In the early 20th century, water and transport flowed freely through San Juan, Puerto Rico’s Caño Martín Peña (el Caño), a centrally-located tidal estuary that runs for nearly four miles from the mangroves of San Juan Bay to San José Lagoon. Since the 1920s, however, uncontrolled informal urbanization and massive environmental degradation generated decades of hazardous housing conditions and ecological devastation. This burdened the once-broad waterway with refuse, debris, and heavy sedimentation, and saddled its residents with enhanced vulnerability to flooding exacerbated by climate change.

Drawing on planning documents and interviews with community residents and leaders of planning organizations, this paper traces multiple generations of planning practices that have been sequentially applied to this location. Proximity to the San Juan’s core economic districts encouraged mass migration to the low-lying areas near el Caño, beginning in the 1920s and 1930s. Informal encroachment of residential areas into the mangroves surrounding el Caño soon gained traction. In 1927, falsely believing the mangrove wetlands supported the spread of malaria-transmitting mosquitoes, Puerto Rico’s Legislature authorized the sale of these areas with the stipulation that they be drained and filled.  Planning interventions commenced with total clearance and in-filling of the territory along the western portions of the channel, summarily displacing the residents of Hato Rey by eminent domain. Such urban renewal plans of the 1950s were followed by entailed high-end development during the 1980s and 1990s. By contrast, the subsequent community-led planning efforts along the eastern portions of el Caño have proceeded from entirely different premises and deployed completely different methods.

Since 2000, the two-decade ongoing effort to transform the polluted urban water channel that endangered its remaining 25,000 human neighbors into a series of healthier and empowered communities has become an international exemplar of empowered participation by low-income residents who resisted displacement. This entailed creation of a collective organization: Group of Eight Communities Adjacent to the Caño Martín Peña, Inc. (G-8), an ambitious Community Land Trust (Fideicomiso de la Tierra) and a government organization, the ENLACE Project Corporation.  Acting on that community focus, the Fideicomiso aimed to make it financially possible to house--or re-house--thousands of community residents in the adjacent neighborhoods, rather than succumb to distant displacement once the area nearest the channel was cleared to permit widening.  This stands as an exceptionally multi-faceted achievement of what can be termed equitable resilience, defined here as adaptive redevelopment that has helped a settlement 1) improve environmental protection through reduction of pollution and flooding; 2) enhance economic livelihoods through retention of proximity to jobs and amenities; 3) reduce displacement through ensuring security of tenure and 4) sustain a commitment to community-led governance. As a sustained undertaking in equitable resilience, the work undertaken to support the neighborhoods that flank Caño Martín Peña is neither perfect nor completed, but it demonstrates that low-income people can both lead, and benefit from, holistic efforts to overcome the limitations of poverty and the threats of an increasingly volatile climate.

References

Legislatura de Puerto Rico. 1927. Resolución Conjunta Núm. 7.

“San Juan, CRP, community Renewal Program for San Juan Metropolitan Area.” Final Grants Reports 1951-1981. General Records of the Department of Housing and Urban Development 1931-2003. Record Group 207, Box 1285, Report 17711, National Archives, College Park, Maryland.

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Caño Martín Peña Ecosystem Restoration Project: Final Feasibility Report Delivery Package, February 2016, Appendix H: Final EIS.

María E. Hernández-Torrales, Lyvia Rodríguez Del Valle, Line Algoed, and Karla Torres Suiero, “Seeding the CLT in Latin America and the Caribbean,” in John Emmeus Davis, Line Algoed, María E. Hernández-Torrales, eds., On Common Ground: International Perspectives on the Community Land Trust (Madison, Wisconsin: Terra Nostra Press, 2020).