Research

  • A Cartography of Interconnection: Jaguars, Humans, and the Redesign of Urbanscapes in the Americas
  • GRANTEE
    Juana Salcedo
    GRANT YEAR
    2020

Juana Salcedo, “Territories of interconnection,” 2020. Digital collage. Courtesy the author

The Jaguar Corridor Initiative is an unprecedented large-scale conservation project that envisages a continuous territory from northern Argentina to the southern United States to preserve the life of jaguars. This article presents a cartography of interconnection that makes visible the entanglements and frictions between urbanization and the Jaguar Corridor. The projects argues that rather than a sole issue of wildlife conservation, the corridor can be reinterpreted as an infrastructure of care for the sustenance of both human and nonhuman life—one that is a deeply contested socioecological ground where indigenous communities and other marginalized populations across the region have struggled for environmental justice.

Juana Salcedo is an architect and scholar working at the intersection of architecture and urbanism. She works as a designer and consultant and has lectured at the University of Connecticut and at the School of Architecture at Universidad de Los Andes in Bogota, Colombia. Her research draws concepts and methods from environmental history, urban political ecology, and science and technology studies to reconnect architecture and cities with the larger environmental and socioeconomic processes that shape them, focusing on Latin America. Salcedo has a BA in architecture (2009) and history (2010) from Universidad de Los Andes and a master's of environmental design from Yale University (2013).