Wanna know why the Camino Real community in Cusco chose "Tambo" as the name for their new reuse and recycling center? As Diego Alonzo Alcazar, a volunteer architect on the project and the founding director of OLA Architecture explains, a tambo (derived from the word "tanpu"...
We're pleased to announce the final version of Sustainable Neighborhoods – Camino Real, a collaborative and intersectional plan that is the culmination of a multi-year project dating back to 2015 when we first began working with Cusco's communities through our Urbinsight global data and participatory...
We’re excited to announce the release of Sustainable Neighborhoods - Moravia, a collaborative and intersectoral project to develop a sustainable neighborhood plan for Medellín’s Moravia neighborhood, initiated and funded by the United Nations’ Environment Program. [caption id="attachment_6155" align="alignright" width="350"] Click on cover to read the complete...
Ángela María Holguín Ramírez, Cielo Maria Holguín Ramírez, and Elsy Torreglosa have been community leaders in the Moravia neighborhood of Medellín for over 20 years. Ángela is the co-founder of Moravia Tours, a local business that promotes responsible and sustainable community tourism, Cielo has led formal...
Joshua Castro is Ecocity Builders' local lead for Cusco’s sustainable plan. Joining Team Urbinsight during Phase 2 of the program, he has been capturing the progress in participating neighborhoods through interviews, photography and videos. We recently caught up with Joshua to ask him a few...
As composting modules are sprouting up throughout Cusco’s historic neighborhoods and new archetype maps are being made available to planners, academics, and community members as a result of the Ecocity Builders-facilitated Secondary Cities (2C) pilot, Team Urbinsight thought it would be the perfect time to...
With a growing population, increasing consumption, and accompanying high rates of solid waste, Cusco’s historic inner city neighborhoods have increasingly been feeling the need for the kind of in-depth accounting of conditions on the ground that is required to institute a holistic solution to their...
Have you ever run across an advertisement saying dirt is good? Have you ever wondered what would need to happen for garbage to be considered beneficial? Well, garbage is just garbage until it is turned into a valuable resource. In the case of organic waste, this...
We are recently back from Santa Fe, Argentina, where, under the Secondary Cities program of the US Office of the Geographer, Ecocity Builders teamed up with a local NGO, the Mayor’s office, and the local public university to host a three-day technical workshop on urban...
Following an engaging event with community leaders, city staff, academics, students, and citizen activists, Ecocity Builders has begun Phase II of its partnership with Cusco, Peru. I feel privileged to take part in this work as a landscape architect with a background in historical landscapes...