We dream of a Puerto Rico recovery designed by Puerto Ricans and we have come together to catalyze that desired future for our island. Faced with the widespread devastation of hurricane Maria, our team at La Marana designed and is implementing a participatory community recovery model, titled Imaginacion Post-Maria. Combining participatory planning and design with the power of micro-granting we offer citizens direct power to imagine, plan and build the changes they desire in their communities.
The widespread devastation caused by Hurricane Maria has shed light to the deeply-rooted flaws of Puerto Rico's hierarchical and non-participatory government system. The centralization of power and lack of accessibility to funds not only trumped the arrival of much needed services, but also denied citizens the opportunity to actively participate in recuperating their communities. We envision a Puerto Rico where every community has the opportunity to take charge of their own future.
Given the fiscal, economic and environmental crisis that abounds on our island, it is essential to create open platforms for citizens to dream and imagine the communities they want for their future. La Marana's participatory projects not only activate that collective imagination, but also offer the skills, tools, and resources to transform those ideas into designs and replicable methodologies that point towards more sustainable, human and participatory models of social and economic development.
Imaginacion Post-Maria offers an unprecedented opportunity to envision independent enclaves of community-based recovery as an interconnected roadmap to replicable, long-term and systemic solutions to our current climate crisis and bleak socio-economic panorama. Working with our three community partners, we are transforming our current implementation into educational, open-source deliverables - Toolkit and Documentary - that can spark community-led recovery efforts across the island.
This project has provided additional documentation in a PDF file (projdoc.pdf).
