For at least seven centuries, the inhabitants of the Tomebamba Valley have found opportunities to prosper by making the most of a bountiful natural water infrastructure, comprising an extensive network of rivers, numerous lakes and vast expanses of paramo ecosystems and rainforests. This natural system has played a decisive role in the history of this region and has ultimately enabled the emergence of a city that remains, to this day, intimately linked to the rivers that flow through it.

However, from the 20th century onwards, the arrival in the region of the wave of modernism that was spreading across the world triggered a series of increasingly profound transformations to this system, in response to the adoption of modern lifestyles by its inhabitants and the consequent need to integrate the rivers even further into the city’s metabolism. The interplay of these landscape transformations and infrastructural developments established a model of extraction in the form of a unidirectional system, in which the assurance of a constant flow of resources and benefits drawn from this natural system for the normal course of daily life in the city comes at the expense of its ecological integrity.

Within this context, this project examines the impact of practices that appear to be inherent to the current conception of an Andean riverscape in this region and, taking the restoration of the global water cycle as its starting point, explores how the intersection of engineering and ecology can shape the landscape to enable a model in which there is room for both the harnessing of this natural system and its future integrity.
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