ARTÍCULO
WATER, TOPOGRAPHY AND DISPERSION: qualifying small scale production and public space in the in-between territory of Cuenca, Ecuador
Fecha
2018Autor
De Meulder, Bruno
Rivera Muñoz, Monica Alexandra
Proaño Escandon, Diego Javier
Institución
Resumen
ABSTRACT The problematizing of generic dispersion as a general evil of growing cities, has led to
a too-easy diagnosis with the same ‘illness’ to peri-urban territories under the influence of mid-sized
cities in the central and southern Ecuadorian Andes. As a consequence, development plans for these
proto-urban territories show a widespread tendency to propose densification as a generic antidote to
battle dispersion. Very commonly, the plans neglect strategies that consider the rationalities behind
those rural lands sprinkled with emerging urbanity. At first sight the peri-urban landscape of Cuenca
appears as a territory of disperse and apparently chaotic occupation. However this is a system of
productive spaces and varied population, a cultural constellation, whose internal logics claim for new
approaches and formulations, which consider its landscape as the structuring base of its spatial
development.