Ravine Revitalization: A Comprehensive Prototype for Valparaiso, Chile Part 1 Project 2012 Jingyi FengDouglas Harsvoort University of Minnesota | USA Unlike many informal settlements of developing cities around the world, the rugged branching hills and ravines of Valparaiso, Chile create a unique challenge for its scattered settlements. This topography divides settlements and prevents them from forming larger, well connected communities. With over 90 percent of the city’s informal settlers working in the city center, mobility through this terrain is becoming an increasingly significant problem. The city’s poor are being pushed further and further back from the downtown and into the hills and valleys. People must make an hour long commute by foot to reach the city in some cases, leading to problems in health, safety, and the general ability to sustain work. One of the major causes for this is a lack of infrastructure in the RAVINE SPACES in the city, which often serve more as informal garbage dumps than anything else. Our proposal would be to take the underutilized and underdeveloped ravine space in the city and turn it into a network of city infrastructure that would both bring LOCAL AMENITIES to the informal neighborhoods as well as URBAN INFRASTRUCTURE to make mobility and transit much easier for the city as a whole. This would not only benefit the informal settlements, but would help improve the economic functionality, health, and well being of the city’s working class. For our proposal, we located a ravine to initiate a prototype that could become part of a larger urban fabric as the resources and demand for these projects developed. Our specific project is an infill of a large ravine pocket, which is the focal point that connects to a tramline and system of ravine walkways to Valparaiso’s city center. Tutor(s) Adj. Asst. Professor Dani Clark