Photos by James Addison
Canal Calicanto Nuevo
Co-designing and co-shaping informal settlements.
This workshop was held with the support of MIT Priscilla King Gray Public Service Center and Fundación Grupo Social in developing an urban revitalization strategy for an area of the informal settlement in the south-east border of the Virgin Swamp in Cartagena, on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. In collaboration with MIT professor Lorena Bello and MIT students Manuela Uribe and James Addison, we led a 3-week design charrette with local architecture students to produce an urban design scheme for the Foundation to use as a base for its habitat transformation plan. Throughout the design charrette we engaged the community in a series of participatory design workshops aimed at integrating the needs and ideas of users into the urban proposal. In parallel, I led a research enquiry focusing on the topic of the spatial adaptations of displaced families from rural areas into marginal neighborhoods of the city. This involved conducting and analyzing individual interviews with a multi-generational set of participants from the neighborhood.
More information at the MIT PKG site.
January 2018