My undergraduate thesis focuses on analyzing the quality of the current public realm in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, and how key design interventions (i.e. pinpricks) can revitalize under-used public spaces to foster social democracy, equity, and collective city identity. The city-scale approach to understand and assess city life is through Urban Acupuncture interventions, originally by Jamie Lerner. The site-scale framework, on the other hand, is taken from Jan Gehl’s Cities for People, human-centered design and analysis principles. Using these two theories hand-in-hand, I have chosen to reimagine two plazas that sit adjacent to each other: one holding the main municipal library, and the other grounding the departmental justice courthouse.
