Project Summary

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The project #Upscaling Resilience aimed to explore the scope for upscaling and transnational transfer of participatory landslide risk-reducing strategies for informal settlements in Latin America. Drawing on lessons from a pilot experience in a single small informal settlement in Medellin, Colombia, this project rolled out and evaluated the use of community-based participatory monitoring and mitigation of landslide risk across the city in Medellin, as well as in another city within a different Latin American country – São Paulo in Brazil.

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The overall aim was to develop bottom-up approaches to dealing with landslide risks in cities around the Global South, in a way that optimises the collaboration between communities and relevant governmental bodies, as well as the collaborative use of ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ infrastructures.

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The previous project called 'Resilience or resistance? Negotiated mitigation of landslide risks in informal settlements in Medellin' that ended in Oct 2017, had as objectives: (1) to explore perceptions of landslide risk in informal settlements within the community and among public sector agencies; (2) to pilot and test informal settlement community-managed risk monitoring and mitigation techniques; and (3) to collaboratively identify mechanisms to develop a sustainable process of landslide risk-mitigation strategy-building.

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This project (#Upscaling Resilience) substantially developed our understanding of the scope for co-produced landslide risk-mitigation infrastructures by testing feasibility of upscaling & internationalising this experience by meeting the following three key objectives:

• Objective 1: Test the roll-out of community-based landslide risk management in Medellin’s low-income NW sector

• Objective 2: Test transnational transfer of community-based landslide risk management

• Objective 3: Draw lessons on community-based landslide risk management from the Colombian and Brazilian experiences transferable to other Global South cities.

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The beneficiaries of this project #Upscaling Resilience were residents in informal settlements at risk of landslides in the Global South, via dissemination of policy papers and academic papers, as well as involvement of international bodies in a final dissemination event in the UK. Local beneficiaries were the estimated 44,600 informal settlement households currently at risk of landslides in the Medellin Metropolitan Area, and the 29,000 households in high & very high risk areas identified by ITP in Sao Paulo.

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For more information on how this project was developed, please the videos found below. 

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#Upscaling Resilience was funded through the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) made available by the British Academy’s Cities and Infrastructure programme ( https://www.britac.ac.uk/co-production-landslide-risk-management ).