Designing for Health in the Informal Amphibious Community, Iquitos
Peru has significantly increased mining and oil extraction in the last decade, degrading Amazon Rainforest ecosystems and Indigenous livelihoods, interrupting local to global climate regulation, and resulting in rapid jungle-to-city migration with ultimately 90,000+ people living in informal “amphibious” communities floating in the floodplain borders of the jungle city. These Indigenous migrants struggle adapting from nature rich lifestyles to the harsh urban slums, manifesting in a multitude of physical, mental, social and environmental health issues.
During this January 2020 talk, Leann Andrews and Coco Alarcón discussed InterACTION Labs: Iquitos, a transdisciplinary action research program that fuses scientific, Indigenous and professional knowledge to design landscape architecture interventions with an informal amphibious community in Iquitos, Peru. They will share preliminary human and ecological health impacts of the designs, and discuss implications to One Health, Planetary Health, diseases of poverty, climate change resilience, generational amnesia, and global environmental justice.
About the Speakers
Leann Andrews and Coco Alarcón are landscape architects and global health researchers, co-founders of the non-profit Traction and co-directors of the InterACTION Labs program in Iquitos, Peru.
Coco Alarcón
Coco is a Peruvian architect and landscape architect currently pursuing a PhD in Global Health in Implementation Science at the University of Washington. He is a former National Institutes of Health Fogarty and Landscape Architecture Foundation Olmsted scholar. Since 2009 his work on design and research in Peru has focused on how the built environment impacts human and ecological health. His most recent project examines how landscape architectural community-based interventions in the cities of the Amazon rainforest impact different dimensions of health and ecology, including dengue and other infectious diseases, mental and social health, nutrition, biodiversity, and abundance of local species.
Leann Andrews
Leann Andrews is a licensed landscape architect with a blended background in urban ecological design, global health, and dance. Leann’s built, planned, and performative works can be seen across the midwest, east coast, pacific northwest, and Peru. Leann’s research focuses on the intersection between human and ecological health across scales and from local to global settings. She works collaboratively across disciplines and with communities and leads design and research projects in the Green Futures Lab and as a Director at Traction.