GREAT – Gridding Equitable Urban Futures in Areas of Transition

GREAT seeks to understand the ways in which being on- and off-grid provide an opportunity to rethink the relationship between people and urban infrastructure in areas of transition, as well as to analyse the off-grid city in the context of informal settlements in the Global South.

Participant Institutions

 

Funded by

 

Team

We are a partnership between Lancaster University, UCL, Universidad del Valle (Colombia), and Universidad Tecnológica de La Habana Jose Antonio Echeverría (Cuba).

PublicLabs

We are rethinking the off-grid city. Would you like to know how?

 

Our work is structured around
three key concepts:

Transitions

Questions around gender, ethnicity, class and, in the case of Cali, whether or not one has been the victim of Colombia’s armed conflict are key to understanding the communities GREAT works with in Cali and Havana. What an equitable urban future is and might be depends on the processes that have shaped the communities of places like Brisas de las Palmas and San Nicolás.

Intersectionality

Questions around gender, ethnicity, class and, in the case of Cali, whether or not one has been the victim of Colombia’s armed conflict are key to understanding the communities GREAT works with in Cali and Havana. What an equitable urban future is and might be depends on the processes that have shaped the communities of places like Brisas de las Palmas and San Nicolás.

Imaginaries of Change

In what ways should the future of the areas where GREAT is based be imagined and who should take part in the process? Often informal settlements, areas of precarity, or, popular neighbourhoods are seen as deviations from what the formal city should be, which has consequences over what is possible and imaginable, for example, in relation to land tenure, occupancy and ownership. In the context of GREAT, we think differently about the kinds of imaginaries of the areas where we work to help inform alternative visions by the residents themselves concerning issues such as transport and mobility and zero waste.

Stories from DISTRICT 18 - Cali, Colombia

"One arrives here with one hand behind and the other in front, disorientated, not knowing what to eat, what to do, nothing.... The first thing you do is look for a place to rent, you have to put up with humiliations and many things simply because you have different customs... you have to adapt the hard way, by force. That's the hardest thing, there was no time to assimilate..."
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Francy Mina
Cali, Colombia

Francy's story is just one of many. Click below to read her story in full, and find out what she is currently up to in Cali.