Group Project Amigos de la Montaña

From the latter half of the 20th century, the boundary between the urban core of Bogotá and its neighboring mountains, the Cerros Orientales, has been a contested area of commercial development, resource protection agencies, and burgeoning informal settlements. This project critically challenges the dismissed value of informal settlements within this contested peri-urban condition, linking socio-political and economic equity to both environmental protection and urban growth. Informal communities are notoriously esoteric in their organizations and as a result, designing for one requires a system that can be easily deployed and hybridized according to unforeseen needs. Each of the three proposed projects addresses the design problem in its own unique way, while still maintaining a linkage to an overall system.