+ CITIES AFTER EXTREME EVENTS [Graduate Studio]
PORTOVIEJO + QUITO, ECUADOR / SPRING 2019
Cities After Extreme Events: Neighborhood Adaptation Scenarios
Sponsor
Texas Tech University College of Architecture
Research Assistant
Thais Marcussi
Institutional Partners
San Gregoriano University; The Catholic University of Quito
TRAVELING GRADUATE STUDIO | ENGAGED DESIGN PEDAGOGY | URBAN REGENERATION SYSTEMS
Rebuilding neighborhoods in the wake of extreme events continues to drive urban redevelopment in Ecuador, but it has also led to parallel processes of displacement following natural and infrastructural happenings. Communities both shape and are vulnerable to displacement in Ecuador’s mountainous and coastal cities, and they use a range of different approaches to cope with the threat of harm.
Following comparative mappings of global disasters, vulnerable sites in Quito and Portoviejo were identified for studio investigation, and students conducted interviews with residents in the neighborhoods of Solanda in Quito and San Pedro and Florones in Portoviejo, in addition to a nearby resettlement community. The studio’s key finding was a history of grassroots efforts to resist large-scale development and to build social and local infrastructures to manage extreme events - from landslides to metro line construction. In response to resident interviews and current Municipal plans, students developed regenerative systems to help an array of post-disaster conditions, including redevelopment-detritus upcycling, wetland agricultural cooperatives, and landslide-to-parkland areas.
Through peer-to-peer workshops and field-based study with students at the Universidad San Gregorio (Portoviejo) and the Pontifica Universidad Católica del Ecuador (Quito), Texas Tech students traced the cityscapes that are shaped by the interaction of urbanization, large-scale development, and Ecuador’s dramatic geography.
The studio focused on six areas, three in Quito and three in Portoviejo, that reflect the diversification of urban informality in these cities and active engagement by residents in negotiations related to post-disaster redevelopment projects. By identifying comparative contexts as platforms for making post-disaster planning place-based, this studio challenged the tendency to ‘build back’ places to prior variations with a baseline of future-focused strategies that can be adapted in similar settings.
