Indigenous land systems and emerging of Green Infrastructure planning in the Peruvian coastal desert: tensions and opportunities

ABSTRACT

For many, Green Infrastructure (GI) is a modern ecological planning concept focusing on stormwater runoff. This paper argues for the importance of Indigenous Knowledge (IK) in GI planning and policy through the case study of the Tumbes Basin. The Basin serves as home to a diverse array of Pre-Hispanic Indigenous networked agro-ecological practices and landscape interventions guided by a worldview marrying humans and landscapes dating back to immemorial times of human habitation in the Americas (∼36,000 BP). By 900 BCE–1100 CE this planned regional network was actively managing landslides, stormwater runoff, and riverine flooding, all challenges are currently being exacerbated by climate change and urban development. Today, this landscape-level network is one of the biggest GI systems in Peru and yet remains unacknowledged in emergent GI policy and planning. By examining existing Peruvian scholarship on landscape practices, and visualizing Pre-Hispanic landscape networks in the Tumbes Basin, this study makes the case for Peruvian GI policy to be guided by Indigenous Knowledge and governance systems. Such a transformation requires a deeper integration of Indigenous conceptualizations of GI with other infrastructure systems and regional urban planning and design.

KEYWORDS:

• Decolonization
• Green Infrastructure
• Indigenous Knowledge
• design
• typologies
• Peru

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Zbigniew Grabowski for assistance in the editing of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

‘No potential competing interest was reported by the authors.’

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Claudia Tomateo

Claudia Tomateo is a Research Fellow in the Urban Systems Lab at The New School, Visiting Professor at the National University of Engineering (Peru), and Co-founder of Urban Collective. She is an architect, urban designer and researcher focusing on the intersections of cartography, urban narratives, and strategic design.