Portoviejo: Co-designing with the community in Mamey Park with SBN strategies

By 2035, Portoviejo aims to become the best and healthiest city to live in Ecuador by building a network of parks, green corridors and a green belt that will increase the quality of life of citizens and protect its natural resources from urbanisation processes. The restoration of the urban green areas and the Portoviejo y de Oro River is integrated in the Urban Master Plan and guided by the Land Use Plan. 

The municipality of Portoviejo has been working for several years to recover its connection to the river, and in 2020 started to define a specific urban restoration plan for the Portoviejo river corridor, partially integrated in its Land Use and Planning Plan until 2035.

Within this framework, the city has several development issues, one of which is the restoration of urban public spaces along the river because there is little public urban land in the vicinity of the river, so it is imperative to make the most of those that are available and underutilised.

Mamey Park is centrally located, very close to the historic centre, but suffers from partial abandonment, security problems and a poor connection to the river that runs through it. The Portoviejo river is not very visible or accessible in the town, and this is one of the reasons why the people of Portoviejo have lost interest in it. To reverse this trend, parks like the Mamey must be able to tell the story of the relationship between the city and the river once again, and recreate a synergy between nature and urban space.

The local community, stakeholders, and experts are involved from the early stages to ensure that the project responds to local needs and fosters long-term ownership and commitment.

In this context, the aim is to understand the problems related to Mamey Park, both from a global planning perspective and from a local vision. Consequently, the participatory process is carried out in order to propose a new design for the park that includes the ecological restoration of the area, the recovery of the relationship with the surrounding urban neighbourhoods, the definition of a new relationship with the Portoviejo River and the use of SBN as a recovery technique, all of this in accompaniment of the empowered community.

• https://online.portoviejo.gob.ec/