GREAT – Gridding Equitable Urban Futures in Areas of Transition
GREAT seeks to understand the ways in which being on- and off-grid provide an opportunity to rethink the relationship between people and urban infrastructure in areas of transition in the context of informal settlements in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Participant Institutions
Funded By
Team
We are a partnership between Lancaster University, UCL, Universidad del Valle (Colombia), and Universidad Tecnológica de La Habana Jose Antonio Echeverría (Cuba).
Our work is structured around
three key concepts:
Transitions
An essential part of identifying and contributing to transition processes is the recognition of existing sustainable lives. The lives of residents of informal settlements are sustainable in many respects, partly because of their limited participation in civic and consumer society. In what ways can we learn from them to inform scholarship on socio-technical transitions?
Intersectionality
Questions around gender, ethnicity, class and, in the case of Cali, whether or not one has been the victim of Colombia’s armed conflict are key to understanding the communities GREAT works with in Cali and Havana. What an equitable urban future is and might be depends on the processes that have shaped the communities of places like Brisas de las Palmas and San Nicolás.
Imaginaries of Change
In what ways should the future of the areas where GREAT is based be imagined and who should take part in the process? Often informal settlements, areas of precarity, or, popular neighbourhoods are seen as deviations from what the formal city should be, which has consequences over what is possible and imaginable, for example, in relation to land tenure, occupancy and ownership. In the context of GREAT, we think differently about the kinds of imaginaries of the areas where we work to help inform alternative visions by the residents themselves concerning issues such as transport and mobility and zero waste.
Stories from DISTRICT 18 - Cali, Colombia
Francy Mina | Cali, Colombia
“One arrives here with one hand behind and the other in front, disorientated, not knowing what to eat, what to do, nothing…. The first thing you do is look for a place to rent, you have to put up with humiliations and many things simply because you have different customs… you have to adapt the hard way, by force. That’s the hardest thing, there was no time to assimilate…”