Ground
Works

In the Peruvian Amazon Rainforest, Indigenous communities have been living in river floodplains for millennia and have developed unique cultural connections with the living waters and their rich biodiversity. To escape hardship (e.g. over extraction of resources, slavery, climate change impacts etc.), or seek opportunities (e.g. health, education, economic etc.), hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people have migrated from the jungle to Amazonian cities such as Iquitos over the past hundred years. Referencing traditional lifestyles, many of these migrants created floating and stilted communities in the city’s floodplain edges. Their multi-generational knowledge of floodplain agriculture, amphibious housing, and deeply-rooted community structures provides cultural, economic, and ecosystem services to the whole city. However, this mass migration also created challenges in housing, infrastructure and public services for the whole city. The Iquitos regional government has responded by enacting mandatory relocation for these residents to new highland developments far from the river, threatening their unique riverine cultures and deforesting a rare white sand rainforest ecosystem. In this visual narrative, we describe a blended arts and sciences project, Tres Comunidades, Un Río: Life Within Peru’s Urban Amazonian Floodplains, in which a highly collaborative team of 24 Peruvian and U.S. researchers and artists worked closely with 136 residents across three communities to showcase their life, health, and environmental connections, promoting traditional cultures and better-informed city planning that includes Indigenous Amazonian voices. We describe our interdisciplinary arts and sciences mixed-methods approach which included a public health survey, documentary photography, community drawings, and biodiversity/environmental measures that incorporated a community training program and local/traditional-scientific knowledge exchange workshop. Lastly, we discuss the value we found in pairing data with artistic storytelling, engaging diverse disciplines and academic-community partnerships, and uplifting underserved communities via an art and data exhibition.

This article describes a collaboration between a STEM-focused land grant university in Raleigh, North Carolina and the Town of Princeville, North Carolina. Princeville experienced severe flood damage in 2016 due to Hurricane Matthew. As an important community hub, Princeville Elementary School, a Title 1 school, was heavily impacted by the floodwaters. After renovations, the school was set to re-open in January 2020 but had to pivot to online learning in March 2020 due to the pandemic. The North Carolina State University (NCSU) Coastal Dynamics Design Lab, who had been working with the Town of Princeville on disaster recovery planning, conducted a survey with the school that revealed that the teachers at Princeville Elementary School needed outdoor learning opportunities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Teachers wanted to challenge traditional indoor learning settings and promote access to fresh air and tactile outdoor learning opportunities for their students. The Design + Build Studio at NCSU, in the department of landscape architecture and environmental planning, was invited to collaborate but the studio was not originally structured to operate as an off-campus model. The pandemic provided an opportunity for graduate students to continue the Design + Build program during the pandemic; yet the challenge was to adapt the traditional, hands-on studio to online instruction. Students faced design constraints but adapted to fabricating modular structures off-site and installing site furnishings for the outdoor learning environment during the summer of 2021 and 2022. The collaboration between the university and the Town of Princeville demonstrates the potential for such partnerships to make a positive impact in the community, even in the face of pandemic-era conditions and shifted modalities of shared creativity.