Pontifica Universidad Catolica del Ecuador (PUCE) and cityLAB/UCLA, with Gensler, Providencia.

Divining Providencia is a strategic and spatial plan for a 10 sq.km. territory in the Ecuadorian Amazon. The site is centered upon the design of Puerto Providencia, a new town that will develop in association with a port recently completed on the Napo River across from Yasuni Na-tional Park. It is located amidst five indigenous Kichwa communities, colonist farmer coopera-tives, and multi-national oil drilling concessions. The project is the result of a new transport ax-is, financed by IIRSA (an infrastructure building consortium funded by all twelve South American countries), to speed the export of resources extracted in the Amazon to Asia through a new overland route (upriver and over the Andes) to the Pacific port of Manta. Our proposal redirects the effects of this global trade-driven infrastructural initiative toward surprising and positive environmental and cultural outcomes rather than the deleterious ones which have resulted in the “boom-bust” tales for which South America is legendary-in places such as Potosi (Bolivia) and Fordlandia (Brazil). The plan offers an alternative to its downriver counterpart Manaos, a city-cum-trade-zone where little of the value being added to the products being assembled is conveyed to the local population, with profits instead being reaped at distant points of sale.
Its shape naturally defined by the limitation of development to only already-deforested land, Puerto Providencia acts as a decoy to attract real estate speculators and subsistence farmers away from their deforesting activities to a single, concentrated hub of commercial and social activity that offers higher and more steady income and access to municipal services. The crea-tion of “transfer of development rights” (TDR) legislation used to incentivize migration in turn enables newly-vacated fincas (farm parcels), largely deforested, to revert to local government control, so that the land can be replanted according to more sustainable agronomic practices such as agroforestry. These would in turn be leased back to micro-enterprises, initiating a sup-ply chain that includes refinement and manufacture of locally-sourced goods that draw upon indigenous knowledge and skills. This new economy is designed to ride the coattails of the global economy of “through-put” resources associated with the trans-Amazonian transport axis. Given the new port’s strategic location, as well as the most easily accessible gateway to the Amazon, these local businesses are expected to be supported by a growing eco-tourist (as well as agro – and industrial-tourist) audience. A regionally-scaled market and eco-hotel serve as key anchors to the plan, as well as community health, education, and recreation facilities – not least of which is daycare for the largely woman-owned cooperatives. Finally, as the fincas are re-turned to temporary public control, they will be consolidated into larger collective tracts, ena-bling the removal, or “deboning” of the so-called "fishboning" of roads that were and are the prime agent of forest clearance in Ecuador’s northern Amazon. Providencia thereby becomes, ironically, a remedy to poverty and deforestation rather than its cause.