PUCP Architecture professors organized important Latin American meetings in Brazil, Chile and Dominican Republic

Between May and June of this year, Department of Architecture professors Belén Desmaison and Pablo Vega Centeno led the organization of a decentralized seminar in the cities of Recife (Brazil), Santiago de Chile (Chile), and Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic). The meeting "Care, Territorial Management and Intersectionality" is part of the Gender Responsive Resilience and Intersectionality in Policy and Practice (GRRIPP) project, which is currently being implemented by the Center for Research on Architecture and the City (CIAC-PUCP). Desmaison and Vega Centeno lead this team.

The purpose of the seminar was to create a space to exchange lessons learned and strengthen the network of contacts of the 10 projects financed by GRRIPP in the region and carried out between August 2021 and March 2022. This marked the end of the first stage of CIAC-PUCP's work in charge of project implementation in the Latin America and Caribbean region. The team is also supported by PUCP sociologists Clara Soto and Dámaris Herrera.

The GRRIPP project is promoted by the University College of London and funded by the UK Government's Research and Innovation Fund. It aims to promote a gender and intersectionality approach in development policy, practice and research.

A network of networks

Architect Belén Desmaison points out that the purpose of the seminar was to reflect the horizontal nature of the GRRIPP project and to provide autonomy to the regions and teams to validate their knowledge regarding the gender approach, intersectionality and emergency management. Likewise, the meetings were held with the intention of taking the project to the field following the challenges presented by the pandemic.

"The region has a long history of knowledge on care, from its social and environmental aspects, and territorial management in urban and rural contexts," says Desmaison, who mentions that the exchange of this knowledge is vital for the integral development of the projects. For his part, Professor Pablo Vega Centeno adds that the main challenge of management has been "to create a platform that, by linking issues of gender, intersectionality and territorial management, opens up the possibilities for developing projects to generate networks among themselves".

"We sought to recognize the practices of each project in terms of their impact on public policy, risk management theory, gender and intersectionality, in order to better understand our territories," adds Desmaison. The architect also mentions that these meetings allowed the 10 selected projects to position and validate themselves from their region and in projection to the global arena. "We hope to strengthen this network of networks and that this will allow the projects to recognize their diversity in terms of experiences and scope," she adds.

Next steps

For Desmaison, the next stage of the project is to continue aiming for a global exchange in order to evaluate the possibilities of generating other collective meeting points. "Our work will focus on continuously strengthening this network of networks and going beyond regional differences. We hope to find similarities and spaces for communication in a global ecosystem, but without ceasing to explore the territories within the region that have not participated in the project in this edition," says the professor.