Dwelling fractions for Bolivia

Bolivia is divided into 9 departments, 51 provinces and 332 municipalities, and the capital city is La Paz. An exposure model has been developed in terms of the number of buildings as well as economic value (replacement cost of the structures, excluding contents and non-structural components) at department, province and district level. Information about building characteristics was based on data from census 2012, INE (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Bolivia).

In order to improve the understanding of the typical and common building types in the region, the results coming from PAGER and UN-HABITAT are summarized in the following figures. Regarding the housing reports from WHE, no information is available for this country.

A summary of information provided in the census 2012 at national level is presented in the following pie charts. These results show dwelling fractions according to the predominant exterior wall material (“material de paredes exteriores”), floor material (“material del piso”), dwelling type (“tipo de vivienda”) and type of area (“tipo de area”); and also pie charts have been generated for dwelling fractions in urban and rural areas (pie charts on the top and bottom respectively) according to the type of house and the material of the floor.

Using the previous information and expert judgement, a mapping scheme to classify the dwellings into a set of building typologies has been developed (see figure). The mapping scheme consists on two tables: the first table allocates a building category according to the material of the exterior walls and the material of the floor, and the second table assigns building fractions to the possible typologies given the type of dwelling and the building category previously defined. The building typologies have been defined in accordance with the GEM Building Taxonomy.

Regarding the census attribute definitions, concrete exterior walls has been assumed to represent confined masonry walls, infill reinforced concrete frames or precast concrete walls (with low construction quality), and the type of house Covacha refers to an informal construction generally characterised by wooden exterior walls.

See more about mapping scheme methodology

Urban	Rural

Bolivia has a total number of dwellings of 2,803,982 distributed across 29 building typologies (taxonomy categories) (see Table 2.1). Figure 2.30 illustrates the proportion of dwellings in each taxonomy category at a national level and the proportions in the communes of La Paz and Irupana (province of Sud Yungas), both located in the department of La Paz. At a national level the predominant categories in terms of predominant construction material are Unreinforced Masonry and Adobe (33% and 24% respectively), whereas at department, province and municipality levels the proportions vary considerably. For example, in La Paz the percentage of dwellings in the unreinforced masonry category is 45% while in Irupana this percentage is less than 11%.

Dwelling distribution along Ecuador is shown in the following maps using different resolution levels. At the province level 1(a), pie charts show the proportion of each taxonomy category in the region. The pie charts are not shown in the other figures for the sake of clarity.

Dwelling distribution
Department level	Province level	Municipality level
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