Dwelling fractions for Venezuela

Venezuela is divided into 25 federal entities, 336 municipalities and 992 parishes [11]. 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 2011, INE (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Venezuela).

In order to improve the understanding of the typical and common building types in the region, the results coming from PAGER and UN-HABITAT and the ones coming from the GEM Workshop in Medellin 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 2011 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). Despite having several features for classifying the building portfolio, the web applications for downloading census data only allows disaggregation of the number of dwellings in each region by a maximum of three attributes, but one of them must be the year of construction. However, the aim of the regional exposure model presented herein is to provide results using homogeneous and consistent methodologies amongst countries. Therefore, only two attributes were taken into account when updating the mapping scheme for Venezuela: material of the exterior walls and floor.

The mapping scheme consists on a table that allocates a building category according to the material of the exterior walls and the material of the floor. 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

Venezuela has a total number of dwellings of 6,929,968 distributed across 25 building typologies (taxonomy categories) (see Table 2.1). Figure 2.44 illustrates the proportion of dwellings in each taxonomy category at a national level and the proportions for the federal entity of Merida and the parish of San Isidro (in the federal entity of Zulia). At a national level the predominant categories in terms of predominant construction material are Unreinforced Masonry, Reinforced concrete and confined masonry (48%, 18% and 14% respectively), whereas at federal entity, municipality and parish levels the proportions vary considerably. For example, in Merida the percentage of dwellings associated to an unknown category is only 2% while in San Isidro this percentage goes up to 30%.

Dwelling distribution along Venezuela is shown in the following maps using different resolution levels. At the State 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
State level	Municipality level	Parish level
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