WATER, TOPOGRAPHY AND DISPERSION: qualifying small scale production and public space in the in-between territory of Cuenca, Ecuador

ABSTRACT The problematizing of generic dispersion as a general evil of growing cities, has led to a too-easy diagnosis with the same ‘illness’ to peri-urban territories under the influence of mid-sized cities in the central and southern Ecuadorian Andes. As a consequence, development plans for these proto-urban territories show a widespread tendency to propose densification as a generic antidote to battle dispersion. Very commonly, the plans neglect strategies that consider the rationalities behind those rural lands sprinkled with emerging urbanity. At first sight the peri-urban landscape of Cuenca appears as a territory of disperse and apparently chaotic occupation. However this is a system of productive spaces and varied population, a cultural constellation, whose internal logics claim for new approaches and formulations, which consider its landscape as the structuring base of its spatial development.