Integrated and Participatory Neighbourhood Upgrading Methodology for the outskirts of urban areas.

The Municipality of Cuenca (Ecuador) together with UN-Habitat headed a Project called 'Neighborhood Integrated Redevelopment Upgrading in Cuenca' in which an innovative and international award-winning Methodology was developed. The last decades the City of Cuenca's growth was disordered and uncontrolled specially in the periphery areas. The Project fostered comprehensive urban redevelopment in the outskirts of the city under a perspective of inclusion, equity and gender equally perspective. In that sense, the Project designed and implemented an indicators-based-Methodology with a citizen participatory approach, that allows the identification and prioritization of the ten most vulnerable neighborhoods of the city. The Municipality led workshops and working groups with the communities of the prioritized neighborhoods taking special attention to women, youth and vulnerable population. The objective was to identify and validate proposals to develop integrated neighborhood upgrading projects about public space, urban equipment, tangible and intangible heritage, infrastructure and mobility and environmental preservation. The result of the process was ten Integrated Neighborhood Upgrading Plans for the most vulnerable areas of the outskirts of the city formulated under the New Urban Agenda Criteria and the Three-pronged-Approach: urban planning and design, urban economy and urban legislation. On a second stage of the project, a Partial Land Use and Management Plan has been drafted using the Three-Progned-Approach methodology, recognized by NAU as a planning tool. The Methodology has been systematized and it is going to start a process to be validated and incorporated to UN-Habitat international methodologies as it is comprehensive and can be easily replicated. This Methodology has recently reached the Final Evaluation level of the Transformational Business Awards of the Financial Times (2017), it was winner in the Best Practices of the New Urban Agenda Contest of UN-Habitat (2017) and it also was winner in the Best Practices of the Ecuadorian Municipality Association Contest (2015).