Brief abstract
Provide a brief summary of the proposed project written for an audience of non-experts. This summary may be used in promotional materials. (limited to 250 words) Lima is typified by its topographic stratification. While the flat, colonial center of the city is home to its middle and upper classes, its mountainous periphery – home to more than 60% of its inhabitants – is dominated by precarious informal construction and exposure to significant environmental and economic risk. A persistent affordable housing crisis and dysfunctional political culture ensure that these informal areas continue to grow, but they receive scant attention from academics, politicians or the media.
Since 2012, the members of the research group CONURB, which is affiliated with the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP), have been researching the causes of this type of urban growth, as well as urban, architectural and political strategies to combat it and/or reduce risk for existing areas.
In order to advance this research, a collaboration with MIT’s Urban Risk Lab is proposed that combines the expertise of both groups to investigate a set of five specific topics within a defined area in the mountainous periphery of the city. These topics include urban morphology, soil

reinforcement using vegetation, water management, renewable energy, and constructive systems. All of these research topics address various aspects of physical risk in resource-poor, seismically active, very dry, very steep informal neighborhoods of Lima. While the existing research carried out by CONURB and others has been geared towards understanding and addressing metropolitan-scale systems, the more specific and technical nature of this collaboration will provide basic knowledge about strategies that may be appropriate at a larger scale.
Description of collaboration (if applicable)
Provide a brief history of the collaboration and describe how your work is complementary. (limited to 250 words) Since the spring of 2015, Luis Rodriguez Rivero (Associate Professor, PUCP), Claudia Bode (MIT M.Arch 2015) and Miho Mazereeuw (Assistant Professor, MIT) have been in frequent contact. Miho and Claudia travelled to Lima in the Spring of 2016 as invited instructors in the “Limapolis 2016” conference/workshop, hosted by the PUCP, which brought together an international group of architects, researchers and students to generate urban and architectural ideas for the periphery of Lima.
CONURB and the Urban Risk Lab have many shared interests, including understanding the underlying political and economic factors that lead to uncontrolled urban growth in the first place; design strategies for affordable housing; technical approaches to physical risk reduction, including slope stabilization through vegetation and water management; and strategies to increase resilience in the face of physical and economic risks. This collaboration aims to bring together the expertise of both groups to investigate selected topics at a deeper level.
Description of the proposed project
Describe in detail the proposed project. Funding may be used to cover travel and meeting costs to facilitate international projects and collaboration. Funds may not be used to cover salaries or materials and long term stays of graduate students. Please include any technical information that will help scientific reviewers in your field evaluate the proposal. Please review the guidelines and eligibility from our website. (limited to 1500 words) The city of Lima is characterized by rings of informal settlements that have, in recent years, extended into the foothills of the Andes. The growth of these settlements has been driven by armed conflicts in Peru and exacerbated by poor infrastructure and access to affordable housing.
This construction in the hilly peripheral areas of the city is typified by high vulnerability to physical, economic and social risk.
CONURB has developed two studies to investigate this type of urbanization: The first one, named “Housing on slopes” was completed in the context of the Barrio Mío program and PLAM2035 project in 2014. The second study, called “The city of the slopes”, is currently being developed for the Housing, Construction and Sanitation Public Ministry. It analyses the urban, social, morphological and political structure of the steep areas of Lima in order to establish different strategies to improve the urban conditions of these areas, and the quality of life of their inhabitants, by mitigating or reducing risks.
In order to apply these strategies, and to be able to carry out new urban regeneration and occupation models in these areas of the city, it is fundamental to develop methods to stabilize the slopes. This collaboration intends to augment existing larger-scale work with a more specific and technical investigation of steep-slope stabilization and risk mitigation.
To deal with the complexity of the territory and the subject, the project includes five research topics:
1. ECO-SUSTAINABLE URBAN SYSTEMS FOR ARID SLOPES. In geographical and geological terms, Andean foothills have specific characteristics that have not been fully considered by the occupations that have occurred in the last 20 years in Lima’s periphery. It is necessary to explore ways to situate and connect these occupations, define urban spaces, and improve mobility to build an urban system that takes these characteristics into account and allows the recently occupied slopes on the periphery to join to the existing city. This needs to provide integrated urban solutions for the deficit of housing, accessibility, water supply and sanitation, public spaces and infrastructure.
2. REINFORCEMENT OF THE SOIL ON THE SLOPES WITH VEGETATION SYSTEMS. The Andean foothills are formed of a rocky base and successive layers of sediments, prone to break down in case of earthquakes and to slide in case of rains and earthquakes. These sediment layers must be stabilized in order to be urbanized. The project will explore the possibility to achieve the reinforcement through the plantation of productive species that infiltrate the soil and counteract its aridity and plan for pilot test beds and experiments.
3. WATER MANAGEMENT ON THE SLOPES.
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Generate a system of supply, distribution, treatment and reuse of water for social housing buildings proposed for the slopes, converting the production of grey waters by the buildings into an asset for the reinforcement of the soil through vegetation and finally providing for proper public space with complementary productive (urban agriculture), recreational (vertical parks), sports, cultural and other potential activities.
4. RENEWABLE ENERGY SYSTEMS FOR COLLECTIVE HOUSING. Analyze the possibilities of generation, distribution and reuse of energy in the buildings of collective social housing. Under the paradigm of regenerative sustainability, design a prototype of social housing with a system capable to generate more clean energy than consumed by its inhabitants to supply to some extend the local grid (for public lightning for example).
5. MATERIALS, CONSTRUCTIVE AND STRUCTURAL SYSTEMS FOR HOUSING ON SLOPES. Explore the possibilities of incorporating alternative materials and systems for collective housing projects, taking into account the existence of semi-industrial enterprises in the area, which offer the possibility to be incorporated into the production processes, thereby generating new labor opportunities for the community.
Under these five topics the project will focus on the sloped area of the valley of Amauta, located in the district of Ate in Lima. The valley of Amauta, whose slopes have been gradually occupied by informal settlements in the past fifteen years, share similar characteristics with a number of other valleys located on the periphery of Lima and other peruvian cities (Cusco, Arequipa, Cajamarca, etc.) and provide the possibility to test a system which could be replicable nationwide.
Both the research and design phase will incorporate students and professors from several disciplines: architecture, urbanism, botany, civil engineering, environmental engineering and agroforestry.
Building upon the expertise of all three institutions (MIT-Urban Risk Lab, PUCP-CONURB and the Faculty of Environmental Science at UCSUR) this project will host several workshops in Ate and student interaction from all three universities.
CONURB has focused on issues surrounding housing, urban morphology, and urban design,as a continuation of the Barrio Mio municipal program (2012 – 2014) and in collaboration with the Housing Ministry of Peru. They have a deep knowledge of the history and politics of the city, as well as the specific risks that are faced by the various peripheral neighborhoods. In addition, they have significant experience leading design workshops that include residents as well as professionals, and have synthesized these workshops with their own technical knowledge in a series of reports that propose new urban and architectural strategies, aimed at influencing policy within the Municipality of Lima.
Since 2015 the Faculty of Environmental Science at UCSUR has been undergoing a transition, with the aim being to carry out interdisciplinary projects focusing on urban issues combining the expertise of its three schools (Architecture and Urbanism, Environmental Engineering, Agroforestry). Under the framework of regenerative sustainability, in 2016 the Faculty has launched a transversal research program on Sustainable Cities and proposed to dedicate four theses to the Urban Ecological System project developed in collaboration with URL and CONURB. The thesis students will base their research on the knowledge produced by CONURB and add to it research from disciplines that CONURB has not worked with previously, namely environmental engineering, agroforestry and material science.
The Urban Risk Lab at MIT will complement this Lima-focused expertise with its extensive background in risk reduction through physical design strategies in various parts of the globe, including Haiti, Indonesia, India and Japan. As an inherently multidisciplinary group, the URL will bring in students from various disciplines, and is particularly focused on the integration of the field of urban ecology with architectural and urban design strategies. This concern is reflected in the inclusion of Peter Del Tredici, botanist and urban ecologist at MIT.
The complementary skill sets of the URL, CONURB and UCSUR will allow for a collaboration that significantly advances technical knowledge, as well as understanding its application in the unique context of Lima’s informal periphery. We will be working through the beginning stages with students in all three universities through workshops, thesis, and studios. The ambition is, after the initial stages, we will work towards pilot projects and tests in certain areas to strengthen the scientific knowledge, especially in slope stabilization.