CAF to Reward Good Ideas for Cities Proposed During Pandemic

The event was also an opportunity to reward the winners of the COVID-19 Ideas Competition: New Opportunities for Sustainable Cities. On this occasion, as many as 323 proposals from across 20 countries in Latin America and Europe were entered, which made the 6th edition of the event the most successful in terms of participation and reach. The proposed solutions proved highly innovative, as well as realistic for the context of the region.

The winning proposal was titled “Neighborhoods that Care: Productive Equipment as an Urban Catalyst”, on the experience of “Ollas Comunitarias” (Community Pots) managed by female cooks in Lima, Peru. Paula Villar Pastor, one of the members of the group, stated that “the pandemic exposed Lima’s structural problems, not only [in terms of] health, but also economic, which led to a food crisis in the neighborhoods in the periphery.” This warranted a recognition of the work of “women who organized themselves through the project in order to ensure food security of families.” This was the starting point for the winning idea, which proposed an efficient way to provide materials and infrastructure to community kitchens to make this action sustainable over time. It is about “turning them into productive equipment where women can also have an economic livelihood and promote sustainability,” Villar said.

In his keynote speech, CAF sustainable development vice president Julián Suárez assured that this new edition of the Ideas Competition has “sought to value the public space agenda, exploring novel ideas for their better management.” Suárez also said that it is important to “understand the intervention on public spaces not as an aesthetic response or merely for leisure” but as a tool to build response that prioritizes this agenda of inclusion and productivity for cities.”

The talk featured Madrid’s Medialab Prado researcher, collaborator and teacher Lorena Ruíz, who assured that the pandemic “has made us think more carefully about the places where we live,” and that "in the face of inequality, an increasingly common response is citizen participation,” which begs the question, "what does each of us have to share?” Argentina’s City in Motion Institute Latin American director Andrés Borthagaray referred to Ideas Competition as “a source of inspiration based on reflection,” whose purpose was to “give future-making ideas a sounding board.”

Also in participation was Ecuadorean urban-environmental planner and researcher Ana María Durán Calisto, who spoke of ecology as “Latin America’s modus operandi,” which also enables a review of the industrial system and place special focus on the “micro-infrastructures that are the alternative to centralized power grids, water supply networks, telecommunications.”  The event was moderated by CAF urban development specialist Emil Rodríguez Garabot and AVINA Foundation Regional Coordinator of Sustainable Cities Marcela Mondino.

This space for reflection and recognition was proposed to be an “opportunity to improve access to opportunities” and based on the premise that, while COVID-19 exposed limitations of our cities to meet challenges of this size, it also showed creativity and ingenuity to design and implement groundbreaking innovative solutions. CAF’s Cities with a Future initiative continues to promote a model for efficient urban management across Latin American cities.