Urban Resilience in Cartagena and Barranquilla

In late August, Andres Achury and Francis Goyes, Master in City Planning candidates and research assistants at the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism, visited Colombia to carry out preliminary field research with Fundación Mario Santo Domingo (FMSD), one of the largest foundation in Colombia. This visit kicked off a two-year collaboration between MIT, led by Prof. Lawrence Vale, and FMSD, with the objective of evaluating FMSD’s housing macro projects with the resiliency framework created by Prof. Vale’s Resilient Cities Housing Initiative (RCHI).

Andres and Francis traveled to Cartagena and Barranquilla, located on the Colombian Caribbean coast, to visit the two affordable housing macro projects the foundation is currently building and spoke with local community leaders and members of FMSD. In addition, they met with professors from Universidad del Norte in Barranquilla to explore future collaboration and visited FMSD’s headquarters.

The RCHI team will continue research for the rest of the semester at MIT and will continue field work in January 2017, after which they aim to complete a resiliency evaluation of FMSD’s macro projects. Further information on the research may be found here.