The Quito, Ecuador Studio: Armatures of Inclusion | University of Pennsylvania | Spring 2021
Team: Mingyang Sun; Shiqi Ming; Siying Xu
Tutor : David Gouverneur
Narrative: Over a billion people around the globe live in unplanned of self-constructed settlements frequently at peri-urban locations, excluded from the benefits of city life, and occupying high-risk sites. Latin America is still considered the continent with the highest social inequalities, manifested in the disconnection between the formal and the informal areas. This project posits that landscape-driven approaches are powerful tools to address the aforementioned concerns, fostering social inclusion, and breaking down physical and cultural barriers, connecting the settlements to their natural systems, linking formal areas to the informal ones, improving physical and performative relations among the informal settlements, and establishing productive local, urban, and metropolitan networks.