four Andean sloping neighbourhoods located in La Paz, Cusco, Quito and Manizales represents a very serious, sound and novel approach on the habitat concept, tackled in this work through a complex and systemic vision that interlaces natural, social, space and institutional dimensions which influence in the building mechanisms of the out of planning Latin American cities.The study shows that the habitat building processes are based on appropriation and territorialization, that allows the use of new instruments in the habitat analysis; main contribution of the work, after the new conceptual reflection.