How did we get to this? Understanding social construction of risk and capacities from the neighborhood history
Abstract as pdf
Corresponding Author:
Elisa Puga Cevallos
FLACSO Ecuador
elisapugac@gmail.com
Author(s):
María Isabel Cupuerán1
1San Francisco University Of Quito, Maryssa992@Gmail.Com, ECU
Risks cannot be managed without understanding the path that leads to the moment for the occurring disaster and lays on the root causes producing such disaster. An integrated Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) research and practice requires exploring practices, reasons and knowledge surrounding the everyday experience of people living with disaster risk. This perspective considers risk as a process of social construction that is built overtime. It puts people at the center of the investigation, and recognizes that while people might generate disaster risk to achieve their basic needs they can also act to prevent and reduce it. In this context, the participatory work of the Quito's Tomorrow's Cities Hub done at the neighbourhood scale with local communities has demonstrated the power of working together with communities to rebuild their past, understand their present, and dream about their future, as well as to explore the challenges of participatory work in particular in pandemic times.
The methodology applied to reconstruct the history of the neighbourhood will be presented as a strategy to approach local communities and create trustful relationships with them, and as a mechanism to provide insights about the community capacities to manage their place and solve their needs. Through in-depth interviews, we built life stories of the first people that arrived into the neighbourhood. By doing so, we explore both the conditions of vulnerability that locally contributed to risk accumulation and the capacities to contrast such risk in the context of urban growth. Thus methodology provides a valuable knowledge about the neighbourhood and its functioning from an interdisciplinary perspective. Results from this research were then shared with the local community in a simple and illustrative way by rebuilding the settling process of the neighbourhood through storytelling. We created a tale of the neighbourhood history as a strategy to record local memories and strengthen social cohesion and local organization. The experience with this methodology shows the importance of prioritizing the voice of those living in the neighbourhood, to have a better understanding of DRR at the local scale. Indeed, this methodology can become a trigger of social participation, by opening the doors of the community and building trustful relationships within and outside the neighbourhood, to share common goals towards DRR.
Envisioning the future by learning from the past: arts and memory in interdisciplinary disaster risk reduction reserarch