The Urban SOS: Fair Share is an urban competition led by AECOM and the Van Alen Institute, in partnership with 100 Resilient Cities and pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation. The challenge looked for multidisciplinary student teams that would combine the concepts of sharing economy with physical design to propose innovative solutions to critical urban issues. The challenge culminated in a live final jury event in Los Angeles on January 10, 2017, with finalist En Común(a), conformed by Parsons’ Urban alumni and current students, emerging as the 2016 second place!

Based on the thesis research project that Design and Urban Ecologies’ alumni Mateo Fernández-Muro and María Morales started on 2016, they reconfigured and pushed their project forward with the help of current Theories of Urban Practice student Francisco Miranda in order to present it to the Urban SOS: Fair Share competition.

En Común(a) consists of a tool to support the comuna’s (self-governing Andean territories) struggle for autonomy. Through this tool, En Común(a) is helping residents of indigenous comunas in Quito to share resources and improve the social and economic infrastructure of their communities. The team has worked with 18 comunas of Quito to produce a pilot website that maps their needs and resources, making it easier for the comuneros to connect and work collectively. Ultimately, this tool could help the indigenous residents with a range of community development projects, ranging from cooperative banks to building homes and connecting employers with skilled workers.

Congratulations to Mateo, María and Francisco!

You can read more on the competition and the other finalists here.