Puerto Rico was already on its heels when Hurricane Maria inflicted its destruction in September 2017. The US territory—home to 3.4 million American citizens—was bankrupt and depopulating. Nearly half the island’s housing didn’t meet code, its rickety power grid was inefficient and unreliable, and the economy was hobbled by staggering debt and a bloated public payroll.

The massive Category 4 hurricane made landfall against that backdrop, damaging or destroying most homes, knocking out telecommunications, and decimating infrastructure on virtually the entire island. Most of Puerto Rico lost electrical power for more than six months, cell service was spotty, and residents and leaders complained of poor federal disaster response.

A Harvard study published in the New England Journal of Medicine estimates that at least 4,645 deaths can be linked to the hurricane and its immediate aftermath—70 times the official estimate (Kishore et al. 2018).

By May 2018, power finally returned to all but about 20,000 people—albeit unreliably—and the federal government announced that Puerto Rico would receive $18.5 billion from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development to rebuild its battered housing and infrastructure. The grant, the largest in the agency’s history, added to $1.5 billion already committed to Puerto Rico from HUD and more than $3 billion allocated for response and recovery by other federal entities such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Army Corps of Engineers.

But the total falls far short of the $94.4 billion that Governor Ricardo Rossello requested from the federal government to rebuild the island, where blue tarps—slow in coming to begin with—still draped roofs months after permanent repairs had been made to hurricane-ravaged states on the mainland.

By spring 2018, Puerto Rico was attempting to pivot—however unsteadily—from the massive response and relief phase of the disaster to mid- and long-term planning for recovery, even as another hurricane season loomed. But what will recovery look like on an island that was so compromised to begin with? How does the insolvent commonwealth, which experienced a post-hurricane exodus of an estimated 200,000 residents, address improvements in debt restructuring, tax collection, land use planning, flood control, and energy distribution?

It’s still very much an open question. “It seems the planning process doesn’t have a leader,” Ruben Flores-Marzan, former president of the Puerto Rico’s island-wide planning board, told a group assembled at Centro—the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Manhattan’s Hunter College—for a recent “diaspora summit” on rebuilding the island. “Who’s in charge here?”

The answer is still shaking out on the island—and in the corridors of power on the mainland—as community groups, developers, financiers, and government officials jockey for influence and primacy over the process.

“Lack of clarity is a big problem right now,” said Robert B. Olshansky, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “They are certainly hoping to build back better. That includes a more resilient electrical grid, a new building code, and improvements in governance and public finance, among other things. . . . I am sure that some improvements will be made, but it’s far too early to tell what.”

In After Great Disasters: An In-Depth Analysis of How Six Countries Managed Community Recovery, published by the Lincoln Institute, Olshansky and coauthor Laurie A. Johnson suggest that disaster reconstruction can offer a unique opportunity to fix long-standing problems (Johnson and Olshansky 2017).

Surely Puerto Rico, suffering from more than a decade of decline, needs a big fix and a robust plan for resiliency as the effects of climate change are likely to continue to batter the island. US government forecasters have predicted an active 2018 hurricane season with as many as nine hurricanes expected.

Planners were often ignored as Puerto Rico’s infamous urban sprawl and informal rural land development proceeded apace over many decades. They are hoping for more of a voice now. “Slowly there is a realization that planning has a lot to offer, and we should be part of the process,” Carmén M. Concepción Rodriguez of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Puerto Rico told the summit at Hunter, via videoconference from the island.

Flores-Marzan, who is now planner for the town of Ware, Massachusetts, hopes the island will also tap into its émigrés as it tries to recover. Nearly six million Puerto Ricans now live on the continental United States. “You see where they could be making small victories if they involved the diaspora, and they’re just not doing that,” he said. Still, there is hope: “We have to be hopeful because otherwise we will lose the island.”

First, Power

Restoring power is the first order of business. The prolonged absence of electricity has taken its toll on Puerto Rico, hampering recovery and exacerbating the misery on the ground. Particularly in the rural areas, people spent months powering medical equipment with noisy, polluting generators, and hauling water from streams because about half the island’s water delivery depends on electricity.

“I don’t know what was worse, being without power or having the generators run all night,” said Ruth Santiago, whose home in Salinas was dark for seven weeks following Maria. She slept with a mask to mitigate the generator fumes.

The island’s electrical grid was in trouble even before the storm. It was old, vulnerable, and inefficient when Hurricane Irma knocked out a portion of it in early September, leaving more than a million residents in the dark. The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA)—mired in $9 billion in debt—was seeking bids to repair that damage when Hurricane Maria struck two weeks later, virtually wiping out the island’s remaining electrical infrastructure.

Like other aspects of the disaster recovery, PREPA’s rebuild has been marked by questionable decisions and missteps, such as the early $300 million repair contract—soon canceled amid controversy—with Whitefish Energy, a small, inexperienced utility company from Montana.

The vast majority of the island is powered by PREPA, whose hulking and rusting generation plants in the South run on fossil fuels and rely on old-school utility poles, wires, and transformers to traverse the mountainous interior in order to deliver power to populated areas like San Juan in the North. It’s an outmoded and balky system, but it’s being “hardened” with more hurricane-resistant replacement parts as Puerto Rico comes back on-line.

In some areas, like the town of San Sebastian, residents and town officials tired of waiting for PREPA, took it upon themselves to bypass the utility by getting a bucket truck and restringing the town’s downed electrical wires. So the integrity of the repaired grid is by no means assured.

The Department of Energy estimates it will take $17.6 billion to rebuild the system. About $2 billion has been committed to the effort to date. Even after more than 90 percent of power had been restored to the island in early spring, Puerto Rico suffered from intermittent blackouts, underscoring the fragility of the grid.

The island’s electricity is expensive too—about double the cost on the mainland—since it relies on fossil fuels that have to be imported. But the 1988 Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act authorizes government agencies to restore only existing utility service. Skeptics doubt that a plan promoted by the governor to privatize PREPA will infuse the utility with the capital needed to substantially improve its efficiency. For now, it seems that renewable sources like solar and wind aren’t likely to replace the grid, even on a sunny Caribbean island with year-round trade winds, because overhauling the mode of energy-transmission island-wide would require a significant public investment. Puerto Rico is broke, and Washington seems reluctant to increase its aid.

Some say political will is also lacking. “There’s a thing called the oil cartel. Somebody is cashing in, and a lot of those people are very influential,” said Flores-Marzan, the former planner for the island.

But a number of efforts are underway. A $750,000 federal block grant will go to the University of Puerto Rico to develop a Resilience Innovation Program to look for innovative solutions to promote home-based renewable energy generation and energy storage. The grant will also fund the study of community-wide resilience measures, home design, and construction methods (PRDOH 2018).

The biopharmaceutical company AbbVie recently announced a $50 million donation to the nonprofit group Direct Relief to equip more than 60 community health centers and local healthcare facilities with solar power, battery storage, and generators, and to enable them to power pumps that would ensure clean water supply. The group will also work over the next three years to rebuild the battered medical supply chain and fund telemedicine programs at select hospitals and health centers.

And there are smaller, grassroots initiatives pending. “Municipalities are tired of waiting for PREPA, so a lot of the push for resiliency and energy independence is coming from them,” said Flores-Marzan.

A group called Resilient Power Puerto Rico is fundraising to bring solar microgrids to the island and recently received a $625,000 grant to bring solar to 200 community centers.

If the PREPA grid failed, the microgrids could be used to power essentials like water pumps and medical devices. “We are rebuilding in a grassroots way. We’re not challenging or replacing PREPA” said Jonathan Marvel, a New York architect who leads the group.

With some funding from nonprofits on the mainland, Santiago and her neighbors in Salinas, who live in the shadow of two smoke-belching PREPA plants, are also working on plans for community-based solar micro grids that can at least provide a backup for essential services like water pumping and running medical devices, should PREPA power fail.

“PREPA is the provider of power to 95 percent of the island, but we want it to change its way of distribution. It’s not in the best public interest to do it the way it was done before,” said Santiago, a lawyer who lived in The Bronx before returning to Puerto Rico. “Developing energy infrastructure at the community level is not an easy thing to do, but we don’t have a choice. The old grid is unreliable—it’s killing us in the South.”

Recovering While Broke

Puerto Rico’s economic crisis looms large over any long-term planning and recovery efforts. Just four months before Hurricane Maria, the commonwealth declared a form of bankruptcy as it struggled under more than $74 billion in debt and $49 billion in pension obligations. The combined $120 billion debt made it the largest municipal bankruptcy in the United States, dwarfing Detroit’s $18 billion filing in 2013.

The territory’s cash solvency and liquidity problems and austerity measures imposed through economic and fiscal reforms inhibited its ability to provide services, notes Lourdes Germán, director of International and Institute-Wide Initiatives at the Lincoln Institute. “This dynamic significantly contributed to the humanitarian crisis that was building before the disaster and clearly continues,” she said.

Beginning in the 1970s, the island’s government had become more reliant on debt financing, and that crisis continued to unfold for decades. The bonds securing that debt—however risky—were easy to sell because they were exempt from federal, state, and local taxes thanks to a provision in the 1917 federal law that also granted Puerto Ricans American citizenship.

“People who invested in Puerto Rican bonds didn’t look at the credit risk. They just looked at the fact that they could get a high interest rate,” said Desmond Lachman, an economist and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). “Puerto Rico didn’t have trouble borrowing money. Until it did. It kept borrowing until the music stopped, and that’s where we are now.”

Despite this common perception, Puerto Rican securities continue to trade, even a year after the island entered its de facto bankruptcy. The market activity among investors demonstrates that the risk profile is affecting the pricing and trading activity around the securities and resulting in new patterns of investor interest and segmentation. These factors will influence the island’s ability to attract outside capital and investment as well as the cost of capital, according to Germán. “The trading activity continues because there is a secondary market. Investors are looking at these securities and pricing risk while evaluating the potential for returns. Last April, for example, Bloomberg reported that Puerto Rico’s bonds emerged as a top performer in the US municipal market—gaining more than any other dollar-denominated debt in the world,” she explained.

Tax-supported debt is now 55 percent of the Gross Domestic Product in Puerto Rico, as opposed to the US average of 2.67 percent according to figures released in April by the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico. The island is confronted with ever more volatile and challenging capital markets while it works through its bankruptcy, and opinions vary regarding how best to resolve the stalemate with investors.

AEI’s Lachman, for one, is unequivocal. “The debt has to be written down big time. That’s just basic math,” he said. “Creditors didn’t do due diligence when lending, so I don’t see why we should feel sorry for them or ask taxpayers to foot the bill when the creditors also messed up.”

Debt in the Aggregate

Puerto Rico accumulated unsupportable levels of debt in the form of general obligation bonds, which are secured by the territory government’s full faith and credit, and revenue bonds, which are secured by specific revenue sources, such as fees or specific taxes. Puerto Rico’s constitution provides guarantees for general obligation bonds.

“The heart of the problem is an inability to support their general obligation-backed bonds, which are subject to constitutional protection,” Germán explained. “And then you have the added problem of revenue bonds, which have been issued by over a dozen separate public and quasi-public entities in ways that are not sustainable. Puerto Rico’s revenue debt is secured by many different revenue sources—including, for example, sales taxes—which could have otherwise been used to fund current government operations. This combination was a recipe for disaster.”

Historical Context

Critics blame a bloated public sector, mismanagement, and corruption, but many believe the roots of the crisis lay in the island’s colonial history. Puerto Rico has had an often-fraught relationship with the federal government since the former Spanish colony was ceded to the United States at the end of the Spanish-American War in the late 1800s.

Puerto Ricans were granted American citizenship in 1917—just in time to serve as US forces in World War I. In 1920, the Jones Act required all goods ferried between US ports to be carried on ships built, owned, and operated by Americans. The mandate makes shipping more expensive, especially in Puerto Rico, where most commodities—even those needed for disaster relief—must be imported.

In 1996, the federal government began a 10-year phase-out of corporate tax breaks—Section 936 of the tax code—that were designed to spur manufacturing growth on the island. Puerto Rico lost 40 percent of its manufacturing jobs in the subsequent decade ending in 2006, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The island’s tax base shrank, and the next blow came in fairly quick succession with the dawn of the Great Recession of 2008. Puerto Rico’s government continued to borrow to meet its obligations, and many of the island’s most employable citizens—the young and healthy—emigrated in large numbers to the mainland United States.

From a 2004 high of 3.8 million, the population in Puerto Rico fell to about 3.4 million last year (Table 1), and it is expected the island will lose nearly half a million more residents by 2023, according to the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico (FOMB 2018). The board was created by Congress under the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA) signed into law in June 2016.

The oversight board paints a grim picture for the island’s economy in the near term: fully 100 percent of the Gross National Product this year will come from the expected $62 billion in public and private disaster relief.

The panel in April approved a series of austerity measures aimed at “aggressive structural reform” in Puerto Rico, such as scaling back employee benefits unheard of on the mainland, like mandatory Christmas bonuses and allowing for “at will” employment. The recommendations also included loosening labor laws and implementing pension and welfare reform. Critics say the “reforms” are punitive and rely on unrealistic growth projections. As economic policy, they say the austerity measures are the last thing Puerto Rico needs as it struggles to recover.

“Can Puerto Rico be rebuilt under that plan? Not much,” said Carlos Vargas-Ramos, director of policy for Centro.

But proponents say it’s the best way to address the underlying fiscal crisis so the island can move forward. “From a community planning point of view, we are in the crossfire. . . . At this moment, the big question is, ‘What is going to happen with this government and the debt’?” said Frederico Del Monte Garrido, a government planner, vice president of the Puerto Rican Planning Association, and Hunter summit attendee. “The principal point is we need to accept this fiscal plan.”

One factor clouding Puerto Rico’s prospects has been its inconsistent classification under US law as a territory. Some past court decisions and US policies have treated Puerto Rico as a foreign jurisdiction and excluded it from certain sections of the US Code, Germán noted. “Part of what has made this very difficult is that our own laws are unclear. For example, Puerto Rico was not authorized to seek protection under the part of the US bankruptcy code, Chapter 9, that provides relief for some insolvent governments, and it’s unclear why it was excluded. PROMESA attempted to fix some of these issues, providing Puerto Rico with a remedy similar to Chapter 9 to enable it to adjust the debt problems that are at the heart of its insolvency.”

Taxation and Land Use

The panel also recommended implementing tax initiatives that many experts believe are essential to righting the ship. They include creating a unified payment system, reducing corporate taxes with the goal of increasing investment, broadening the tax base, and improving compliance.

Puerto Rico’s chaotic land development has, of course, led to a haphazard system of property taxation. In many rural areas, land has been handed down for generations, and there is no paperwork or deeds—a barrier for as many as 60 percent of the 1.1 million claimants seeking FEMA aid, according to the financial oversight board.

By some estimates, as many as half of Puerto Rico’s 1.6 million housing units may have been constructed “informally”—an umbrella term that includes illegal subdivisions. Entire communities grew informally, such as Villa Hugo, a makeshift settlement of 6,000 residents who were forced from their homes by an earlier hurricane, for which the community is named.

Most of the informal homes don’t have insurance of any kind. Many don’t have addresses and don’t show up on the tax rolls. An equitable property tax base—a staple of healthy communities—is absent in many parts.

“They haven’t done a great job in capitalizing on land value,” said George W. McCarthy, president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute. “They’ve done a very poor job of even collecting property taxes.”

By improving land registration systems, establishing property values, and enforcing taxation, Puerto Rico can tap an important revenue source needed for rebuilding, he said.

The fiscal oversight board found no workable assessments for “tens of thousands” of properties on the island and estimated that more than $800 million could be raised by improving tax compliance, registering properties not on the rolls, and capturing back taxes.

The issue is critical, said Flores-Marzan. “It’s an immense problem and an important issue to address right now,” he said. “A lot of lawyers in Puerto Rico—people with the skills to address this problem—are probably out of work now.”

Over the next five years, the nonprofit housing group Habitat for Humanity International, which also received a $50 million grant from AbbVie, will partner with families to repair and rebuild housing and to address so-called “land tenure” issues that have substantially hindered housing recovery, said Bryan Thomas, head of public relations for the Georgia-based group. “A large portion of the housing was built without clear title, and that has caused huge delays,” said Thomas. Habitat will also work with government officials to look for ways to address the problem on a systemic level, he said.

Thomas said Habitat encounters similar issues in many of the less-developed countries where it builds. “Puerto Rico is in many ways sort of a hybrid—it’s part of the US but doesn’t operate under the same systems or laws,” he said. Habitat also plans to train construction workers, since many left the island as the economy plummeted.

McCarthy said Puerto Rico could also benefit from the creation of more public land bank authorities as it grapples with what to do with tens of thousands of abandoned properties. Such mechanisms helped rebuild in Japan and Germany after World War II and more recently in Detroit, he said.

Land banks aggregate and pool property and then design more efficient use. They can promote economic development by leveraging loans and grants for an area. The public Detroit Land Bank Authority owns about 100,000 pieces of property in the city, much of which was in foreclosure.

When Maria hit, Puerto Rico was already in the midst of a foreclosure crisis, with rates that were three times higher than on the mainland. Tens of thousands of properties have been abandoned, and there are an estimated 40,000 vacant properties in the San Juan area alone, planners say. San Juan created a land bank for its most densely populated neighborhood, Santurce, in 2016 (Vélez 2016).

Puerto Rico will also need to demolish or repurpose hundreds of school buildings. A quarter of the island’s schools have been shuttered because of the exodus to the mainland. The territory’s education department this spring announced plans to close another 265 schools. This would leave Puerto Rico with one-third fewer public schools than it had at the outset of the 2017–2018 academic year, potentially accelerating the out-migration (Mazzei 2018).

“I don’t see a path forward unless they can rationalize their land use,” said McCarthy. “It all hinges on effective leadership. It’s going to require somebody who is both charismatic and visionary.”

But the path seems anything but clear-cut on the ground. “Everything in Puerto Rico has become really complicated. There’s a perception of an anarchic environment,” David J. Carrasquillo-Medrano, president of the Puerto Rican Planning Society, told a panel at the recent “diaspora summit” in Manhattan. “The narrative of the government is that Puerto Rico is a blank slate, and you can go do what you want to do,” he said, referring to the courting of developers. “In Puerto Rico, it’s not that we don’t have planning; it’s that there’s no real estate regulation.”

Housing, Infrastructure, and the Return of the Cruise Ships

Many planners are deeply concerned that desperation and expediency will upend any planning already in place and thwart innovative rebuilding in Puerto Rico. Zoning and planning vary across the island. Del Monte Garrido said much of the reconstruction in poorer areas has been makeshift. Flores-Marzan said there are island-wide zoning codes and plans in place in 30 of 78 municipalities, but enforcement often is lacking, as is regional planning.

In 2011, Puerto Rico adopted a uniform building code that required structures to be built to withstand winds of up to 145 miles per hour. But most homes on the island were built informally before then.

To date, there are few concrete plans for new housing; an “action plan,” drafted by the federal government when it awarded the Community Development Block Grants, was more a statement of need than a plan. There are enormous price tags for righting the island: $375 million for debris removal, $1.5 billion to repair and rebuild roads and bridges, $8 billion for public buildings.

Puerto Rico is poor: before the storm 43.5 percent of the population lived below the poverty line. The island is home to the second-largest US public housing authority, with over 55,000 units across 340 properties. More than a quarter of those units were damaged, and initial damage claims totaled over $119 million in public housing alone.

In all, a million homes were affected by the storm; 472,000 sustained “significant damage” and 70,000 homes were completely destroyed, according to government estimates. The preliminary federal action plan estimates that rebuilding for greater resilience could cost $34.3 billion.

Foundation and nonprofit funding could be important. Groups like the Resilient Puerto Rico Commission, supported by the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, have been working with community groups to assess the damage and look for sustainable solutions. Rockefeller also has supported an island-wide public engagement campaign called Reimagine Puerto Rico. Still, many feel ignored after a lagging federal response and much confusion in the aftermath of Maria.

“I represent the people, and nobody is listening to us. We’re still being told 64 people died, and it’s over 1,000,” said Rev. Jose Antonio Oquendo, growing visibly agitated during a discussion at the summit at Hunter. Oquendo is a Catholic priest in the diocese of Caguas, and his parishioners had no electricity or running water for six months. “We say on the island that it is going to take us 10 years to set up again.”

Carrasquillo-Medrano, who heads the Puerto Rican Planning Society, said too much information is missing, such as accurate flood maps, to make informed planning decisions. And he cautions about the rush to build rather than rehabilitate housing. “We don’t need new homes; we have 326,000 vacant units on the island.”

Most planners agree that communities will probably have to be relocated from areas particularly vulnerable to the flooding and mudslides that affected the mountainous interior and coastal lowlands of the 35-by-100-mile island. More than 50 rivers and 60 watersheds surged with flood waters when Maria hit, according to the government.

Agriculture has nearly been wiped out and industry is flagging, but tourism is rebounding. Puerto Rico resumed cruise operations just two and a half weeks after Hurricane Maria, and 1.7 million passengers are expected for the 2018–2019 season, according to forecasts included in the federal government action plan. Traffic at the Luis Muñoz Marín airport is expected to reach pre-Maria levels this summer. And most hotels are back in business; the government estimates that the tourism sector has spent or planned for $1.9 billion in new developments and renovations.

McCarthy points to Puerto Rico’s estimable amenities—it is a Caribbean island after all—and said perhaps the island can look to New Orleans and Detroit, which have stabilized, if not rebounded, from decline and calamity. “It’s not like Puerto Rico is going to stay vacant for long. The question is, who is going to develop it?” said McCarthy. “Can you build a thriving economy in Puerto Rico beyond tourism?”

At the recent summit in Manhattan this spring, panelists and attendees seemed humbled by the work ahead. “We still need a lot of information. There is still a sense of the enormity of the task at hand,” said Hunter College’s Vargas-Ramos. “Rebuilding Puerto Rico is going to take decades, so we need to think short-term, medium-term, and long-term.”

Patricia Alex is a principal at Silk City Communications, which specializes in writing and editing for nonprofit organizations. She is a former newspaper reporter and editor in northern New Jersey.

Additional reporting by Loren Berlin.

Photograph: cestes001 (iStock/Getty Images Plus)

References

Brown, Nick. 2018. “Special Report: In Puerto Rico, a Housing Crisis US Storm Aid Won’t Resolve.” Reuters, February 6, 2018.

FOMB (Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico). 2018. “New Fiscal Plan for Puerto Rico: Restoring Growth and Prosperity.” Puerto Rico: Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico (April).

Kishore, Nishant, Domingo Marqués, Ayesha Mahmud, Mathew V. Kiang, Irmary Rodriguez, Arlan Fuller, Peggy Ebner, Cecilia Sorensen, Fabio Racy, Jay Lemery, Leslie Maas, Jennifer Leaning, Rafael A. Irizarry, Satchit Balsari, and Caroline O. Buckee. 2018. “Mortality in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.” Special article, New England Journal of Medicine, May 29, 2018. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMsa1803972.

Johnson, Laurie A., and Robert B. Olshansky. 2017. After Great Disasters: An In-Depth Analysis of How Six Countries Managed Community Recovery. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Mazzei, Patricia. 2018. “Puerto Rico’s Schools Are in Tumult, and Not Just Because of Hurricane Maria.” New York Times, June 1, 2018.

PRDOH (Puerto Rico Department of Housing). 2018. “Puerto Rico Disaster Recovery Action Plan for the Use of CDBG-DR Funds in Response to 2017 Hurricanes Irma and Maria.” Draft for public comment. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Department of Housing, Government of Puerto Rico (May 10).

Vélez, Eva Lloréns. 2016. “San Juan Creates Community Land Bank.” Caribbean Business, October 2016.

Today an indigenous Bolivian produce vendor glides through the air on an aerial cable car to reach the market in La Paz. A student in Bogotá, Colombia, knows she will arrive on time for class because the city’s bus rapid transit (BRT) network never gets stuck in traffic. A car owner in São Paulo, Brazil, leaves the keys at home because the city’s ban on rush hour driving in the city center applies to his license plate number that day. A young middle-class family lives comfortably without a car in downtown Santiago, Chile, thanks to new sidewalks and bike lanes for neighborhood trips and a clean, safe combination of subway and BRT to navigate the rest of the city. And a day laborer in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas can count on a shared van that serves his neighborhood when the city’s official bus system does not.

These slices of life in Latin America’s big cities are not unusual. Bus rapid transit (BRT) lines zip through the heart of 54 cities in the region. Aerial cable cars connect steep hillside neighborhoods with the rest of town in over a half-dozen cities. Pedestrians and cyclists of all social classes are increasingly finding their way on busy urban streets. Informal transit options abound, although their safety and reliability vary widely, as does tolerance from public officials. Subway systems are being built out, albeit slowly. Car ownership remains well below averages in the developed world.

Altogether, Latin America has earned a reputation as a global innovator in urban transit. Latin American cities have garnered 9 of the 16 annual Sustainable Transport Awards given by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), and they regularly place as finalists in the C40 Cities4Mobility Awards.

There have been some impressive successes. Public-private partnerships (P3s) are now de rigueur across the region: national governments are funding infrastructure and overseeing long-term plans while private firms bid to operate routes. The World Bank estimates that Latin America invested $361.3 billion for energy and transport infrastructure in more than a thousand P3s over the last decade, with the lion’s share in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. Meanwhile, Brazil and Colombia have deployed land value capture in order to finance the expansion of BRT networks and the construction of new rail lines (Smolka 2013).

Amid the Latin American transport boom, however, there have also been busts. Overcrowding on Bogotá’s TransMilenio system, the region’s largest BRT network, has led to periodic riots. Rio staked its Olympic legacy on enhanced mobility with a citywide build-out of BRT and three aerial cable cars to serve favela communities, but endemic corruption and top-down planning resulted in unkept promises. The zeal to implement new transit corridors in places like Quito, Ecuador, has come at the expense of informal operators serving the poorest urban dwellers.

“Latin America is innovating, but we still don’t know if that innovation brings a virtuous cycle to generate resources for the city,” said Clarisse Linke, director of ITDP’s Brazil office. “Are we benefitting the poor so they don’t have to travel 50 kilometers each way to work?”

Such questions are at the heart of Latin America’s transportation innovation paradox. The region may have invented creative ways to move people around crowded urban centers, but can it deliver on a broader need to reduce crushing inequality? When it comes to that level of innovation, the awards jury is still undecided.

BRT Boom

Transportation innovation has flourished in Latin American cities, primarily due to two factors: rapid urbanization and extreme inequality. Despite improvements in recent decades, 8 of the 20 least equal countries in the world, as measured by the Gini index, are in Latin America. And demographers consider the region the most urban in the world. Eighty percent of its population resides in cities, and rates are even higher in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. Those teeming cities emerged during a postwar economic boom that sparked massive rural-to-urban migration. As peasants, farmers, and indigenous people came down from the Andes or left the arid hinterlands of northeastern Brazil, they did not encounter a ready supply of inner-city housing. Instead, they were shunted to the edges of cities or onto steep hillsides unsuitable for construction.

Seas of poor people surrounding islands of affluence became the socioeconomic norm in the region (Gutman and Patel 2018). New arrivals to a city often find centrally located jobs as maids, janitors, construction workers, or cooks. This creates a need to move large numbers of low-wage workers relatively long distances, to where they can afford to live.

Plenty of enterprising options have sprung up to meet the demand. Shared vans or taxis, known as colectivos (Spanish) or kombis (Portuguese), began plying routes to serve new neighborhoods that overburdened municipal governments couldn’t reach or intentionally neglected. Privately operated bus fleets popped up, offering frequent but uncoordinated service that saw companies competing against each other and drivers competing against the clock in ways that left gaps, duplication, and unsafe conditions.

In the late 1960s and early ’70s, the cash-strapped public sector used its limited resources to invest in rail networks in only the biggest cities. Subways in Mexico City, São Paulo, and Santiago are prime examples from this period. Although they serve millions of passengers daily, they don’t compare well to the comprehensive rail networks of similarly sized megacities like London and Tokyo.

Enter bus rapid transit. While the idea is credited to British urban planner Peter Midgley, a retired World Bank consultant who devised the first dedicated bus lanes in French and Belgian cities in the late 1960s, it was Curitiba, Brazil, that evolved the first BRT system. The 20-kilometer line that opened in 1974 featured not just dedicated bus lanes, but also enclosed stations, pre-boarding payment, and all-door boarding—features that make subways swift and convenient.

Curitiba’s then mayor, architect Jaime Lerner, who became famous for his urban design interventions in the southern Brazilian city, had federal funding for a metro line. But he realized that the city could produce a much longer dedicated bus system for the same price as a much shorter subway line. With bus stops that had the look and feel of subway stations, and zoning that allowed taller buildings on major corridors near the stations, Curitiba gained most of the benefits of a subway line with a limited budget.

That basic approach appealed to Latin American cities. “We didn’t have the resources or the time to implement rail-based transport,” said Linke. “It was an urgent situation because our cities were already heavily populated, and we needed more transit coverage.”

The model evolved in Bogotá under Mayor Enrique Peñalosa—who is back in office after a 14-year hiatus. The city of 8 million is conspicuously absent from the list of Latin American metropolises with subway systems, because Peñalosa, like Lerner, invested heavily in BRT instead in the late 1990s. Bogotá’s TransMilenio system grew to become one of the largest BRT networks in the world. With 210 kilometers of routes and over 2 million passengers daily, the TransMilenio rivals many underground networks.

Curitiba and Bogotá represent something of the golden era for Latin American BRT, as these two cities proved, at least for a time, that they could transport a critical mass of residents for a fraction of the cost of heavy rail, sparking a worldwide trend. Meanwhile, cities like Santiago, São Paulo, Rio, Mexico City, and Quito moved to implement BRT lines as a complement to trains, mostly filling in gaps rather than building out rail networks.

BRT, in turn, became identified with Latin America in transportation and policy circles. Think tanks like the Brookings Institute held seminars on what US public transportation could learn from the Latin American BRT boom. The World Resources Institute (WRI) championed BRT as a Latin American innovation and identified Latin America as home to the bulk of the world’s BRT passengers, nearly 20 million people daily.

Middle of the Road

While the global fervor around BRT continues, unabashed boosterism has been tempered by growing criticism, and Bogotá’s TransMilenio has been the main lightning rod. The system’s approval rating has plummeted from 90 percent to around 20 percent, with chronic overcrowding the main complaint. Like Tokyo’s infamously overcrowded mass transit system, TransMilenio is designed for 6 people per square meter—compared to Sweden’s transit design standard of 2 per square meter or New York City’s average of 2.7 per square meter. This means passengers are squeezed so tightly they may not be able to disembark at their stop. And the system routinely carries as many as 8 or 9 people per square meter, so at peak times it can take 45 minutes just to find a bus with room to board.

While the city continues its efforts to shore up TransMilenio, most recently announcing $8 million to enlarge 49 of 138 stations so they can accommodate more passengers, the system’s flaws have driven more Bogotanos to alternate modes of transportation. The increased reliance on private cars and taxis has produced the sixth-worst traffic congestion on the planet, according to the INRIX 2017 Global Traffic Scorecard. And after 60 years, Bogotá is finally poised to invest in a metro line.

“Today we celebrate that we reached a point of no return with the Bogotá Metro,” said Peñalosa last September when Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos approved national funding for the project. Transportation officials determined that a 30-kilometer subway system powered by renewable hydroelectric energy was preferable to more BRT, which has been slow to convert to clean electric buses from dirty diesels.

Some still favor the cost benefits of BRT. Colombian transportation economist Juan Pablo Bocajero at the University of the Andes estimates that the city loses $800 million annually (0.5 percent of its GDP) to traffic congestion. “If I had to decide between a 30-kilometer subway and a 200-kilometer BRT, I would probably choose the BRT,” he told Public Radio International’s The World in 2015. But even TransMilenio diehards like the system’s former deputy general manager, Dário Hidalgo, who now coordinates WRI’s Observatory of the BRT Center for Excellence, have publicly supported the Bogotá metro.

The BRT versus metro debate also played out in Brazil, where both Porto Alegre and Curitiba considered subway lines after receiving a huge injection of capital from the federal government’s public infrastructure spending campaign, much of it funneled into 2014 World Cup host cities. While on paper both opted for a subway, favoring higher capacity and ribbon-cutting potential over the cost-benefit efficiency of BRT, Brazil’s political and economic crisis over the last few years has led both cities to suspend their projects. Curitiba has petitioned the federal government for permission to redirect its roughly $500 million federal grant back into the city’s flagship BRT system.

Nonetheless, transit investment is not a zero-sum competition, notes Daniel Rodriguez, a University of California, Berkeley scholar and Lincoln Institute fellow, citing research on US metropolitan areas (Levine 2013). Overall, spending on different modes of transit tends to rise and fall together, and spending on one mode has a neutral or complementary effect on another.

Aerial Cable Cars

A more recent innovation reflects a willingness to invest in poorer neighborhoods shaped by the unique topography of Latin American cities, where informal settlements often cling to hillsides. As Curitiba inspired a BRT boom, the aerial cable car inaugurated in Medellín in 2004 likewise inspired a half-dozen other Latin American cities. At a cost of $5 to 10 million per kilometer, it compares favorably with rail transport that couldn’t necessarily navigate the formidable terrain above Medellín’s valleys or between high-altitude El Alto and La Paz. Cable cars have slashed travel times in complicated areas previously navigable only by motorbikes, pedestrians, and small vehicles. But there are notable exceptions: Rio’s two cable car lines have been shuttered for over two years after corruption probes discovered that construction firms colluded with public officials to overcharge for the projects by tens of millions of dollars.

While the public sector debates the merits of BRT, private bus fleets continue to serve every Latin American city, and local governments have tried with mixed success to rein in the chaotic overlapping networks of buses. In 2007, Santiago’s publicly subsidized, privately run Transantiago introduced smart cards, scrapped old modified trucks in favor of new buses, and brought the entire system under the authority of one agency. But commuters felt frustrated that the radical reform—considered the most ambitious in the transport sector of a developing country—was imposed on them too rapidly. Although Santiago’s system was more reliable than many Latin American cities’ overall transport networks, in 2017 the think tank Espacio Público called it the worst public policy decision since Chile’s return to democracy, in large part because of the billions of subsidies the government pays to private bus operators to keep the system running.

The inadequacies of Santiago’s BRT stemmed in part from an initial lack of public subsidies for the private bus companies, according to Rodriguez. “This translated into operators attempting to carry as many passengers as possible,” he said. The city also eliminated many existing routes and failed to inform riders of the changes (McCarthy 2007).

Such questionable public policy decisions could be a contributing factor to Latin America’s rising car ownership rates (Roque and Masoumi 2016). Still, a recent study showed car ownership rates below the averages in wealthier countries, from a low of 71 per 1,000 residents in Ecuador to a high of 314 per 1,000 residents in Argentina. Those relatively low numbers mean that a large constituency favors an increase in bus lanes at the expense of private car lanes.

But the annual growth rate of car ownership—up to 6.1 percent in Chile—far outpaced the 1 to 2 percent range in developed nations. These figures suggest that despite Latin America’s advances in mass transit, the upper class and upwardly mobile are still opting for private automobiles, regardless of traffic congestion. (Nine Latin American cities feature in the INRIX 100 cities with the worst traffic, more than in Asia and Africa combined.)

On the other end of the economic spectrum, the proliferation of BRT may be having other consequences. “BRT is the flavor of the decade in transportation and it is supplanting, in some cases problematically so, existing transport systems that are problematic in their own right,” said University of California, Berkeley scholar Daniel Chatman, who has studied the impact of new BRT routes in several cities, including Quito and Barranquilla, Colombia.

Preliminary research suggests that BRT in high-volume corridors tends to best serve those working in traditional office settings, moving them from dense, formal residential areas to job centers. That can leave the poor behind as ancillary routes through poorer parts of the city are cut off by transit planners aiming to formalize the existing transportation network, even though it underserves the 30 percent of the region’s residents who live in informal housing.

“BRT ends up serving the dominant traffic pattern in a city and doesn’t necessarily deal as well with other travel patterns that are not part of this main trunk system,” Chatman said.

BRT’s ability to move people over long distances has also facilitated worsening socio-spatial segregation. After creating access to land on the urban periphery, housing officials and private-sector developers in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico moved to build social housing ever farther from the city center in order to take advantage of lower land prices.

“We now know this was a mistake, leading to social exclusion, higher fares, and travel burden,” said University of California, Berkeley’s Rodriguez.

The prevailing spatial structure of Latin American cities, with low-income residents located predominantly in the outskirts, means that BRT projects have largely benefitted middle-income residents. This is true in Bogotá (Combs 2017) and Lima (Scholl et al. 2017), where BRT serves concentrations of middle-income residents, connecting them to formal employment clusters. Residents of social housing in Brazil pay over 50 percent of their income on housing and transportation combined, while occupants of more centrally located housing pay 39 percent, according to Linke.

Urban Transportation in Latin America

In May 2017, the Lincoln Institute and the University of California, Berkeley’s department of city and regional planning hosted a symposium on urban transportation in Latin America. It focused on the influence of innovative transit schemes on real estate, urban development, and the lives of city residents. The aim of the symposium was to examine the evidence to date and discuss ways to apply recent scholarship to public policy.

Symposium papers paint a complex picture of experiences and impacts. Research was inconclusive about whether BRT investments can have distinct impacts on real estate markets, although most of the studies have focused on just a few cities in Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico. Aerial cable cars have been empirically studied only in Medellín, which showed increased real estate activity. Both types of transport have led to increased building permit activity and population density. Land use trends shifted from residential to commercial in Bogotá and Quito but not in León, Monterrey, Guadalajara, and Puebla. Inconsistencies regarding estimated impacts point to differences in local conditions. Urban land markets are subject to a variety of forces—from planning institutions and development activity to the availability of land—that are likely to influence the price of land, making it difficult to generalize price impacts within corridors, across corridors, and over time. 

Opportunities for further research abound, including studies of the importance of these innovations relative to established urban transportation modes, how to target the benefits towards the poorest residents, and how to better coordinate with land development.

The high cost and inconvenience also reflect poor coordination between housing and transit planning. As a result, housing is often located without consideration for transit access, notes Enrique Silva, associate director of the Lincoln Institute’s Program on Latin America and the Caribbean. BRT’s failure to reach more underserved communities is the result of discrete choices of “how you plan your routes and how accessible the stops are to people,” he said. Planners decided to work on existing major routes and decided not to extend or consider routes that penetrated more effectively into poor neighborhoods, Silva explained.

Latin America’s advances are nevertheless impressive, and moving around cities in the region has improved demonstrably in recent decades. But until the region reduces the vast gulf between rich and poor—a division that manifests itself in where people can live—high-speed transit can serve at best as a salve on a deeper wound.

Gregory Scruggs, AICP, writes about cities and culture in the Americas. He is a correspondent with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, and his work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic CityLab, and The Guardian.

Photograph: Gwen Kash

References

BRTData. www.brtdata.org.

Combs, Tabitha. 2017. “Improving Equity in the Distribution of Public Transit Benefits.” Paper presented at the Symposium on Transportation Innovations and Urban Land in Latin America, Berkeley, CA, May 2017.

Gutman, Jeffrey, and Nirav Patel. 2018. Addressing Spatial Inequality in Latin American Cities. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. www.brookings.edu/research/addressing-spatial-inequity-in-latin-american-cities.

Levine, Jonathan. 2013. “Is Bus Versus Rail Investment a Zero-Sum Game? The Misuse of the Opportunity-Cost Concept.” Journal of the American Planning Association 79:1, 5–15. DOI: 10.1080/01944363.2013.785285.

Linke, Clarisse, and Luc Nadal. 2017. “Housing, Transport and Access: A Case for Transit-Oriented Low-Income Housing in Rio de Janeiro.” Paper presented at the Symposium on Transportation Innovations and Urban Land in Latin America, Berkeley, CA, May 2017.

McCarthy, Julie. 2007. “In Chile, Commuters Sue City over Transit System.” Broadcast on All Things Considered, National Public Radio, October 8, 2007. www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15100976.

Rodriguez, Daniel A., Erik Vergel-Tovar, and William F. Camargo. 2016. “Land Development Impacts of BRT in a Sample of Stops in Quito and Bogotá.” Transport Policy 51: 4–14. DOI: 10.1016/j.tranpol.2015.10.002.

Roque, Daniela, and Houshmand E. Masoumi. 2016. “An Analysis of Car Ownership in Latin American Cities: A Perspective for Future Research.” Periodica Polytechnica Transportation Engineering 44(1): 5–12. DOI: 10.3311/PPtr.8307.

Scholl, Lynn, Daniel R. Oviedo, Marco Innao, and Lauramaria Pedraza. 2017. “BRT Systems and Social Inclusion: Impacts on Access to Jobs—The Case of Lima, Peru.” Paper presented at the Symposium on Transportation Innovations and Urban Land in Latin America, Berkeley, CA, May 2017.

Smolka, Martim O. 2013. Implementing Value Capture in Latin America: Policies and Tools for Urban Development. Policy Focus Report. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Velandia Naranjo, Durfari Janive. 2017. “The Impact of Bus Rapid Transit System on Land Prices in Mexico City.” Paper presented at the Symposium on Transportation Innovations and Urban Land in Latin America, Berkeley, CA, May 2017.

Vergel-Tovar, Erik. 2017. “The Impacts of Bus Rapid Transit on Land Use and Real Estate Activity in Bogotá, Colombia.” Paper presented at the Symposium on Transportation Innovations and Urban Land in Latin America, Berkeley, CA, May 2017.

In Colombia’s Caribbean coast city of Santa Marta this July, local citizens, community groups, public officials, and an unusual array of specialists will pick up tools and work together for two weeks to solve technology design challenges relevant to residents of coastal communities. In the process, they will hammer away at the ecological, social, and political issues facing poor people in the region, particularly those living in new, informal settlements.

The International Development Design Summit (IDDS) Colombia: 2018, New Coastal Territories, whose roughly 60 participants hail mostly from Latin America, will bring together MBAs, fishermen, architects, roboticists, anthropologists, economists, artists, biologists, chemists, and an assortment of engineers. A solid majority of the attendees are female.

High on the agenda are sanitation, housing, access to water, and food security. Participants will consider these needs within the context of territorial planning. The United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) treats urban and territorial planning as a decision-making process geared toward achieving economic, social, cultural, and environmental goals through land policy. Planning is a means of reshaping cities and regions to spur local and regional growth “while addressing the needs of the most vulnerable, marginalized, or underserved groups.”

The logic behind the design event is to assemble diverse actors in an environment conducive to innovation on several levels. Given sufficient time, instruction, and support, participants can collaborate to devise tools and methods suited to local needs, and make progress toward hashing out complex, systemic problems. One of the main tenets of the design process is expecting negative results and learning from them.

The IDDS event’s grounding in the technology design process reflects its origins in a project launched at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2002. The event’s host is the Bogotá, Colombia–based Center of Innovation of Appropriate Technologies and Education (C-Innova), which was founded in 2015. C-Innova is an offshoot of the MIT D-Lab, a technology education and design hub and international community development program that’s active in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia.

D-Lab’s anti-poverty strategy aims to make the lives of poor people less precarious. It equips them to build durable settlements and create economic opportunity by developing technologies and products that can find ready markets within the community and potentially beyond. D-Lab has grown to include an interdisciplinary curriculum that emphasizes fieldwork, applied research in technology and community building, and bottom-up development methods centered on local creative capacity and sustainability.

D-Lab Founding Director Amy Smith is a senior lecturer in mechanical engineering at MIT. A former Peace Corps volunteer in Botswana, Smith was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 2004. Her early collaborative design work—conducted with students interested in addressing the effects of poverty worldwide—includes methods for making low-pollution charcoal from agricultural waste, low-cost, easily maintained water filters, and bacteria test kits.

The lab works with a long list of international partners and heads up the International Development Innovation Network (IDIN), a consortium of universities, institutions, and innovation centers like C-Innova. IDIN was set up to support the International Development Design Summits, which Smith cofounded in 2007.

D-Lab-influenced innovations include a multistage water filtration system for treating contaminated spring water in Valle del Cauca, on Colombia’s mountainous Pacific Coast, and a composting method for creating fertile soil for use in small-scale food production in La Calera, on the outskirts of Bogotá.

“We’re a little different in the degree to which we engage the community groups—the end users—in the design process, the problem-solving process,” Smith explained. “Many initiatives consult the users but don’t engage them fully in creating the solutions, identifying the challenges in implementation, and making improvements.”

IDDS Building Peace, hosted by the National University of Colombia in January 2018, brought together participants in post-conflict resettlement talks, including members of the Revolutionary Armed forces of Colombia (FARC). The summit yielded a rainwater collection and purification system along with the constructive dialogue. “Anything that helps communities solve a problem—such as having drinking water at a very low cost—is also a step towards peace, because it will benefit all of us,” former rebel Efrén Morales told the National University of Colombia’s news service.

Bogotá

C-Innova works out of a repurposed neighborhood workshop, a short walk from the National University of Colombia, in Bogotá. Here, design-minded students and other community members can develop their tool skills, experiment, and make practical, low-cost devices from everyday materials. For the students, it means ready access to mentors, equipment, and materials in a less bureaucratic environment than on campus. To the local community, and throughout Colombia and the region, it’s part of a broader movement to use design principles and collaborative approaches to combat poverty and to democratize access to technology.

The center was part of a USAID-sponsored project to establish a global network of community-based technology hubs, according to cofounder Pedro Reynolds-Cuéllar. The idea was to bring together international and regional experts and professionals, local residents and organizations, and area entrepreneurs to address community needs through design-oriented activities promoting sustainable local and regional businesses. The center is based on a D-Lab template for community innovation centers: workspace and meeting space equipped with tools, training sessions, and a shop selling technologies.

C-Innova held a zero-waste summit in the city of Cali, where it worked with local waste pickers to develop a method of recycling plastic filament for use as 3-D printer resin—providing a new market for the material—and to foster what is now a 50-person business that recycles construction waste into cement. It has also worked with the displaced population in the southeastern outskirts of Bogotá to assist single mothers in ventures to make party decorations from recycled plastic and to design and build practical household items like cribs and lanterns.

Innovation Ecosystems

“The thing that is relevant to our work is this idea of creating local innovation ecosystems—whether they be urban or rural­—that consist of both a network of community members and physical space,” Smith said.

After promoting design-based responses to poverty for nearly two decades, D-Lab has begun taking stock of the types of conditions that encourage innovation. In its hypothesis-forming stage of research, D-Lab is reviewing 300 local innovations—from peanut shellers and small-scale underwater turbines to water filters and sanitary napkins—by conducting interviews and preparing case studies in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America.

In the first of a series of papers, D-Lab research scientist Elizabeth Hoffecker describes innovation ecosystems as “place-based communities of interacting actors engaged in producing innovation and supporting processes of innovation, along with the infrastructure and enabling environment which allows them to create, adopt, and spread solutions to local challenges.”

The lab seeks to identify the boundaries and other characteristics of innovation ecosystems, ways to measure and bolster a community’s ability to innovate, and the significance of local innovation in the context of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and similar initiatives.

D-Lab classifies local innovations by type: those that save time and/or labor, such as pedal-powered washing machines and wind-powered rice threshers, which increase income and free time for other productive uses; those that create new streams of income (usually novel inventions); those that fill important gaps in the provision of health, sanitation, and well-being; and those that provide an essential service, which enables other forms of economic or household activity. In general, these local innovations can increase well-being, income, access to education, mobility, and opportunity for local civic participation and decision making.

The overall approach can benefit the planning process, according to Peter Pollock, FAICP, manager of the Lincoln Institute’s Western Programs. “Developing and deploying planning tools shouldn’t be done in a vacuum,” he said. “Directly engaging end users to address their practical needs with appropriate technology will best help achieve these important social and economic goals.”

In conventional development terms, such local innovation can be seen to have limited impact and little uptake beyond the local community. Hoffecker notes that the vast majority of innovations were used by 500 people or fewer, and the median user group was 50—unsurprising, given the target communities.

But the MIT researchers found that innovation at the local level promotes the growth of infrastructure in the form of physical spaces and social networks.

This self-perpetuating dynamic is testament to D-Lab’s methodology: identify communities based on local needs, resources, and community interest; train community members in the design process and teach the skills to address their particular situation; help set up a makerspace; provide six months’ post-training mentoring; and, where feasible, provide seed capital.

“We start by teaching the design process with very tangible products and a very concrete challenge, and then move that to something like an intangible but still somewhat concrete solution,” Smith said. “And then [we] move to programs and systems, which are abstract and intangible, so that people can look at the design process as creative problem-solving steps for a variety of issues.”

Ted Smalley Bowen is a senior editor at the Lincoln Institute.

Photograph: C-Innova Team