Growth-oriented Development in the Peruvian Amazonia commodifies its biocultural diversity. Thus, inscribed in a path dependence of unfulfilled promises of local development, the Amazon Waterway Project seeks to create an international trade chain connecting produce from Manaus in Brazil to China by dredging the four most important Peruvian Amazonian rivers. In such a complex territory, the execution of the Amazon Waterway Project represents both a risk of widening the territorial unevenness gap and a challenge for creating alternative development. In this regard, the research shows the relevance of spatial planning and design looking upon the talents, opportunities and knowledge of the territory to create new shared understandings for a holistic development. This would pursue social and ecological wellbeing by involving local and global agents, as well as reframing big scale infrastructure projects as integral development opportunities. The main goal is to build a cooperative relationship of Amazonian cities and communities. Therefore, a landscape economy strategy is envisioned at multiple scales as a start for a co-creation process. This includes a series of interventions, guides, protocols and dialogue spaces towards the construction of a New Amazon Pact.

Like many other Latin American cities, Lima experienced explosive population growth during the last century. Its population went from 600 thousand people in 1940 to nearly 9.5 million people nowadays. Former agriculture fields between the coast and the beginning of the Andes mountains were quickly filled with urban developments. Neither the public sector nor the private housing market provided decent living conditions in the city for all these newcomers. 34% of the city’s land was developed informally (Municipality of Lima, 2013a) and 70% of the houses were to some degree self-built. The process of urban development and, specifically, the control of the space through land ownership, generated a segregated city. The urban poor usually accessed low-cost land or housing in areas exposed to high levels of risk, with accessibility problems or lack of basic infrastructure.

The current process of urban development, along with a quantitative understanding of housing in policy, continues reproducing socio-spatial segregation today. Buying a plot to land traffickers on the steep slopes of the periphery is the primary way for the low-income population to access a place to live in the city.

This graduation project has two main goals. On the one hand, it tries to understand the relations between housing, urban development and socio-spatial segregation in Lima. On the other, it explores the potential of housing (understood as a process) to develop alternative models of urban development and reduce socio-spatial segregation, in search of a more just city.