As climate impacts intensify, planned relocation has become an increasingly prominent adaptation strategy in global climate policy, particularly in relation to low-income and marginalized communities exposed to environmental risk. Frequently framed as a voluntary, last-resort, and rights-based response, relocation is now being incorporated into national adaptation strategies across a growing number of countries. Yet important questions remain about how relocation becomes institutionalized as climate policy in practice, whose interests it serves, and with what social and spatial consequences.
This presentation examines the case of Uruguay, one of the first countries to formally incorporate state-led relocation into its climate adaptation framework. Drawing on a multi-scalar relational case study approach based on interviews, field observations and documentary analysis, the presentation traces how contemporary relocation initiatives framed as adaptation responses are deeply rooted in longer trajectories of state intervention associated with the governance and eradication of urban informality. It examines the political, institutional and socio-spatial implications of advancing planned relocation as a climate adaptation strategy in the context of Montevideo, as well as the tensions that emerge between housing policy, environmental management and urban development. More broadly, it calls for a greater critical attention to the ways climate adaptation policies can reproduce existing forms of socio-spatial inequality and reshape urban governance through new forms of territorial intervention.
Speaker: Begoña Peiro Salvador, Harvard Graduate School of Design & Real Colegio Complutense at Harvard University (RCCHU) Fellow, Harvard University
LOCATION:RCCHU Conference Room STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20260527T173000Z DTEND:20260528T035859Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR