In January and March 2018, a team of graduate students from the University of Texas at Austin conducted a project involving critical pedagogy, field mapping, GIS analysis, and ethnography in Los Platanitos. The 2018 project aimed to document the geographic and socio-emotional impacts of an ongoing stormwater project in Los Platanitos conducted by the Corporación para el Acueducto y Alcantarillado de Santo Domingo (CAASD), develop a participatory design process to envision community-based uses of new open spaces, and pursue critical pedagogy as a means of facilitating residents’ participation in an international conference to commemorate 10 years of collaborative research in Los Platanitos. Students’ work on critical pedagogy included developing a course on public speaking and a popular education guide. The guide to public speaking was designed to assist residents in Los Platanitos and elsewhere in presenting claims and proposals to government agencies.
See the 2018 report here.
Because of the sudden and radical spatial and social changes wrought by the CAASD project, which was implemented with little to no public information let alone community participation, the focus of this class project shifted in order to understand the impact of these changes on individuals’ and families’ emotional, economic, and social well-being. As in previous years, we primarily focused on the most vulnerable residents in Los Platanitos, in particular women and children living by the cañada where flooding and trash accumulation have been most severe and where most of the
displacement and construction are taking place.