Areas of work

GRADEAreas of workUrbanization and Sustainable Cities

Urbanization and Sustainable Cities

The last 50 years have seen a fourfold increase in Peru’s urban population, a process that has added 20 million people to its cities. This accelerated urban expansion has occurred mainly through the informal, unplanned occupation of the territory—which has generated cities where vast areas do not have adequate access to basic services, public spaces, urban infrastructure, and economic opportunities in general.

GRADE’s urban development research agenda seeks to help reduce the exclusion and inefficiency associated with such disorderly growth, and to prevent such expansion patterns from continuing to reproduce indefinitely. For this, GRADE has focused its efforts on the development and adaptation of accessible and low-cost technological tools that, on the one hand, facilitate the detailed and systematic analysis of urban problems, and on the other, help the relevant public and private stakeholders to improve the governance of cities—especially in their expansion areas.

The tools and analysis developed by GRADE can be adapted and applied in the rest of the Global South, where urbanization processes are replicating several of the patterns already observed in Peru. For this reason, GRADE seeks to promote cooperation channels that would allow the efficient and direct transfer of experiences and knowledge in the South-South axis.