Densifying Ecuadorian Middle Cities

Densifying Ecuadorian Middle Cities Questions, Problems, Design Issues

Antonio di Campli, maria de los angeles cuenca holger patricio cuadrado torres, fernanda luzuriaga torres NALACS | TU Delft International Conference | Cities and Citizenship in Contemporary Latin America and the Caribbean | Delft University of Technology, | 17.06.16

This research proposes 3 different strategies for the densification of Ecuadorian medium-sized cities.

The considered case study is the city of Loja, a settlement of about 200,000 inhabitants placed in an Andean valley at about 2100 meters above sea level within the Amazon River basin.

The objective of this research is twofold.

1 2

On the one hand one try to determine which, in these contexts, are today the conditions under which it is legitimate and possible to prefigure densification processes.

On the other, this research defines precise design actions able to trigger a dense regeneration of Ecuadorian medium-sized cities through a spatial and environmental recomposition process favoring more integrated relationships between the different parts of the city, as well as a redefinition in a most inclusive sense of its forms of social interaction at the proximity scale.

The fundamental questions are: What problems can be addressed through a process of densification of Ecuadorian medium-sized cities urban space?

What urban design strategies and logics it is useful to put in place in order to trigger a spatial and functional densification that may be socially and economically sustainable, durable, the result of the involvement of more actors , stakeholders, subject and inhabitants to the most various levels?

research objectives

The identification of precise urban densification strategies focused on the invention of particular urban-environmental devices characterized by a superposition of uses, functions and ecologies will help make the urban mosaic of Ecuadorian medium size cities more livable, inclusive, and finally polycentric.

The configuration of this geography of places, designed according to radical ecological design techniques, as social and spatial ‘membranes’ between neighborhood inhabited by different social classes will help making Ecuadorian middle cities urban spaces less socially segregated and environmentally virtuous.

Strategies for urban densification are here conceived as ‘protocols’ intended to be replicable in different Ecuadorian middle cities. >modification of urban space. > how notions of just/unjust space relate to issues of densification.

Why is it good to densify the urban space? What are the problems we want to address?

> sustainability

> urbanity

> compactness > ...

hypothesis