Learning Lima: Collaborative action-learning through mapping

Learning Lima [https://www.learninglima.org/] is an action-learning platform set up in September 2012 as a collaborative undertaking between DPU (Adriana Allen and Rita Lambert) and a number of partnering organisations and local communities in the metropolitan region of Lima. The aim is to understand how environmental injustices are produced and how they can be addressed by exploring scenarios and strategies embedded in the wider socio-political, economic and ecological processes that shape this urban region.

The website offers the possibility to explore the outcomes produced since then by students of the ES3 practice module from the MSc Environment and Sustainable Development at DPU in conjunction with innovative mapping processes and methods developed under the research project ReMapLima, led by Adriana and Rita in collaboration with UCL CASA and Urban Laboratory.

The platform focuses on five neighbourhoods (barrios): Barrios Altos, Cantagallo, Costa Verde, José Carlos Mariátegui and Huaycán. Each case study provides a unique lens through which we learn about the wider processes of change shaping metropolitan Lima. By exploring power relations, the challenges citizens face, and the strategies they are adopting at the barrio level, we can gain insight into the wider drivers and dynamics of urban change at play in metropolitan Lima. However, the barrio is not a microcosm of the city. The ways in which citizens interact with state and private actors, the barriers they face in accessing secure housing, services and infrastructure, and their agency, must be re-examined and reinterpreted at every scale, from the household to the city-level. By exploring social-environmental justice at the barrio-level, we can identify scalable strategies and imagine scenarios for more equitable and sustainable urban development for the wider city.

Learning Lima has been developed as a bilingual and interactive site, explore it, contribute to it and let others know.