Building healthy environments in Cali: Strategies to strengthen social engagement and equity

Abstract

In the context of the city of Santiago de Cali, characterized demographically as a receiving territory for migrants and victims of armed conflict, it generates processes of uprooting individuals from their territories, recognizing the challenge of responsibly building territorialization with the hosting place and the people accompanying them in community construction processes.

During the “Semana Diagonal,” the Vivo Mi Calle project, developed by the Despacio Foundation in collaboration with Tecnocentro Somos Pacífico, Colegio Nelson Garcés Vernaza, and ACDI/VOCA, challenged Javeriana University students to engage in a dialogue about “Building Healthy Environments in Cali” as a strategy to strengthen dialogue among the youth of the Potrero Grande neighborhood grouped under the “Vivo Mi Calle Leadership Program.” The goal is to develop improvement plans grounded in the neighborhood context to manage transformations in the ways of inhabiting public space.

This article, composed of 3 chapters, firstly introduces the role of participating institutions, and provides a general overview of the Potrero Grande neighborhood. The second chapter contextualizes the conceptual approaches in both educational communities. The third chapter narrates the “improvement plans” in the Diagonal Week experience. At the time of document writing, these improvement plans are in implementation, and subsequent articles will assess their impacts.