Solino, or the Missing Method

Since the start of the year, the signals sent in Solino’s direction have multiplied. On 26 March, the Minister of Planning and External Cooperation, Sandra Paulemon, received representatives of the “Retour au Quartier - Solino” (Back to the Neighborhood) project, as a follow-up to a roadmap drawn up by Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé. On 17 April, an interministerial delegation led by the Minister of Youth, Sports, and Civic Action, Pythagore Dumas, toured the area with officials from the National Directorate for Drinking Water and Sanitation (DINEPA), Port-au-Prince City Hall, and Civil Protection, in order to assess the damage and guide the interventions. In the press, figures are starting to circulate: a thousand homes to rebuild, several thousand young people to train in the building trades. Streetlights have been announced. The government’s will is there. That, at least, is something.

That leaves the question that no visit, no announcement, and no press release has yet clearly asked: do we know what we are undertaking?

The temptation is to answer yes, because the vocabulary sounds familiar. Rebuilding after a disaster is something Haiti has done, or rather attempted, in 2010 and the years that followed. Post-disaster reconstruction is well-charted territory, with its manuals, its indicators, its specialized donors, its tried-and-tested doctrine. You assess the damage, mobilize resources, rebuild, restart services, support people’s return. The grammar is known. The problem is that this grammar does not apply to what happened to Solino.

An earthquake, a flood, a fire: these events share one decisive feature. They strike the urban fabric, but they leave intact whatever is not made of stone and sheet metal. Neighbors remain neighbors. The baker still knows whom she gives credit to. The tap-tap driver still knows the names of the children he has watched grow up. The tacit contract of coexistence that held the neighborhood together before the disaster survives amid the rubble. When the cement returns, it settles on a substrate that has survived. It is this invisible continuity that makes reconstruction possible in the usual sense of the word. It is not a creation; it is a repair.

Solino is not in that situation. What happened to it is not a disaster; it is an eviction. Organized violence, carried out by the Viv Ansanm coalition after nearly two years of pressure, drove residents from their homes, set buildings on fire, looted belongings, and erased, step by step, the material traces of a collective life. But it did more. It scattered people. It broke the chains that bound neighbors together. It forced each person to leave alone, quickly, without warning the others, because warning them meant putting oneself in danger. When a return is contemplated today, it is not a sleeping neighborhood that we are trying to wake. It is a scattered population: no one any longer knows exactly who they are, where they live, or what they want.

Everyday language has no word for what happened. “Forced displacement” sounds too administrative, “cleansing” is politically loaded, “eviction” is still too civil. This lexical gap is not a detail. As long as a phenomenon has not been properly named, the response it meets defaults to the one that applies to the nearest phenomenon with a clear name. And the nearest phenomenon with a clear name, in Haitian urban affairs, is natural disaster. We borrow its grammar, apply it, and fail to see what it misses.

What it misses is that the raw material for rebuilding Solino is not, first and foremost, concrete. It is the human fabric that has been torn apart. This is not a sentimental point; it is an operational one. Rebuilding a thousand homes for a population when no one yet knows who will want to come back, how many, or on what terms, means running the documented risk of producing a dormitory district that its own residents will leave as soon as they can. This has been seen elsewhere, in comparable settings, every time reconstruction was treated as a housing-supply problem.

Something else must be added that further complicates the picture: the Solino of before was not an optimum to be restored. It was already a zone of concentrated poverty, haphazard construction, absent basic services, water that did not come, electricity that flickered, schools that barely functioned. The lack of a reliable land registry, the occupation of land classified non aedificandi, the crowding onto slopes and along the edges of ravines had patiently produced, over decades, a vulnerability of which the gangs’ takeover was more the consequence than the cause. A territory without documented ownership is a territory whose use no one can legally defend. A territory the state never sets foot in is a territory where someone else will eventually lay down the rules. What is now called the Solino to be rebuilt is therefore, in reality, a failing equilibrium that finally gave way, not a healthy order brutally interrupted.

That changes the question. To “rebuild,” in the literal sense, would be to restore the configuration that produced the fall. Obviously no one wants that, even if it is often what happens, because the path of least resistance is to rebuild, exactly as before, what memory holds on to and what rights holders demand. The alternative, to “re-found,” carries its own risks. A re-founding decided from above, with an engineer’s plan and an authoritarian reconfiguration of the street grid, opens the door to what Beirut experienced with Solidere in the 1990s: a rebuilt center from which the former residents were gradually excluded, a space materially impeccable and socially hollowed out. The story is not Haitian, but the warning is.

And the warning carries all the more weight because Solino is not an isolated neighborhood. It is one sample from the constellation of working-class neighborhoods that have served Haiti’s political economy for at least three decades. Recent history, the part that is documented, shows repeated links between the territorial dynamics of working-class neighborhoods and the political or criminal uses that have been made of them. Jamaica formalized this model to the point of giving it a name, garrison constituencies, whose genealogy the academic literature, from Obika Gray to Laurie Gunst, has painstakingly reconstructed. Haiti never reached that level of formalization, but the phenomenon of the “bases,” the use of young people from working-class neighborhoods for mobilization or protection, and then the emergence of territorial gangs such as Grand Grif in the Lower Artibonite: all of this belongs to what can be cited without conjecture.

In this context, re-entering Solino with a few facilities and talk of revival means running the risk of unwittingly renewing the arrangement that produced the fall. It means restoring the area to just enough working order for life to resume, without touching the structural conditions that made it fertile ground for anyone who chose to use it. Cosmetic reconstruction does not preserve peace; it weakens it by giving it the appearance of recovery. It allows political actors to turn the page, even though the page has not been written.

For there is a phenomenon, documented by Charles Tilly over the long run, that has to be named: the routinization of collective violence. With each cycle, the threshold of what is acceptable rises. The zenglendos of the 1990s still operated in a logic of individual predation; the chimè politicized violence but kept it within clientelist frameworks; Viv Ansanm has climbed a further step, as a coalition, through lasting territorial control, in head-on defiance of sovereignty. At each step, what was unthinkable at the previous one becomes the new baseline. This is not a psychological inevitability; it is a phenomenon of social memory: the next generation works from the precedent, not from the origin. If Solino is rebuilt without re-founding the contract that governs it, the next cycle, if it comes, will start from Viv Ansanm as the norm, not the exception.

That is why what Solino needs, before any program, before any budget envelope, before any announcement with figures attached, is a method. A method that does not separate diagnosis from action, that treats “what must be understood” and “what must be done” not as two successive stages but as two sides of a single act. This method unfolds in five interlocking layers (physical, land tenure, demographic, economic, institutional), each carrying both its own observation and its operational translation, each calling for the next.

The first layer is physical, and it is also the most immediately decisive. Before anything else, the terrain must be mapped in fine detail: topography, slopes, soil behavior, flood zones, the load-bearing capacity of the buildings still standing. Even before the gangs, a significant share of Solino’s buildings stood on land that should never have been built on: at the edge of ravines, on unstable soils, in pockets exposed to runoff. This mapping does not lead to a report that gets filed away; it leads immediately to a decision: what must be razed because it can be rebuilt elsewhere, what must be reconfigured because it can be repaired with structural work, what must be abandoned as a non aedificandi zone and turned into public space or roads. This decision is not purely technical. It touches the memory of places and people’s sense of belonging, and it requires consulting the residents, which is itself an act of social reconstruction, because it puts them back in the position of subjects of their own place rather than objects of a project. Boldness without mapping is brutality. Mapping without boldness is mere management. The first layer sets the two down together.

The second layer is land tenure, and it is in this layer that much of the difference between a cosmetic reconstruction and a founding one is decided. The task is to establish who occupied what, on what basis, and since when: official titles, possession that can be documented through testimony, pre-existing occupancy recognized by the community. But this observation is meaningless unless it is followed, in the same breath, by systematic land regularization, with registration at the General Tax Directorate (DGI), recognition of long-standing use, and the issuance of enforceable titles. Peru carried out a comparable operation with COFOPRI in the 1990s; for all the criticism that can be leveled at its commodification of land, it showed that mass regularization can be achieved within a few years. For a population that has just been driven out, that has lost even the papers proving its administrative existence, a property title is more than a legal document. It is public recognition that people lived there, built there, belong to that place. It makes the holder legally defensible, economically visible, and identifiable to the tax authorities. It is the key that unlocks everything that follows.

The third layer is demographic, and its particular difficulty is greater than it seems. Who has already come back, who wants to come back, who has resettled elsewhere for good: in upper Delmas, in Pétion-Ville, sometimes Tabarre, sometimes the Dominican Republic, when pre-existing family networks made that possible. The reference population is not gathered in a camp where it could be counted; it is dispersed across a myriad of makeshift arrangements: at an aunt’s, in a rented room, in a house already sheltering three families. A targeted census, conducted with the grassroots organizations, churches, and schools that have stayed in touch with the displaced, is the only way to match the supply of reconstruction to actual demand. The census matters not as a statistic but as a calibration: the figures now being put forward, a thousand homes, several thousand young people, float without any empirical anchor as long as this layer has not been laid down. And it entails a decision. If the population that wants to return is three hundred households rather than a thousand, rebuilding for a thousand means manufacturing the dormitory district no one wanted. If it is two thousand, it means condemning half of those entitled to return to stay outside. Observe in order to calibrate, calibrate in order to decide, in a single act.

The fourth layer is economic, and it carries the rebuilding of the productive fabric in the most concrete sense. The livelihood chains of before must be mapped: how the workshops, the shops, the employment ties used to work; what can be revived, what is lost for good, what must be replaced by something else. But this mapping, once again, is worth something only insofar as it enables a decision to actively structure the local economy, and that structuring plays out on two levels at once: the industry itself, and the financial infrastructure that makes it viable.

On the first level, training in the building trades, if it takes place in a classroom for months before the young people go back to looking for jobs that do not exist, repeats the classic failure of Haitian vocational training programs. The alternative is to treat the worksite itself as the school: Solino’s young people rebuild Solino, under the supervision of site managers; the reconstruction becomes the certification, and in the process they remake the neighborhood as their own. The physical act creates the social bond, not the other way around. But a training worksite does not create an industry. For the skills acquired to produce lasting employment, the young people trained must go on to form cooperatives or small and medium-sized construction firms rooted in the neighborhood, capable of bidding for public contracts beyond Solino once the start-up period is over. That calls for engineering that goes beyond training: support with legal incorporation, partnerships with bulk purchasing groups for materials, recognized technical certification, and an enforceable local-content clause written into every public contract awarded for the reconstruction, not as a recommendation but as a contractual clause whose breach carries a penalty. Such clauses exist elsewhere, in Chilean and Peruvian mining concessions and in some urban development programs. Without one, training is an expense, not an investment. With one, the industry exists because it has the orders it needs to grow.

On the second level, that of financial infrastructure, Solino’s economic reconstruction can draw on a resource that earlier generations of urban planners did not have: digital financial inclusion. Four models, in very different settings, converge on the same architecture: WeChat Pay and Alipay in China, PromptPay in Thailand, UPI in India, M-Pesa in Kenya. The mechanism can be summed up in a few words. The market woman selling fritay, the fried street food, does not need a conventional bank account opened at a branch in Delmas. She needs a QR code on her stall. The customer pays by phone. The money lands in a mobile wallet that can immediately be used to pay back the wholesaler, settle the electricity bill, send money to family in the provinces, or buy materials for the worksite next door. Dematerialization is complete; cash becomes residual. Haiti already has the technical infrastructure, with MonCash and NatCash; what is missing is not the technology but density of use across an entire neighborhood, backed by a proactive program to equip shops and train people to use it. Every transaction leaves a trace, and that trace builds a history. Six months of documented, smoothed daily income make it possible to grant the market woman a microloan calibrated to her actual cash flow, with her land title as additional collateral if the amount warrants it. The risk profile is reversed: the more she transacts, the more visible she becomes to the financial system, and the more access she gains to products that consolidate her business. And this infrastructure has a side effect that it would be foolish to ignore: the gang economy runs on cash, on untraceable liquidity, on the ability to racketeer a shopkeeper whose takings are invisible. A neighborhood where most payments are digital is a neighborhood where everyday extortion loses its efficiency. It is not absolute protection (no mechanism is), but it adds structural friction to the economic ecology of crime.

Before turning to the last layer, we must name what holds the previous four together as a political promise rather than a mere technical stack: the symbolic dimension. In the early 2000s, under the Fajardo administration, Medellín placed deliberately monumental buildings, entrusted to leading architects, in its most run-down comunas. The Parques Biblioteca, of which the Biblioteca España in Santo Domingo, designed by Giancarlo Mazzanti, is the best-known example, embodied a clear thesis: the finest public buildings should stand where people have historically received the worst. It was a symbolic reversal, and it produced a documented ripple effect, because the other comunas wanted what Santo Domingo had received, and political pressure became collective. In Solino, such a demonstration could take the form of a cultural and educational center of high architectural quality, with a library, study rooms, a space for debate, digital equipment, and language and coding labs. A place where the neighborhood’s children prepare for their exams in the same conditions as children in Pétion-Ville, where adults take training courses, where debate competitions and intellectual gatherings are held regularly. This is not aesthetics; it is the material signal that a different spatial hierarchy is possible. Without that signal, the method remains technical. With it, the method becomes political in the full sense.

The fifth layer is institutional, and it closes the loop. Who is responsible for integrating the previous four? At what level of the state can the trade-offs be settled when the land layer contradicts the physical layer, when the economic layer demands a choice the demographic layer does not bear out? Under what accountability are those rulings made? These questions are not incidental. A diagnosis without an integrating authority remains a document. And in Haiti, documents get filed away. But this layer also carries, in its operational translation, what may be the most powerful demonstration of what a re-founded state can look like at the scale of a neighborhood: the visible fiscal cycle.

Land titling creates owners. Owners, made visible through digital banking, become taxpayers in a non-punitive way. The DGI no longer collects an arbitrary flat fee; it calibrates a contribution proportional to a documented flow of income, with a low rate offset by a broader base: property tax on buildings, the business license tax (patente), turnover tax (TCA) on registered businesses. And this is where the re-founding of the contract becomes tangible. An identified share of this revenue is earmarked for the neighborhood itself, in the form of visible services: a school that works and has a canteen, roads that are maintained, daily garbage collection, a health post open day and night, lighting that stays on, water within two hundred meters of every home. Citizens see their taxes come back to them. It is this visible return that legitimizes the state as an economic actor and not only as a security force. This is not speculation: Colombian urban federations experimented with this mechanism from the 2000s onward, and it is one of the reasons the residents of Medellín’s disadvantaged comunas ended up paying their property taxes. Because they could see, street by street, what it produced.

Security must then be conceived not as presence but as architecture and as contract. Rio de Janeiro’s Pacifying Police Units, once held up as a model, collapsed precisely because they rested on a police presence with no contractual quid pro quo with residents and no link to the other parts of the criminal justice chain. The alternative is to make the security presence one of the terms of an explicit, renewable local pact whose breach is made public: residents commit to reporting, cooperating, and taking part in monitoring committees, in exchange for guarantees that protection will be permanent. The pact works as a mechanism of shared responsibility only if it is embedded in an architecture that links police, intelligence, and the courts in a permanent system. Without that linkage, the gangs’ recapture of territory is not a distant hypothesis; it is the most likely trajectory.

It remains to say what this article does not claim to be. It is not an operational roadmap, not an implementation plan, not a policy brief. It is a method, put forward for discussion, that stands or falls as such. None of Haiti’s current mechanisms, taken in isolation, is structured to carry out an integrated operation of this kind. The Ministry of Planning and External Cooperation (MPCE) will produce its planning layer, the Ministry of Sports and Civic Action its youth programs, City Hall its urban development component, DINEPA its water network, the police its security arrangements. Each will fill in its implementation reports. Integration, which is the very thing at stake, will have happened nowhere. It is not that the will is lacking; it is that a framework is lacking.

That framework can be invented by thinking through Solino. It may also not be, in which case the reconstruction of Solino will have been nothing more than the interval between two destructions. We have already lived through several. The difference this time is that the method exists if we choose it, and that the choice is not technical. It is political, in the most sober sense of the word: it is a question of whether the state wants to demonstrate that it can reappear somewhere, durably, fully, as a state. Solino can be the example. It will not become one through the list of things announced; it will become one through the coherence of what is done, in the order in which things must be done.

What can be replicated is the method. Not the figure.