Lasting Connections: Impressions from a Flash Landscape Architecture Studio in Panama City

The site of the studio comprised Ell Cerro Ancón, an iconic promontory in the city and its adjacent areas. Cerro Ancón was part of a huge city military area that was under the control of the US for 100 years, located on the Pacific side of Canal. The Canal zone included defense, administrative, service, and residential facilities, following Garden City urban layouts, and deploying tropical-sensitive architecture in a humid and lush setting.

The Canal Zone, after reverting to Panamanian sovereignty, has become an enormous and well-kept academic and institutional campus, in which the natural habitats, the garden city grounds, and the buildings are all protected. Cerro Ancón separates this former green enclave from very low-income and contested neighborhoods—some of which were the result of urban renewal operations carried out after the destruction caused by the American invasion to Panama in 1989, and the historic center of Panamá City, now mostly gentrified, catering to tourism and high-end hospitality. High-speed roads at the base of Cerro Ancón further cutoff the hill from the urban areas.

The goal of the studio was to make this make Cerro Ancón Zone the pivot between the Inter-oceanic tropical forests (addressing global scale ecologies), and the challenged neighborhoods, and the old colonial city (addressing urban and local issues).

To respond to the first goal, the studio proposed taking advantage of an airstrip that was part of the military facilities—now scarcely used by small tourist planes—to create a low-laying extension and more active recreating park, linking the existing hilly metropolitan park which is the tip of the Inter-oceanic corridor, to the Cerro Ancón. Cut-fill topographic moves allow to manage water, creating the habitat corridors, and diverse public spaces. Some areas are designated for mixed use real estate developments to enhance activities at the edge of the park and to help finance the scheme.

The second goal led to identifying a system of urban corridors that could connect the existing waterfront parks to Cerro Ancón as green armatures that can the extend the habitats of the hill to the streets bellow now lacking vegetation. Possible links were also proposed to provide easy aces to Cerro Ancon by constructing pedestrian land bridges over the road system.

The green corridors offer amicable public spaces to the low-income areas. The scheme also proposed improvements in public transportation, including an aerial gondola connecting the western waterfront to the neighborhoods, providing easy access to the now rarely visited high elevations of Cerro Ancón, and to the new park, including a terminal station that would link to the Metro system.

Under-utilized and publicly owned sites were targeted for relocation/new housing and community services, offering shelter to those living in overcrowded and non-salvageable traditional dwellings. Here, the strategy is to avoid gentrification/displacement of these communities, elevating living conditions, and diversifying economic drivers, taking advantage of the unique location of these neighborhoods straddling between the old city and the expanded park system and ecologies.

The project was advanced in such a short time thanks to the input of, and a brief course dedicated to site-analysis conducted by, Professor Maria Bellalta, dean of the School of Landscape Architecture at Boston Architecture College, and the Portuguese Professor and Landscape Architect Ricardo Souza, who envisioned the program at Universidad Isthmus, and to site vits. Employing very large maps, working in groups by hand before scanning and vectorizing them also contributed to the fast-paced production. This is the “reading of the landscape” method I use in my two semester per year Global South studios at Penn.

The team at Universidad Isthmus suggested another engagement in Panama City next year. Groups of their undergraduate and master’s students would on a different site in parallel to Penn students, participating in joint lectures, site visits, and a charrette during our field trip to Panama in the Spring of 2024.