Encounters on the Frontier: The Next 100,000 -The Canton of Samborondon, Ecaudor-Growth Management Plan

The Samborondón Urban Design Workshop was a joint effort between two architecture and urban design programs: American and Ecuadorian . The workshop combined a team of American city planning and architecture graduate students in Atlanta with a group of architecture undergraduate students from Ecuador, to create a growth management plan for the county of Samborondón in Ecuador. The workshop started with the Ecuadorian students focusing in site data collection and analysis. Throughout one semester, the students collected, digitized and translated information for the workshop to use, while familiarizing themselves with the area and the urban scale. In the second semester of the process, the Atlanta students started with research on case studies in Latin American urban design issues. After this introduction, both teams were divided into three groups and simultaneously researched three alternatives in future growth. This meant each institution had a mirror team in the other one. At the end of this interval, both teams came together during a ten day visit to Samborondón. Each group was paired up with its mirror partner, which allowed contrasting strategies to merge and different problems to be resolved. The approach emphasized the topics being studied over the differences between institutions.The workshop proceeded to engage local residents and developers in a series of work sessions that aimed to target different concerns within the county. Suburban residents had to be reconciled with the idea that the ideal world they were looking for had already disappeared: What they had lost was starting to outweigh what they had gained.This presentation will focus on three key themes: The Challenges of conducting a joint studio in two languages in two locations and the supporting technology, The shape of the pedagogy as a reflection of municipal and community needs, The work of the studio.

Volume Editors
David Covo & Gabriel Mérigo Basurto

ISBN
0-935502-57-2