Full project Title: Climate Resilient Cities in Latin America Initiative- Project -076: “Home as a catalyst for resilience: Settlement relocation in the Amazon rainforest.”

After a rigorous and comprehensive evaluation process undertaken by the Technical Advisory Panel of the Initiative and the approval of the Steering Committee, six projects have been selected. CDKN, the International Development Research Centre of Canada (IDRC) and Fundación Futuro Latinoamericano (FFLA) launched the Climate Resilient Cities in Latin America research call in May 2016. This research call focuses on climate resilience in urban contexts, and specifically on small and medium cities in Latin America that are experiencing rapid growth.

Overview:

One of those is this research project, Settlement relocation, a relatively unexplored form of city production, offers a unique opportunity to build a city from scratch. In these projects, the tension between top-down decisions and local identity and needs is particularly evident.

The project aims to investigate relocation settlements as a new form of ‘home’ making by exploring the importance of infusing urban projects with local knowledge as a necessity to achieve resilience. An oversimplification in policy response of the social, economic, and political factors at the local level leads to the consolidation of poverty and vulnerability and, thus, to a lack of sustainability of the projects

Objective:

This research seeks to highlight hidden and/or overlooked socio-economic and cultural realities in policy response, which consolidates pre-existing patterns of vulnerability and produces unsustainable settlements. We will analyse ‘home’ as understood by future dwellers to identify these realities, using participatory activities to co-create informed alternative livelihood sources and spatial designs to relocation settlements that reflect local ideals towards their future. We seek to unveil both positive and negative aspects of current living conditions as well as the proposed settlement design to enable opportunities for social and climate compatible development through the active participation of future dwellers in decision-making

processes in housing and city production, with an emphasis on the inclusion of gender issues in political and social agendas.

The project seeks to generate a methodology of participatory and multi-disciplinary processes, aiming for recommendations based on evidence produced during research that can be incorporated in already existinglocal and national policies.

This research project will take place in the city of Iquitos (Peru), which are small to medium sized cities that have experienced rapid development in the last few decades. This city encounters different urban problems and is at risk from different impacts of climate change requiring various DRR, CCA and resilience building strategies.

Suppliers: Fundación Futuro Latinoamericano (FFLA)

Partners: Fundacion Futuro Latinoamericano (FFLA), International Development Research Centre of Canada (IDRC)

CDKN funding: £ 75,178.18

Picture: Kate Fisher