The Liter of Light program redesigns solar lighting forfor rural communities and disaster-prone areas. Through their community-based workshops we creates green jobs, teaches manual skills and empowers local communities supporting sustainable energy. The project aims at advocating for solar energy systems and open source technologies and skills locally accessible in order to lessen the expensive costs of access to energy in Quito and in all the regions in need.

The project promotes a society where everyone can enjoy the city and its public spaces, having access to all its spaces as well as adequate facilities, guaranteeing a good quality of life for people with disabilities. The Accessibility Map APP offers the possibility to share information about the accessibility and usability of places like restaurants, shops, hotels and public facilities among others. The app is helpful for wheelchair users, elderly, parents with strollers, people with dogs’ assistance as well as their family, friends, partners and colleagues enabling everyone to get around the city freely. This service aims at improving social inclusion as a key factor in achieving the SDGs in the cities, which still lack in guaranteeing universal access to people with disabilities.

The "Ruta de la Experiencia", is a people-friendly route – which runs from the main Conference venue into the neighborhood la Mariscal – showing to participants from all over the word social and physical interventions improving city’s liveability and creating a platform for networking within professionals and citizens. The walk will pass through physical interventions that enhanced social, economic and cultural development of the area. The project aims at leaving a legacy to the area, giving an input to its transformation from a car-oriented street into a pedestrian and cycling-friendly green zone, creating extra space for local entrepreneurs to improve their business environment and stimulating social cohesion and ownership by actively cooperating with local citizens. The Human Cities Coalition is a public-private partnership of similar-minded Dutch organizations from government, NGOs and business to focus on realizing UN Sustainable Development Goal 11 on sustainable cities and communities

The project invite organizations, youth movements, students, filmmakers, young artists, citizens between 15 and 24 years old, to attend a workshop of collective production where young people will capture with their own cameras and/or smart phones scenes and images expressing the concept of "Good Living in cities"! The workshop is about finding and reflecting parts of the city and their communities expressing multiculturalism, coexistence, empathy, respect for differences, care for life and all the activities and events happening during the days of HABITAT III in Quito, Ecuador. The last day of the workshop the scenes recorded will be projected on a public wall in the city centre. Once finalized, it will be created a space on Facebook / Instagram / Snapchat to interact with other youth and replicate it in other cities of Latin America. This will also be the legacy of the workshop experience and of what happened in Quito during Habitat III.

The project consists in the construction of a four-floor affordable, sustainable and eco-friendly building, to showcase participants the opportunities of green technology applied to sustainable urban planning.  A team of designers will be on site explaining how the main features are combined to demonstrate how high quality, low-carbon, modular, and affordable housing solution can have a significant positive impact on the future of sustainable development by creating sense of community, improving people’s quality of life and preserving the environment. Modular solutions can address some of the major concerns of decision makers around the world, such as housing shortages and climate change, with the benefit to significantly reduced costs, scalability, and speed of construction. Sharing affordable housing solution is a way to create network and learn from world’s leading urban thinkers and innovators.

The Bamboo House is a permanent exhibition of a bamboo construction in the centre of Quito showing to participants of Habitat III, as well as citizens of Quito, the multiple opportunities of the use of local techniques and materials to build innovative structures creating newer, safer, cleaner and more sustainable urban spaces. The market is plenty of conventional materials and it lacks of standardized local materials, thus examples of sustainable housing initiatives based on local materials are rare. The demonstrative bamboo structure within El Ejido Park will be one of them and will also leave a legacy in the city as the structure will be used after the event by artists and artisans to organize expositions and to protect themselves from rain and sunny days. 

The project is leaded by INBAR, an organization promoting the use of bamboo in construction all over Latin America, and it’s realized with the collaboration of the Bamboo National Roundtable, a platform of individuals, institutions from the public and private sector, producers´ associations, industries and universities and Ecuadorian Ministries.

This itinerant project, moving through the neighborhoods of La Floresta and La Mariscal, will experiment a critical and innovative methodology of civic participation that aims at proposing new citizens engagement tools and community awareness. It consists in a question-based participatory performance with documentary outcomes designed to promote, visualized, and disseminate collective debates in public spaces, bringing in Quito an experience already appeared forty times across Chile, Brazil, Spain and Germany. Opening debate through the collective act of questioning – instead of posing statements – generates a participatory dynamic and enables the visual recognition of contents generated by citizens’ interaction with the installation and the urban public spaces. The performance delivers a shared experience based on the dialogue between participants and a photographic reportage of the questions staged in Quito. The project is developed by Mil M2, an arts collective based in Santiago, Chile.

El JapiAwer is a space that promotes a culture of sustainability through citizens’ participation and engagement. The project consist in a series of open access events that drive conversations about key themes of urban sustainable development in a relaxed environment among a vibrant local community. With the aim of promoting more inclusive and resilient urban systems el JapiAwer drives debates and discussions, inspiring positive action and exchanging ideas among decision makers, academics, entrepreneurs, businessmen, activists and members of civil society. During the Habitat III Conference, el JapiAwer “Cities in crisis” will take place on the 19 October talking about local and sustainable entrepreneurship as a tool to address local economic crises. On the same day – from 12 a.m. to 7 p.m. – a fair will showcase local and sustainable products and projects related to the topic of the discussion. The project will continue in Quito after the Habitat III Conference tackling ideas of interest of the city, nourishing the local multi-stakeholder discussions and driving positive interactions and actions.

The Mobile Class is a project arising citizens’ awareness and training based on a recycling waste management of electronics. The bus will cross the city informing citizens on the impact of the improper disposal of Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment WEEE (televisions, computers, cell phones and other) as well as on the importance of reducing the consumption of WEEE and/or their responsible use. The benefits comprehend different aspects: people will be more conscious about consumption, use and decline of these devices, the city will benefit from having recyclers and local authorities who know the ways to prevent disease and pollution and economic benefits can come from precious metals found in WEEE components.

The project includes activities taking place in the El Ejido Park to promote the use of public spaces and the development of alternative sustainable practices in Quito through a series of interventions, of playful and educational nature, to promote coexistence and citizen participation, generating the appropriation of public space within an urban circuit connecting the Conference venue with the city. This proposal claims the public space as a meeting space and citizens as the protagonists of the city. Through the establishment of the New Agenda Urbana the project seeks to renew the global commitment to sustainable development, focusing on creating and strengthening effective citizen participation. The legacy of the intervention will be the promotion of a responsible local community ready to fully enjoy the city and its public spaces.

The Youth Building Sustainable Neighbourhood project aims at encouraging citizen participation in building sustainable neighbourhoods by concrete actions, creative workshops and tactical planning with the inclusion of the local community, youth and academia. The project showcases a best practices that can be replicated in other neighbourhoods where environmentally sustainable as well as gender friendly policies are strategic in changing urban conditions and meeting citizens’ needs.

The project consist in the consensus decision-making, participatory design, and the collaborative construction of a Green House in a local community in Shanshayacu Gully, Quitumbe. Although during the earthquake in April 2016 the Shanshayacu Gully was flooded, the community and the students decided to face the challenge of the project’s reactivation. The aim of the project is to work out a process that will allow communities to reach a common goal autonomously. The project searches not only for an appropriate architectural space, to promote food sovereignty and a good quality of life, but especially wants to show that if groups get organized they can meet great challenges.

Bridging Formal [IN]Formal is a joint project of Ecuador and Japan that will showcase examples of architectural micro-interventions to an old house under regeneration process at the edge of the historic center of Quito. The purpose of the intervention is to give sustainable solutions by reusing and recycling construction stocks and to create “built-ecosystem” as a proposal of integrated solutions for both climate change and poverty. During the Habitat III Conference the house will be open to the public and the participants of the Conference. While socio-economic disparity has been widened as well as globalized, the border that separates the rich and the poor or the formal and the informal has been fragmented and scattered inside the city area. Bridging between formal and informal is a great challenge the project is aiming to face with architectural micro-interventions.

The project is designed to bring people together and create a space for them to debate on their desires and needs concerning the city based on their individual interests and experiences. Taking a picture with the Quito skyline is a way to feel and share the sense of the city and also to call for a positive change through engaging people in urban projects. The aim of this project is to empower the citizens of Quito to become engaged citizens who take action to creatively change their city starting from sharing the feeling of ownership of their city’s future.

Pop-Up Talks on Placemaking are public dialogues for people involving a broad range of urban voices. The talks will highlight the role of the public realm and local placemaking as a key forum and factor in securing cities for all and fostering housing for all. The talks will bring Conference’s key debates into the public spaces of the city. The Pop-up Talks will address impacts, indicators and implementation of public space and placemaking strategies; cross-cutting collaborations between public, private and civil sectors of societies; agile urban leadership and processes of participatory urban governance. Placemaking, urban life and urban livability depend on local contexts and the talks aim at proposing fruitful thoughts both for the local community of Quito and international audience, inciting everybody to act as implementation agents of UN SDG’s and a New Urban Agenda for the Cities We Need.

TrackYourCity, digitizing transit data aims at collectively building the best digital public transport map. TrackYourCity is a worldwide initiative of volunteers willing to create data where there is none, or is in unusable formats or unavailable to the public. This project empowers citizens to fully make use of open data as well as to become solution providers exercising their right to access knowledge, green energy and public transportation. This first digital and opensource map does not use the crowdsourcing but the community sourcing, through the platform OpenStreetMap encouraging people to own the tool and enhance it. The production and use of Open Data fosters social integration, citizens’ empowerment and democratization of the information while advocating for transparency and accountability of local authorities.

The project consist in a students’ competition to create sustainable solutions and a range of urban furniture. The competition was targeted to innovative university students willing to create solutions for sustainable and functional street furniture that can be easily replicated to be installed among public spaces and create an interaction with people. This competition tested the creativity, innovation and skills of 71 multidisciplinary teams from 7 different universities in the country. The jury consisted of one delegate from the United Nations, the Municipality of Quito, urban planners, a delegate from UNACEM Ecuador and a delegate of the Association of Architects of Pichincha. The main objective of this initiative is to involve citizens in a more sustainable design of cities and at the same time influence the planning of their spaces refining construction techniques. The urban furniture will remain in the urban public spaces as a legacy to the city. The three finalists of the contest, who will be exhibited at the Habitat Village are: Biohor furniture (Carina Vaca, Marilyn Rosero, Michelle Perez and Richard Bolaños); Flexible furniture (Diego Fonseca, Gabriela Vasquez, Carlos and Luis Rivadeneira Masabanda) and Morphology Neo Andino (David Alarcón and Pablo Betancourt). The finalists will be exhibited from October 3, the jury will give its verdict on 11 October.

The project creates a new behavior map as a tool in mobility planning for the city of Quito to face common city’s mobility problem like land use and topographical limitations, limited capacity in mass public transport systems, and poor pedestrian environments that are affecting the urban transport system and polluting the streets. The project is based on a proposal of the Metropolitan Urban Planning Institute (IMPU) for improved pedestrian mobility within the neighborhood La Mariscal and enhances public transportation attractiveness. The micro-simulation model will be used to evaluate it and to propose any adjustments that could be recommended.  The simulation will test the software’s needs in representing vehicles’ and pedestrians’ behavior as well as in simulating their interactions and conflicts. Pedestrian and traffic micro-simulation can be used to generate video presentations of the simulated proposals in 3D environments enhancing the public understanding of the IMPU’s proposal.

The Vizcaya Park is a design developed by the Municipality of Quito for the neighborhood La Floresta. This project aims to provide the district with a high-quality park that will become a familiar space providing leisure and health of neighbors in the area of the city with the lowest average of pro capita green space. Over consolidating approximately 1,000 m2 of green areas and public space, the intervention included the extensions of the sidewalks along the block. The Vizcaya Park bore from the participatory design project #My Street-La Floresta', in order to improve, transform and redistribute the public space of the streets, vehicles and pedestrians. The neighbors supported the recovery of the original features of the neighborhood, in which you could walk in peace and enjoy public space. This project also enhanced neighborhood’s citizens’ participation, mobilization on foot or by bicycle, consolidating the culture of road safety in all areas and decrease traffic accidents.

Sunlectric Waiting Shed is a solar-powered sitting area for people who wait for the buses that provides charging sockets powered by thin and lightweight solar panels not requiring any extra supporting system. Participants and citizens will experience the benefit of using solar energy and of the transformation of a waiting place into a new, lived space in the city. In line with the eco and sustainable design principles the shed is designed with two green walls with less water demanded plants rooted on recycled plastic bottles. The green wall will mitigate the temperature inside the waiting shed, providing extra shading for the space showing how green walls are more than just decorations. This best practice shows how to incorporate sustainable energy in future urban architecture promoting an environment integrated urban habitat.

The project gathered information and data over the past six months to monitor Quito’s environmental sustainability. With the addition of a new goal in the Sustainable Development Goals focused on sustainable urban development (SDG11), the need for reliable monitoring data related to environmental performance has never been greater. The project reviews the SDG11 indicators, proposes new criteria for determining the quality of indicators, and demonstrates data collection and analysis approaches using open data and open source software. The ecological footprint of Ecuador is equivalent to one earth, implying that the per-person consumption patterns in Ecuador may be sustainable if scaled to the global population. However, Quito’s ecological footprint exceeds the earth’s carrying capacity. This puts Quito in a unique position to demonstrate how urban and rural areas could relate within a sustainable future. Studying Quito’s environmental performance in this context will hopefully yield lessons applicable in other cities.

Working with Maskbook.org passers-by can create their own anti-dust mask reflecting their fears and hopes about urban air pollution. Air pollution kills 1 in every 9 people globally. Improving air quality dramatically improves urban livability and health, and reduces climate emissions. Air Quality is a nexus point with multiple benefits enabling more walking and cycling, more energy efficient buildings, and better waste management.  The campaign will raise awareness about the linkages between air pollution, health & climate through digital media, and interactive exhibitions. The project brings together interactive media forms to highlight threats including videos in Spanish, examples of air pollution solutions based Quito, a Breathe Life Selfies booth, and a 3D poster by a the artist Kurt Wenner, illustrating the choices cities face today to achieve healthy urban design. The project is part of the Breathe Life campaign (www.BreatheLife2030.org), launched by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the UNEP-hosted Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC) at Habitat III.

Be an SDG Hero – WeAppHeroes mobile app helps to address the UN Sustainable Development Goals through acts of goodwill between people. It matches those who are looking for help with potential “heroes”, thereby generating trust among strangers and strengthening social cohesion within urban centers. The tool, consisting of a mobile app working with geo-localization, and efficiently connecting people as an additional means to address the SDGs. The project aims to benefit from technology and the sharing economy to contribute to the Agenda 2030 through everyday action. It creates a virtuous circle that aims to improve the social fabric through a new micro-volunteering phenomenon. It has the potential to create new networks of people interested in addressing urban issues in their immediate neighborhood and to connect people for more efficient sharing of resources.

The electric bus and the five electric cars by BYD are examples of sustainable public transport and will also transport citizens along different routes throughout the Habitat III Village offering a brand new zero emission experience and showing a best practices in reducing pollution transportation. This project brings to Quito the experience of electrifying transportation around the world that was already successful in cities such as Bogota, Shenzhen, London, Hong Kong, New York, improving the quality of life, and promoting the use of electricity that is one of Ecuador’s main energy source, produced in the country by hydroelectric power plants at 94% by the end of the year.

Vive Alameda worked along with the community in order to identify and evaluate heritage elements within the neighborhood – tangible and intangible – exploring how to transform those elements into tools for urban sustainable development. The results will be shown and shared with Conference’s participants invited to explore the neighborhood discovering the selected elements. With the active collaboration of neighbors and citizens through workshops, interviews, events, and online tools, the project identified ten valuable elements for the community within buildings, monuments, sites, spaces, legends, traditions, stories, and characters. These elements has been further documented, studied, and transformed into tools to strengthen local identity and culture, promoting heritage as an asset for urban socio-economic sustainable development. This pilot replicable project, developed in collaboration with the Metropolitan Institute of Heritage, seeks to empower local communities to decide on what sort of heritage should be preserved and showcased as part of their identity as a community, neighborhood, area or association.

Live Infographic represents an interactive methodology to promote horizontal governance generation, where the opinions of experts and citizens will be shown together in a unique visual platform during Habitat III. From 3 to 19 of October, organizers will conduct surveys in Quito and worldwide, gathering information to be shared on social media and shown in a dynamic map which allows integrating and contrasting perceptions about the New Urban Agenda worldwide. The project represents an interactive technologically-based methodology to support horizontal governance and to promote the inclusion of citizens’ opinions into the socialization, debate and implementation of the New Urban Agenda.

The project will set up a beach on the shore of Laguna La Alameda Park, with reference to the main river of Quito: the Machángara River. Like almost all the rivers of the cities, these waters are densely polluted refraining most of the citizens to enjoy again the pleasure to swim its waters. With typical Brazilian parasols and beach chairs, this event will propose playful open public space to the citizens to rescue a long forgotten dream. In addition to this, the place will be equipped with inflatable bubbles that will make experience the water feeling without getting wet, and a projection space with images about the appropriation of urban rivers will be also showcased. This project advocates for the citizens’ appropriation of natural urban and public spaces promoting sustainable urban development with irony and participation.

The Urban Caravan is a bus to show participants and citizens city’s best urban solutions for then share ideas and findings in a workshop. The Urban Caravan Workshop in Quito will take place on Sunday 15 October in a half-day debate on innovative initiatives for Quito, including youth and women engaging projects, and best local governance experiences. The objective is to create a catalyst for private sector-driven development projects in Quito and eventually start-ups that will promote impactful and sustainable urban development solutions for the implementation of the New Urban Agenda and the Agenda 2030. Selected proposals will have the opportunity to apply for a fellowship/seed-funding prize towards tackling an urban challenge in the Quito municipality.

Inspired on the Pre-Hispanic legend about a lost city made of gold, which motivated many explores to travel to unknown lands, the project proposes the idea to discover El Dorado neighborhood by identifying urban renewal potential, as well as the “treasures” of the place with a bottom-up approach in urban planning. The exercise of discovering a place is a stimulating mechanism to discuss how to create a more livable space. It also involves recovering local knowledge, economies and diversity as an asset to empower communities to shape their environment. Camino hacia El Dorado is a community-oriented intervention to show achievements at the reach of organized communities. The project aims at opening the neighborhood up to its own residents, and also to both the city of Quito itself and the international participants of Habitat III, by making the neighborhood enjoyable and more attractive.

The project consists in building five metal bookshelves inside the Gabriela Mistral Park to be filled at first by the project, and then by citizens that will be free to take and read the books. The idea is to start a book exchange promoting culture and education in public places and providing access for everyone to the books shared by the community. The neighbors are invited to share their favorite books, putting them in the bookshelf correspondent to their genre. All kinds of literature are welcome although the Andoteca is mostly dedicated to children. The Andoteca will be inaugurated on the 16th of October with the presentation of the book “Hábitats justos, diversos y participativos – Contribuciones ciudadanas para solucionar desafíos urbanos” published by FES-ILDIS.

This intervention will complement the current municipal efforts to pacify streets in the neighborhood La Floresta having a special focus on increasing citizen participation in the intervention that will be done along Ignacio de Veintimilla Street. The aim is to create a safer street by the use of low-cost materials and resources and as much citizen and neighborhood participation as possible, highlighting the improvements that can be made to achieve safer conditions for road users. The intervention impact on neighbors will be monitored to further improve it in the medium term and eventually keep it permanently as a solution enhancing urban equity, safety, security and participation.

The Open Air Gallery aims at promoting inclusive and multidisciplinary public spaces renewal solutions and at raising awareness among different urban communities through art walks and productions. The project takes place at the neighborhood La Mariscal considered a strategic place of the city crossed by both locals and tourists with a great architectural beauty and cultural and historic heritage. The Open Air Gallery is a model of renewal and recovery of urban zones through artistic and cultural activities positioning the neighborhood as a touristic quality zone and at the same time a space lived by artists and citizens of the city. Artistic interventions will follow specific routes – so-called “art walks” - that residents and visitors can visit to learn about the artistic and cultural production generated by the project.

The Urban Design Lab is a cross-sectorial two-day participatory workshop, which will include a space for dialogue on post-disaster issues and will culminate in a joint exhibition of the results of the workshop and participatory projects. The Urban Design Lab (UDL) are workshops helping Latin America and the Caribbean’s municipalities to design creative solutions in a context of rapid urbanization offering a platform for dialogue between various stakeholder groups, identifying priority thematic areas of action, and helping in generating proposals for participatory urban design. So far, the Urban Design Labs have been implemented in 17 cities in the region, and contributed to the design of urban interventions and the development of planning tools for these cities. During Habitat III the Urban Design Lab in Quito, aims at implementing this specific methodology of participatory design in the Borja Yerovi Square according with the Metropolitan Institute of Urban Planning (IMPU) objective of creating new centralities in Quito and it is being organized in collaboration with the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Arts (FADA) of the Pontificia Universidad Católica Ecuador (PUCE).

It’s a participative project done by from residents for residents. Faced with a very particular urban situation, where public space has lost its role of social cohesion, it seems essential to rethink the city from its base, as a space of freedom where human relations are the sustenance of their identity. It provides an opportunity to create citizenship empowerment and appropriation based on the development of a process. Benefits: •Awareness of gender problem and city rights. •Long term public space improvement. The legacy is people empowerment to look after their interests and needs thus they can improve their quality of life and exercise their right to the city.

The project is a micro-urban intervention/pop-up public space that incorporats temporary urban furniture and a module for public participation with the aim to activate a determined public space and to encourage civic debate about city improvements. The project is based on 2.3x2.3m modules to be combined in many different ways generating public spaces to, relax, read or recreate. It includes different levels of social interaction and dialogues by complementing furniture with a cafe module, structures for projects exhibitions and urban proposals, and computers enabling the access to innovative technological tools, such as Minecraft for participatory design. There will also a model of the neighborhood La Mariscal in order to input discussion on how to improve it. The modules were designed to be located in different spaces of the city and donated to the city of Quito after the Conference.

Through the Montessori educational methodology and by applying the Fund-Form-Movement (FFM) development model, this project intends to help children to expression their vision of a better city. Though different activities, children will exercise their right to the city also acquiring knowledge and skills.  This methodology promotes the participation of children in the vision of the city they want, giving them a voice on urban issues, and promoting the participation of future citizens by encouraging the fundamentals and human rights as the basis of a healthy coexistence.

The Edible City is a multi-stakeholder initiative aiming at creating bio-culture community gardens and productive public spaces in the neighborhood La Mariscal promoting social cohesion, citizen participation and innovation. The project implements participatory urban agriculture as an engine of social cohesion and a way to promote sustainable development, healthy eating and combating climate change. It includes the using of new knowledge and technologies, as well as ancient cultures and innovative technologies for efficient water management. The public space is a key element of the New Urban Agenda vision and this project is an example of how the Ecuadorian and Latin American cities can advance towards the 11th Sustainable Development Goal by improving public spaces quality and appropriation.

Espora is a viral project about a replicable and efficient practical guide in response to social issues and environment. Born from the need to generate a community and solve everyday problems of a sector, neighborhood or street the project is based on community self-management and the commitment of both private and public entities. Implemented in the northern center of Quito, the project is managed by the surrounding collaborative working space shared and created by art, architecture, construction and design studies and factories aiming to disseminate the creative ideas and making them viral also outside the working space. The project will stimulate a process of participation and ownership among neighbors by having periodic neighborhoods meetings to identify and decide how to address collective needs.

The OPUS La Mariscal proposes an urban makeover of the neighborhood La Mariscal aiming at the building of a community house, using the public spaces more effectively, and creating a center for urban agriculture. Early 2015, the community of La Mariscal started a process for promoting sustainability in the neighborhood by launching integrated activities to ensure prosperity in the neighborhood balancing social, environmental and economic aspect of the neighborhood life continuously validated by the community and external participants by an APP for the monitoring of the process.

To promote a culture of respect, safe crossings for pedestrians will be implemented including an intervention of urban artists. The Tejar Small Plaza, leaded by the Metropolitan Public Enterprise Mobility and Public Works (EPMMOP), gives the community of the neighborhood the opportunity to re-adjust this important space for the enjoyment of all.

Dedicated to the recovery and improvement of local streams, rivers, and wildlife, this project proposes workshops and training about urban gardening to implement a self-management community development through the use of the existing natural resources that have been abandoned or neglected. It aims at revalorizing the zone through the recovery of the edge of rivers that create a transition area between natural and urbanized area preserving endemic species and renewing the existing type of soil. The project proposes an architectural structure built with nature compatible and weather adaptable materials. The knowledge of the building methodology will be shared to serve the creation of more economically sustainable projects.

A workshop to present innovative design tools developed to offer a multiplicity of services adapted to the cities specific needs identified through interaction with citizens. The project presents successful experiences in the spheres of commuting, tourism and deprived areas restoration.