The People’s Struggle: The Story of a Neighborhood in Quito, Ecuador

This story is part of a series produced in CoLab’s Self-Determination Narratives Fellowship program. MIT urban planning students produced multimedia narratives focused on investigating and lifting up efforts by communities on the margins to forge their own path to develop independent cultural, political, and economic systems.

Lucha de los Pobres is a housing cooperative and neighbourhood in Southwestern Quito in Ecuador. In this documentary I explore the inspiring story of how an indigenous community was able to self organize and how this unique informal settlement and cooperative was transformed into a thriving neighbourhood. In this case, the process of homegrown incremental housing development was a means to the self-determination of marginalized communities.