El Vado air pollution monitoring results
After a month of monitoring, it has been determined that concentrations of PM10 and sedimentable particles exceeded Ecuadorian and international standards.
Air pollution monitoring in El Vado
We used two particulate matter (PM) monitoring networks, while sharing with neighbors the chemical components of PM and its impacts on health.
Citizen science to El Vado community
In connection with other research groups at the university, we got in touch with neighbors of El Vado in order to discuss what they thought of the urban intervention and in an attempt to include ci
Tactic urbanism intervention on El Vado
This past September 2019, Llactalab—an urban studies research group at University of Cuenca—proposed a tactical urbanism intervention with the aim of reducing pedestrians’ mobility risks in the str
El Vado air pollution stories
According to Juan, a metal worker air quality has only decreased over the years causing lung cancer among some of his colleagues and close kin.
air pollution social protest in El Vado
In 2010, artists and craftsmen-women who rent small local businesses, started an initiative against noise and air pollution resulting from excessive bus/car traffic.
Car traffic in El Vado
The elevated number of cars that pass through the narrow uphill street of La Condamine—located in the heart of this neighborhood—sees over 7000 vehicles per day and has generated a conflictive area
Brief history review of El Vado
El Vado is a historical neighborhood in the city of Cuenca, marked by rural migration, economic marginalization in the 19th century, and limited urban infrastructure—including the absence of adequa
Elena Sobrino: anti-carceral anthropocenics
elenaWhy is the rate of incarceration in Louisiana so high? How do we critique the way prisons are part of infrastructural solutions to anthropocenic instabilities? As Angela Davis writes, “prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.” One way of imagining and building a vision of an anti-carceral future is practiced in the Solitary Gardens project here in New Orleans:
The Solitary Gardens are constructed from the byproducts of sugarcane, cotton, tobacco and indigo- the largest chattel slave crops- which we grow on-site, exposing the illusion that slavery was abolished in the United States. The Solitary Gardens utilize the tools of prison abolition, permaculture, contemplative practices, and transformative justice to facilitate exchanges between persons subjected to solitary confinement and volunteer proxies on the “outside.” The beds are “gardened” by prisoners, known as Solitary Gardeners, through written exchanges, growing calendars and design templates. As the garden beds mature, the prison architecture is overpowered by plant life, proving that nature—like hope, love, and imagination—will ultimately triumph over the harm humans impose on ourselves and on the planet.
"Nature" here is constructed in a very particularistic way: as a redemptive force to harness in opposition to the wider oppressive system the architecture of a solitary confinement cell is a part of. It takes a lot of intellectual and political work to construct a counter-hegemonic nature, in other words. Gardeners in this setting strive toward a cultivation of relations antithetical to the isolationist, anti-collective sociality prisons (and in general, a society in which prisons are a permanent feature of crisis resolution) foster.
A few weeks after the tactic urbanism intervention, the results began to be notorious. Population felt safer with the implementation of secure paths and colors, which increased pedestrian space.